Mary Betz comments on Pope Francis's encyclical on Christ as the loving heart of the world.

LIKE MANY OF us, I knew the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary from childhood holy cards, certificates of family consecration and church statues. I was never fond of those images of bleeding hearts exposed on otherwise fully-clad enfleshed bodies.

So, for me, this encyclical has been both surprising and instructive. It reveals a different Pope Francis from the one I knew in Laudato Si’ or Evangelii Gaudium. It also tells a story of the Sacred Heart (in ways both helpful and disturbing) which I had not known before.

Chapter 1: The Importance of the Heart

In this, my favourite chapter, Francis explains classical, biblical and contemporary symbolic understandings of the heart, identifying it as the deep, interior core of a person — not to be dualistically divided from the soul and mind (although even he falls into this at times). Knowing our hearts is critical for being able to know and be known by others. We risk losing our centeredness if we immerse ourselves in consumerism or overuse technology. Our hearts can become cold, indifferent and even evil if we lose our focus on what is really important.

We need to give ourselves time to reflect on questions: Who am I? What am I looking for? What direction do I want to give to my life? Why am I here? Attending to “heart” questions reminds us of our uniqueness and what we bring to others: "if love reigns in our hearts, we become … the persons we are meant to be, for every human being is created above all else for love."

Chapter 2: Actions and Words of Love

Francis regards the heart of Christ as the symbol of his love and the core of the Gospel. Jesus calls us friends and is “God with us”. He seeks out and attends to women and men, poor (especially) and rich, sick and well. His words and actions reveal his love. This chapter, only two-and-a-half pages, could have been expanded to better show how Jesus’s life and message embody the compassion and justice of God’s realm to which we are called.

Chapter 3: The Heart that Loved

Emphasising that images of the Sacred Heart are only symbols of Christ’s love, Francis admits that some may be tasteless and not conducive to affection or prayer. He urges us to recognise the affective nature of Christ’s love, noting that popular piety (the Stations, devotion to the wounds and blood of Christ and the Sacred Heart, and Eucharistic devotions) arose in response to an over-emphasis on the divinity of Christ (and later to the lack of mercy present in Jansenism) as well as bridging gaps left by theology (I would have liked some elaboration on those).

A few pages here totally lost me. They seem to isolate Jesus’s “human heart” from the unified person who is both human and divine, use a plethora of exclusive language (from both Francis and those he quotes), and in a single paragraph mix metaphors of birds, bridegrooms and stags, all to my great confusion.

This chapter ends with teachings of the Magisterium, for example, Pius XI declaring devotion to the Sacred Heart a “summa” of Christian faith, and Francis’s statement that devotion to Christ’s heart “is essential for our Christian life”. At the same time, he says, “no one should feel obliged to spend an hour in adoration each Thursday”, and we should not feel forced to follow the visions or mystical showings of saints should they not prove helpful to our own spiritual journeys. Francis says that such devotions may be counterpoints to recent dualisms, like new forms of disembodied spiritualities, and being caught up in church reforms that have nothing to do with the Gospel. Again, I wish his allusions were more specific.

Chapter 4: Love that Gives Itself as Drink

This longest chapter, at 15 pages, is problematic for me. Francis begins beautifully by establishing the historical biblical theme of living water (as in the psalms, prophets and wisdom literature) as a sign of God’s love to a people who were thirsting — thirsting for water, in the desert, and when deserted, thirsting for love. Living water is equated with knowing God.

He then cites verses from John and Revelation that note Zechariah’s reference to looking on (an unidentified) “one they have pierced” (Zech 12:10) and to the cleansing fountain (Zech 13:1). The Johannine community considered Jesus’s pierced side to be the promised fountain from which he invites them to drink. Francis continues for far too many pages citing numerous “fathers of the church” [sic], monastics (women and men) and popes who write of drinking of the sweet, adorable and delectable living waters from Jesus’s pierced side, heart, breast or bowels. For me this takes a metaphor decidedly too far.

Finally, Francis encourages readers to contemplate the sufferings and death of Jesus which atoned for our sins. Many contemporary theologians understand Jesus’s death as a consequence of his life and message which threatened the religious and political powers of his time. Like them, in my reading of the Gospels, I don’t understand Jesus as coming (or being sent) to suffer and die as atonement for our sins. Rather, I know a Jesus who lives and dies in faithfulness to his belief in, and loving practice of, God’s mercy and justice.

Chapter 5: Love for Love

Francis devotes his final pages to our responsibilities to our sisters and brothers, suggesting contemplation of Jesus’s pierced heart as a motivation to attend to the suffering of the world. If it does this for people such as Pope Francis, then it is indeed of value.

There are also millions of people working to alleviate suffering through peacemaking, advocacy for justice, and hands-on ministries who look to the Scriptures, their own traditions (eg, Judaism, Unitarianism, Buddhism), or simply respond to people and situations when they see great need. They do it from the love and justice in their hearts and are sustained by their communities, nature, the arts and many ways of prayer.

Christians have a wealth of spiritual resources to draw on, yet often seem no better at restoring the common good and building a world of love than others around us. If there was one “magic bullet”, we probably would have discovered it by now. Each of us needs a spirituality as unique as we are which transforms whatever is selfish in us into truth, generosity, goodness and love. We need to keep company with Jesus — and others — like Whina Cooper, Martin Luther King Jr and Dorothy Day, opening ourselves to the beauty and woundedness of people and all creation around us.

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 299 December 2024: 6-7