Pope’s encyclical on Sacred Heart focuses on essentials of faith

“All of us need to rediscover the importance of the heart,” in order to resist a world that turns people into “insatiable consumers and slaves to the mechanisms of a market unconcerned about the deeper meaning of our lives,” said Pope Francis in his fourth encyclical, Dilexit nos (“He loved us”), published on October 24, 2024.

After two encyclicals focused more on social themes, Fratelli tutti and Laudato si', the Argentine pontiff has now developed a text dedicated to "the human and divine love of the Heart of Jesus Christ," focusing on traditional spiritual teachings.

Pope Francis develops in this around 40-page text a wide-ranging reflection on the need for Christians to make their hearts available to contemplate and receive God's love.

He draws extensively on the teachings of John Paul II and numerous figures of Catholic spirituality, such as St. Francis de Sales, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, St. Charles de Foucauld and more.

This text follows a long tradition of popes and saints who have promoted the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a traditional piety popularized by the apparitions at Paray-Le-Monial (France) at the end of the 17th century.

Starting with a quotation from St. Paul's Letter to the Romans - 'Dilexit nos' in Latin, meaning 'He loved us' - the 87-year-old pope begins this encyclical with a wide-ranging reflection on the heart in the broadest sense, drawing on mythology (Homer), classical philosophy (Plato) and the Bible.

The Word of God “speaks to us of the heart as a core that lies hidden beneath all outward appearances, even beneath the superficial thoughts that can lead us astray,” he explains. He cites the example of the emotion of the disciples encountering the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus: “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road?” (Lk 24:32). 

The Pope denounces today’s “liquid” society, in which people are reduced to the rank of consumers. However he also points out that “this depreciation of the deep core of our humanity – the heart – has a much longer history. We find it already present in Hellenic and pre-Christian rationalism, in post-Christian idealism and in materialism in its various guises.” 

“The heart has been ignored in anthropology, and the great philosophical tradition finds it a foreign notion, preferring other concepts such as reason, will, or freedom,” says the Pontiff, who comes from a Latin America that has always kept a critical eye on the excess of rationalism present in Western thought, notably through the philosophy of the Enlightenment.

With eclectic references ranging from Romano Guardini to Dostoyevsky to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the Pope emphasizes an approach to human relationships, and one’s relationship with God, that makes ample room for the heart and emotions. “In this age of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity,” insists Francis. 

Drawing on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola and their re-reading by the French Jesuit Michel de Certeau, the Pope uses his own religious family to explain that affections are an integral part of the spiritual life, and that the emotions of the heart must be part of the relationship with God, through prayer.

“The Lord saves us by speaking to our hearts from his Sacred Heart,” Francis underlines, drawing on the theology of British Cardinal John Henry Newman, an Anglican priest turned Catholic whom he canonized in 2019.

“It is only by starting from the heart that our communities will succeed in uniting and reconciling differing minds and wills, so that the Spirit can guide us in unity as brothers and sisters. Reconciliation and peace are also born of the heart,” he explains.

Pope Francis then proposes a reading of the Gospels that highlights Jesus' emotions. “How reassuring it is to know that, even if others are not aware of our good intentions or actions, Jesus sees them and regards them highly,” the Pontiff writes.

“Devotion to the heart of Christ is not the veneration of a single organ apart from the Person of Jesus. What we contemplate and adore is the whole Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, represented by an image that accentuates his heart,” he continues, drawing from an encyclical dedicated to this theme, Haurietis aqua, written by his predecessor, Pius XII, in 1956.

“Christ’s heart is ‘the Holy Spirit’s masterpiece,’” Pope Francis explains, in one of his many references to John Paul II, whom he canonized in 2014.

Quoting again a catechesis from 1994 by his Polish predecessor, Francis explains how the “devotion to the Sacred Heart, as it developed in Europe two centuries ago, under the impulse of the mystical experiences of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, was a response to Jansenist rigor, which ended up disregarding God’s infinite mercy. The men and women of the third millennium need the heart of Christ in order to know God and to know themselves; they need it to build the civilization of love.”

Today “we find ourselves before a powerful wave of secularization that seeks to build a world free of God,” Francis notes. “In our societies, we are also seeing a proliferation of varied forms of religiosity that have nothing to do with a personal relationship with the God of love, but are new manifestations of a disembodied spirituality.”

Highlighting the theme of the “thirst” for God expressed in the Bible, as well as in the development of religious life and monasteries over the centuries, the Pope explains that the “devotion to the heart of Christ slowly passed beyond the walls of the monasteries to enrich the spirituality of saintly teachers, preachers and founders of religious congregations, who then spread it to the farthest reaches of the earth.”

Pope Francis cites for example St. John Eudes' missions in Normandy at the end of the 17th century or the contribution of St. Francis de Sales. The latter “frequently contemplated Christ’s open heart, which invites us to dwell therein, in a personal relationship of love that sheds light on the mysteries of his life,” the Pontiff says. 

Referring to the spread of the devotion to the Sacred Heart through the spiritual experience of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque at Paray-Le-Monial, the Pope underlines the fundamental role played by the saint's spiritual director, the Jesuit Claude de La Colombière, who “combined the spiritual experience of St. Margaret Mary with the aim of the Spiritual Exercises.”

“St. Charles de Foucauld and St. Therese of the Child Jesus, without intending to, reshaped certain aspects of devotion to the heart of Christ and thus helped us understand it in an even more evangelical spirit,” the Pontiff says.

He develops at length the spiritual heritage of these two French saints to whom he has often referred to, notably in canonizing Charles de Foucauld in 2022, and in dedicating an apostolic exhortation to St. Thérèse of Lisieux, C'est la confiance ("It is confidence"), in October 2023. 

St. Charles de Foucauld’s “friendship with Jesus, heart to heart, was anything but a privatized piety. It inspired the austere life he led in Nazareth, born of a desire to imitate Christ and to be conformed to him,” the Pope explains, looking back at the life of this former French soldier and hermit who was killed in the Algerian desert in 1916.

“Like Saint Charles de Foucauld, Saint Therese of the Child Jesus was influenced by the great renewal of devotion that swept nineteenth-century France,” Francis writes. “My way is all confidence and love. I do not understand souls who fear a friend so tender,” the young nun wrote in a letter to Father Adolphe Roulland, in which she shared how she didn’t understand certain dry spiritual treatises and preferred to immerse herself directly in Holy Scripture. 

“Then all seems luminous to me; a single word uncovers for my soul infinite horizons, perfection seems simple to me. I see that it is sufficient to recognize one’s nothingness and to abandon oneself like a child into God’s arms,” wrote St. Therese, who was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by John Paul II in 1997.

Drawing up a vast panorama of the place of the devotion to the Sacred Heart in Jesuit thought and in the history of spirituality in general, the Pope explains that “a merely outward reparation [is not] sufficient, either for our world or for the heart of Christ. If each of us considers his or her own sins and their effect on others, we will realize that repairing the harm done to this world also calls for a desire to mend wounded hearts where the deepest harm was done, and the hurt is most painful.” 

“The Church also needs that love, lest the love of Christ be replaced with outdated structures and concerns, excessive attachment to our own ideas and opinions, and fanaticism in any number of forms, which end up taking the place of the gratuitous love of God that liberates, enlivens, brings joy to the heart and builds communities,” the Pope underlines, insisting on the theme of reparation and forgiveness. 

The encyclical ends with Pope Francis’ invitation for the Church to be missionary, addressing his readers personally: “to be able to speak of Christ, by witness or by word, in such a way that others seek to love him, is the greatest desire of every missionary of souls.”

This text, which seems almost like a testament for the soon-to-be 88-year-old Pope, marks a shift in theme from his previous encyclicals.