Pope Francis’ encyclical on the Sacred Heart of Jesus is “a testimony written on his heart and offered to the hearts of all”, the Archbishop of Westminster has said.
Cardinal Vincent Nichols said Dilexit Nos, published last Thursday, was an invitation to “anyone who is broken hearted, or feeling empty of heart, or yearning for love, or filled with the joy of a loving heart”.
“It speaks the language of the heart, a language known to those who love, who yearn, who feel pain, who know loneliness,” he said.
Bishop Mark Davies of Shrewsbury also praised the encyclical as a “great gift” delivered at “a moment in history disturbed by so much toil and anxiety”.
“At a moment when the Church seeks ways to grow in communion, participation and mission, he indicates in these pages that an authentic path of renewal must pass through the Heart of Jesus,” Bishop Davies said. “In this way, the Pope speaks in continuity with the Church’s faith and devotion.”
Speaking at the publication of Dilexit Nos in Rome on Thursday, the theologian Archbishop Bruno Forte of Chieti-Vasto said it expressed “the inspiring motive of the whole ministry and magisterium of Pope Francis” and was “the key to understanding this pope’s magisterium”.
In its conclusion, Pope Francis writes that his latest encyclical “can help us see that the teaching of the social encyclicals Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti is not unrelated to our encounter with the love of Christ”.
The document argues for a renewed dedication to the Sacred Heart, premised on a philosophical argument for the idea of the heart as a “locus of sincerity” and the theological centrality of the heart of Jesus, driving the Church’s mission to build what John Paull II called “a civilisation of love”.
“The algorithms operating in the digital world show that our thoughts and will are much more ‘uniform’ than we previously thought,” Francis writes. “That is not the case with the heart.” Each human heart is “the entire person in his or her unique psychosomatic identity”, such that Christ’s heart “is the unifying principle of all reality”.
“At times, we may be tempted to consider this mystery of love as an admirable relic from the past, a fine spirituality suited to other times,” he writes, but argues for the wide relevance of such “popular piety” against the practices of “those who claim to possess a more reflective, sophisticated and mature faith”.
The Pope writes that the idea of the Sacred Heart is integral to the Church’s “social dimension” of devotion described by John Paul II in particular. It “challenges us to seek a deeper understanding of the communitarian, social and missionary dimension of all authentic devotion to the heart of Christ”.
“Our acts of love for our brothers and sisters in community may well be the best and, at times, only way that we can witness to others our love for Jesus Christ,” Francis writes.
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