A world that has become “heartless” and indifferent to greed and war, and a Catholic Church in need of revitalizing its missionary joy need to open themselves up to Christ’s infinite love, Pope Francis wrote.
By contemplating Jesus’ Sacred Heart, the faithful can be filled with the “living water that can heal the hurt we have caused, strengthen our ability to love and serve others, and inspire us to journey together toward a just, solidary and fraternal world,” the pope wrote in his encyclical, “‘Dilexit nos’ (‘He loved us’): on the Human and Divine Love of the Heart of Jesus Christ.”
The Vatican released the 28,000-word text Oct. 24.
While it is the pope’s fourth encyclical, he wrote that it is meant to be understood in tandem with his previous two encyclicals, “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,” he 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.”
The pope had said in June, the month the Church traditionally dedicates to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, that he was going to release a document in the fall on 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 encyclical includes numerous reflections from the Bible, previous magisterial texts and the writings of saints and his fellow Jesuits, to re-propose to the whole Church the centuries-old devotion. Since 1899, there have been four papal encyclicals and numerous papal texts dedicated to the Sacred Heart — a symbol of Jesus’ infinite love, which moves the faithful to love one another.
He wrote, “When we witness the outbreak of new wars, with the complicity, tolerance or indifference of other countries, or petty power struggles over partisan interests, we may be tempted to conclude that our world is losing its heart.”
“It is heartbreaking,” he wrote, to see elderly women, who should be enjoying their golden years, experiencing the anguish, fear and outrage of war. “To see these elderly women weep, and not feel that this is something intolerable, is a sign of a world that has grown heartless.”
At a Vatican news conference presenting the encyclical Oct. 24, Archbishop Bruno Forte of Chieti-Vasto, Italy, said the document is a “compendium” and the “key” to understanding Pope Francis’ pontificate.
Some commentators criticize the pope for focusing too narrowly on “social” issues, the archbishop said. This encyclical explicitly presents the spiritual and theological foundation underlying the pope’s message to the Church and the world for the past 12 years — that everything “springs from Christ and his love for all humanity.”
Many saints and religious congregations have a special devotion to the Sacred Heart, including St. Ignatius of Loyola and the Society of Jesus, the religious order the saint co-founded and to which Pope Francis belonged.
St. Ignatius’ spiritual exercises encourage people to “enter into the heart of Christ” to “enlarge our own hearts” and train them to “sense and savor” the Gospel message and “converse about it with the Lord,” the pope wrote.
Pope Francis invited Catholics to rediscover or strengthen their devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the practices connected with it, particularly Eucharistic adoration and receiving the Eucharist on the first Friday of each month.
The First Fridays devotion, he wrote, can help counter “the frenetic pace of today’s world and our obsession with free time, consumption and diversion, cell phones and social media (when) we forget to nourish our lives with the strength of the Eucharist.”
