Pope Francis’ new encyclical on the Sacred Heart of Jesus is being hailed as “a simple and powerful cure” for a fractured world, said the president of the U.S. Catholic bishops’ conference — and that sentiment was echoed by other experts on devotion to the Sacred Heart.
“Dilexit Nos” was released Oct. 24, following Pope Francis’ announcement in June, a month traditionally dedicated to the Sacred Heart, that he planned to issue a document about the devotion to “illuminate the path of ecclesial renewal, but also to say something significant to a world that seems to have lost its heart.”
“The ills of modern society can read like a litany of uncurable diseases: consumerism, secularism, partisanism,” said Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and head of the U.S. Archdiocese for the Military Services, in an Oct. 24 statement. “In his latest encyclical … the Holy Father teaches us that devotion to the heart of Jesus can open our own hearts to renewed ways we can love and be loved.”
Subtitled “On the human and divine love of the heart of Jesus Christ,” the 28,000-word text — available on the Vatican’s website in Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish — draws on Scripture, church teaching and the writings of various saints regarding the devotion, which has a centuries-long history.
Adding to Pope Francis’ social teaching
The encyclical adds to the numerous papal documents on the Sacred Heart since 1899, and is intended to complement Pope Francis’ previous two encyclicals on social teaching, “Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home” and “Fratelli Tutti: On Fraternity and Social Friendship.”
“The present document can help us see that the teaching of the social encyclicals … is not unrelated to our encounter with the love of Jesus Christ,” Pope Francis wrote. “For it is by drinking of that same love that we become capable of forging bonds of fraternity, of recognizing the dignity of each human being, and of working together to care for our common home.”
“We need this timely counsel,” Archbishop Broglio said in his statement.
“In an age where we are at each other’s throats — whether it’s simply disagreeing with positions or even going to war — appealing to the heart of not only of people, but more importantly of Christ, refocuses us on what really matters to being human,” Father Thomas Dailey, a member of the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales and author of “Behold This Heart: St. Francis de Sales and Devotion to the Sacred Heart,” told OSV News.
Re-discovering what’s essential in Christianity
Timothy O’Donnell, president emeritus of Christendom College and author of “Heart of the Redeemer,” said the pope’s new encyclical “could really go a long way to help people get back to what’s really essential in Christianity.
“Devotion to the Sacred Heart really is a summary of the whole mystery of our redemption, as Pope Pius XII and numerous other popes have said,” O’Donnell told OSV News. “And if anything, that call … is even more urgent now in our current times, with the loneliness, the isolation, the sort of secular miasma that we all have to breathe, where oftentimes we are affected far more by this atmosphere of secularity, (rather) than drawing from the riches of a relationship with Christ.
And it is Christ, O’Donnell said, “who brings love to a world that really is starving for it.”
The timing of the document is “intentional,” added Father Dailey, who is the chair of homiletics and social communications, as well as project director of the Catholic Preaching Institute, at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Ambler, Pennsylvania.
He stressed the need to approach others not in terms of “policy to policy, war to war, or nationality to nationality,” but “heart to heart,” since “the heart is what makes us the same.”
Turning back to the heart of God
The encyclical stands to call attention to “the personhood and the importance of the uniqueness of each individual,” said Father Donald Calloway, a member of the Marians of the Immaculate Conception and author of numerous books, including “Sacred Heart Gems: Daily Wisdom on the Heart of Jesus.”
Father Calloway said that in his initial perusal of the encyclical he was struck by the document’s emphasis on “an aspect of being” that is often neglected in current society.
“Being devoted to the heart is being devoted to the person,” he told OSV News. “I think it’s time to get back to some of these fundamentals. We live in this robotic, technological age where, I think, we’re forgetting that things have consequences. You can be on social media and you crank out a post, not realizing that you’re actually hurting people. You’re hurting hearts, not just some robot or some machine. … It affects people.”
He also stressed the need to attend to “the heart of our God.”
“There’s so much going on in the world right now that I think is offending our Lord’s heart,” Father Calloway said.
“It’s a good time to be reminded of the heart of our God, and that he loves us and wants us even to console him, to make reparation to him for our own sins and the sins of others,” he said.
“Jesus has a heart just like you and I do,” Father Dailey emphasized. “That heart loves just as yours and mine does. That heart breaks; that heart, poured out in love for humanity, is the ultimate sign of God’s love for human beings.”
