Exposing Our Dulled Sensibilities: The Burning Love of the Sacred Heart
Why did Pope Francis write Dilexit Nos, his final encyclical, on the Sacred Heart of Jesus? In many ways, it was a surprise. It was unexpected. Pope Francis has been especially thought of as a Pope of Catholic Social Teaching, with perhaps his most important encyclical, Laudato Si’, on care for our common home, as the keystone in an arch that also included Fratelli Tutti, and even Evangelii Gaudium with its emphasis on the necessity of social action. Perhaps the last thing many people expected from Pope Francis was an encyclical on a devotion, one could almost say, on devotions, since devotion to the Sacred Heart can be thought of, in a way, as exemplifying the kind of extremely emotional, intimate, and passionate language that has come to seem embarrassing to contemporary sensibilities, the very reason the devotional life has been and should be placed on the extreme back burner of Church life, in favor of more serious and central things like the Eucharist and social reform.
These have come to be seen as, we could say, the “rational” dimensions of Church life, the Eucharist as a meal of fraternity in Christ, and social reform as the aim of Church life that is and should be front and center. Church life should be focused on serious things like climate change and fighting poverty, not on flights of floridly passionate outbursts of intimacy which seem self-enclosed and which seem to doom Church life to an irrelevance enclosed in private sentiment. This is especially true of devotion to the Sacred Heart, which seems to many to have originated in a private revelation full of all the almost stereotypically excessive language of passionate mystical intimacy that reasonable modern people are trying to leave behind.
For those who had been reading Pope Francis’s encyclicals more closely, this last encyclical would not have been a surprise, but for many, it seemed an anomaly that he would close his pontificate—for surely he knew he was dying—with this lapse into devotionalism in an encyclical which not only valorized devotion to the Sacred Heart, but with it, Eucharistic adoration, etc. It is no wonder that for those for whom Laudato Si’ was essentially a social policy encyclical, and Fratelli Tutti an encyclical on social diversity, equity, and inclusion, Dilexit Nos was passed over without comment and passed unnoticed into the waters of oblivion, especially after the death of its author made it politically OK to forget about it.
And just in case we too fall under the spell of thinking this encyclical was itself just another way of sidestepping the devotional life even while talking about it, let us recall some of its features. Far from passing over Margaret Mary, as some of the papal encyclicals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries almost seem to do (but do not quite), Francis features her role in the devotion to the Sacred Heart, contextualizing it in previous devotion and lifting up some of what modernity might consider her most problematic dimensions, including the call for reparations for offenses to the Sacred Heart and the call to console the Lord’s Sacred Heart in his suffering and in the coldness we now see exhibited towards that furnace of burning love, as it was characterized in her visions. Francis lifts these seemingly awkward dimensions up and places them front and center.
He also features the legacy of Margaret Mary’s zeal as it was carried on and interpreted in saints devoted to the Sacred Heart. We can echo this strategic design and hope to further it in our own way, by focusing on men and women whose lives were sanctified by this devotion and in whom we can get a glimpse of its essence. Francis even includes an extensive section on Thérèse of Lisieux devoted to her expressed ambition to become a “victim of love,” language that has appeared not only unrecoverable but almost anathema to our own culture of modernity (apart from its positive cameo appearance, incidentally, in Dorothy Day’s biography of Thérèse). All of these have been quickly passed over as though they were maybe a phase of forgivable nostalgia to which the elderly may be susceptible as they sense their life or their career is ending.
So, back to our question, why did Pope Francis write it? Actually, it is no mystery. He tells us. At the beginning of his brief but stirring Conclusion, he observes:
The present document 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 Jesus Christ. 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 (§217).
It is worthwhile pushing on a little farther into this Conclusion. Francis continues,
In a world where everything is bought and sold, people’s sense of worth appears increasingly to depend on what they can accumulate with the power of money. We are constantly being pushed to keep buying, consuming, and distracting ourselves, held captive to a demeaning system . . . The love of Christ has no place in this perverse mechanism, yet only that love can set us free from a mad pursuit that no longer has room for a gratuitous love (ibid.).
And, recalling the main theme of the encyclical, he says, “The wounded side of Christ continues to pour forth that stream which is never exhausted, never passes away, but offers itself time and time again to all those who wish to love as he did. For his love alone can bring about a new humanity” (ibid.). Francis does not say it is a renewed social change that can bring about a new humanity. The social encyclicals show that Francis is certainly not against working for social change! But replacing the current system with a new one will not bring about a new humanity. Only the love of Christ, poured forth from his Sacred Heart, as he goes on to specify, can do that. This encyclical leaves behind the dualism between devotion and social teaching, between privatized faith and public action, where, at best, one’s practice of Eucharistic table fellowship as an expression of fraternity, and one’s faith, provide special spiritual pizzazz, a heightened inspiration, for embracing paradigms of social action and social change which are intrinsically secular in nature.
In fact, Francis says he undertook the writing of this encyclical letter to undercut related dualisms. Francis had earlier observed that devotion to the Sacred Heart was not and is not a devotion stemming principally from a private revelation (see §83 and §101) and cannot be relegated to the sidelines as though it were. Rather, the private revelation to Margaret Mary served as private revelations are supposed to serve, to recall the attention of the faithful to something in the deposit of faith that is being overlooked or needs special attention in any given historical setting. Margaret Mary’s mystical illuminations connected, among other things, devotion to the Sacred Heart with Eucharistic devotion, and very practically so, in the recommendation of the nine First Friday novenas of daily Mass.
Recommending that practice as well as the regular practice of Eucharistic adoration, Francis notes that the private revelations to Margaret Mary sent, in the context of Jansenism, “a powerful message at a time when many people had stopped receiving Communion because they were no longer confident of God’s mercy and forgiveness and regarded Communion as a reward for the perfect” (§84). He recalls Jansenist aversion to the devotion to the Sacred Heart, for, he says, “they looked askance on all that was human, affective, and corporeal, and so viewed this devotion as distancing us from pure worship of the Most High God” (§86). Pius XII, Francis recalls, referred to this attitude as a “false mysticism” (ibid.) in his own encyclical on the Sacred Heart, Haurietis Aquas, where he also notes that Margaret Mary’s revelations came in part as a reaction against Jansenism.
Pope Francis says that he is writing to encourage devotion to the Sacred Heart in the face of our own situation where, he says, “a baneful Jansenist dualism has reemerged in new forms,” in our case, he says, as “a recrudescence of that Gnosticism which proved so great a spiritual threat in the early centuries of Christianity because it refused to acknowledge the reality of ‘the salvation of the flesh,’” and, he continues, “for this reason, I turn my gaze to the heart of Christ, and I invite all of us to renew our devotion to it. I hope this will appeal to today’s sensitivities and thus help us to confront the dualisms, old and new, to which this devotion offers an effective response” (§87). He even says that “in place of Jansenism, we find ourselves before a powerful wave of secularization that seeks to build a world free of God,” and that “the heart of Christ frees us from another kind of dualism found in communities and pastors excessively caught up in external activities, structural reforms that have little to do with the Gospel, obsessive reorganization plans, worldly projects, secular ways of thinking and mandatory programs” (§87, then §88). He also adds that, “once we succumb to these attitudes, so widespread in our day, we tend to lose all desire to be cured of them” (§89).
We are too enlightened to descend to the passionate expression of devotion, or to put it another way, to devotions with their embarrassingly intimate and passionate language. Instead, “in our societies, we are . . . 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” (§87). In such a context devotion to and the devotions of, for example, Thérèse of Lisieux seem “so nineteenth-century.” We have outgrown this kind of childishness, we feel.
Francis here echoes Benedict XVI before he was Benedict XVI. In his 1984 Behold the Pierced One, Ratzinger took up the devotion to the Sacred Heart in the same context in which Francis takes it up, recalling, as Francis also does, Pius XII’s landmark encyclical Haurietis Aquas. Both Francis and Benedict see Pius’s encyclical, which we shall take up on its own terms momentarily, as uplifting the devotion to the Sacred Heart as refocusing our attention on the passions of Jesus, his emotional life, and thus on the Paschal Mystery itself, for without the passions and emotions of Jesus, there is no Passion on the part of the Son (see: p. 56) and if we are embarrassed at the passionate expression of the love of Jesus, of his passions, “which are summed up and set forth in the Heart” (59), if we are embarrassed by the possibility of our own passionate response in devotion, then we have lost the Easter mystery from our own hearts, because “the mystery of Easter, the mystery of suffering, is of its very nature a mystery of the heart” (60).
Pius XII was trying to recall us to this mystery as, Benedict says, the liturgical movement, “in the name of a rediscovery of the Bible and the Fathers,” distanced itself from the devotional depth of medieval mysticism and of the “ecclesially based piety of modern times,” meaning, I would say, a passionate devotion to the Church as herself the fruit of Christ’s passions and Christ’s Passion (see p. 54). “Against such a backdrop,” Benedict says, “Christianity is diminished to the level of a philanthropic world improvement”—Pope Francis would say to “an NGO”—“and Eucharist becomes a brotherly meal” (59)—which, to anyone who reads Laudato Si’ closely, it is anything but. In a passage which seems echoed in Francis’s comments on contemporary religiosity, Benedict says,
Theology today is . . . faced with a technological rationalism which pushes man’s emotional side to the irrational periphery. . . . Accordingly, the emotions are placed under a kind of taboo in spirituality, only to be followed by a wave of emotionalism which is, however, largely chaotic and incapable of commitment. . . . Similarly, the neglect of a meditative, contemplative spirituality in favor of an exclusive, community-based activism has produced a wave of meditation which largely dissociates itself from the specifically Christian content, or even finds . . . [it] a hindrance (60).
It is almost shocking to think that, in their joint attention to Pius XII’s Haurietis Aquas, these two popes, often set against each other, converge. Benedict says, in a comment that Pope Francis could easily affirm given his extensive attention to the history of devotion to the Sacred Heart from medieval times, that “these developments,” namely the alienation of pathos into a chaotic and unchristian emotionalism, and the loss of devotional consideration of Christ’s passionate love in favor of a community-based activism, or the “worldly projects, secular ways of thinking and mandatory programs” mentioned in Francis’s encyclical, “show how much has collapsed in the life of the Church at the very moment when people thought they could cast aside the entire spirituality of the second Christian millennium as being of no account, thinking they should be satisfied with what was imagined to be the pure spirituality of the Bible and of the early centuries” (60).
By the way, Benedict warns against blaming the Second Vatican Council for the almost total collapse of devotional life and devotional sensibilities, including devotion to Mary, to the Sacred Heart and to the Blessed Sacrament in adoration. The false dualism that pitted emotional devotionalism against the Church’s liturgy as a distraction and de-centering of the Eucharist was already afoot. It was rebutted by Haurietis Aquas, and this rebuttal was expressed “in terms which were presupposed, not superseded, in the Council’s liturgical reform” (51). Nor is the liturgical movement itself to blame, as both Benedict and Francis show that the forces intent on sidelining devotionalism were operative long before, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and John Henry Newman’s attempt to synthesize devotion and theology was itself a response to the project of enlightened modernity which had seemed to outgrow childish devotions such as Margaret Mary’s, as it was felt to be. Cor ad cor loquitur, Newman said, a motto cited by both Benedict and Francis following Pius XII.
We should turn now to Haurietis Aquas, the encyclical of Pius XII, itself, issued on May 15, 1956, intended thereby to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Pope Pius IX’s extension of the feast of the Sacred Heart to the universal Church. Pius also recalls the brief encyclical Annum Sacrum of Leo XIII, dated May 25, 1899, which also recalls Pius IX’s honoring of the Sacred Heart. Leo declares his intention to consecrate the world to the Sacred Heart during the Holy Year 1900. Leo emphasizes, citing Augustine, that the blood of Christ was shed for the whole world, so that all human beings, not only the baptized, can be thought of as a “purchased people” (AN §5). Even unbelievers are subject, Leo says, to his dominion, which is a dominion of, above all, love (§6). Consecrating the world to the Sacred Heart is consecrating the world to his love. For believers it means giving Jesus our heart (§7), a self-offering, “an offering and binding of oneself to Jesus Christ” (§8), an oblation which is undertaken on behalf of unbelievers. Devotion to the Sacred Heart is hardly a privatized, sectarian affair, but rather devotion to the love that so loved the world that the price of Christ’s blood was paid for it. Devotion to the Sacred Heart is devotion, in effect, to the Church as formed by that blood and thus herself formed in love of the world. This is hardly a sectarian view of Church life.
All of these themes are drawn together in the truly magnificent encyclical of Pius XII, issued only six years before the opening of the Second Vatican Council. In the first place, he makes it clear that devotion to the Sacred Heart “has [not] taken its origin from some private revelation of God and has suddenly appeared in the Church,” rather, he says, it has spontaneously appeared in the life of the Church as believers contemplated “the adorable Redeemer and his glorious wounds which they saw as irresistible proofs of [his] unbounded love” (HA §96). Thus, “the revelations made to St. Margaret Mary brought nothing new into Catholic doctrine,” but they are nevertheless important because, “in a quite extraordinary way” they “invite the minds of men to a contemplation of, and a devotion to, the mystery of God’s merciful love for the human race” (§97). It is a devotion the origin of which is evangelical, for it goes back to doubting Thomas, who, upon considering the wounds of Christ, saw through to his divinity, exclaiming, “My Lord and my God!” This means that he had to have been struck with a new idea of God, convinced not just that Jesus was indeed raised, but that his glorified wounds pierced his own heart with a startling revelation that the one Risen with the marks of his suffering love was God. St. Bonaventure, in a passage cited by Pius, put it this way, referring to the wound in the side, imagined as a thrust through the heart: “‘Thy Heart has been wounded so that through the visible wound we may behold the invisible wound of love’” (HA §87, Mystical Vine).
The profundity of this is hard to overestimate. For who is it that bears this invisible wound, the wound of love, and “what wondrous love is this” that bears these wounds? The answer to this question is at the heart of this encyclical, no pun intended. Pius says that “the Heart of the Incarnate Word is deservedly and rightly considered the chief sign and symbol of that threefold love with which the divine Redeemer unceasingly loves his eternal Father and all mankind” (§54), that is, the divine love, which Jesus, as a divine Person, “shares with the Father and the Holy Spirit,” and which was made manifest through his mortal body, since “in him dwells the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Col 2:9, HA §55). But also it is a truly human love, the love of his human will, which is fully infused with the “burning love” of the Word of God and thus the acts and words of Jesus are genuinely human expressions of this divine love (see 56). And finally the Heart of Christ is the “symbol also of [his] sensible love, since the body of Jesus Christ, formed by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary, possesses full powers of feelings and perception, in fact,” Pius adds based on an observation of Thomas Aquinas, “more so than any other human being” (§57, Thomas ST 3.33.2).
What does this mean? It really means that in some deeply mysterious but powerful way, we see in the feelings expressed by Jesus, in his emotions and sensibilities, the love of God, and that means all of a sudden we see that this is not an abstraction, God’s love, and—there is no easy way to put this—but that God has feelings, and in contemplating the feelings of Jesus, in contemplating his Heart, we see and contemplate, if it can be put this way, the feelings of God and we realize that he, the eternal God, has a heart. It is what Thomas saw in those wounds and what prompted his exclamation. All of a sudden he realized that somehow God felt for him, and the God who felt for him was the wounded Person standing risen before him. In Thomas’s exclamation, we see that he felt back. He gave himself. That is the essence of devotion, right there. The Heart of Jesus, wounded, thus became for him, and is for us, “a sort of mystical ladder by which we mount to the embrace of ‘God our Savior’ (Tit. 3.4, HA §58; with regard to doubting Thomas, see HA §92).
Expanding on this image of the ladder, Pius, in a truly sublime passage, notes:
Thus, from something corporeal such as the Heart of Jesus Christ with its natural meaning, it is both lawful and fitting for us . . . to mount not only to its love as perceived by the senses but also higher, to a consideration and adoration of the infused heavenly love [in the soul and will of Jesus]; and finally, by a movement of the soul at once sweet and sublime, to reflection on, and adoration of, the divine Word Incarnate. We do so since, in accordance with the faith by which we believe that both natures—the human and the divine—are united in the Person of Christ, we can grasp in our minds those most intimate ties which unite the love of feeling of the physical Heart of Jesus with that twofold spiritual love, namely, the human and divine love (§104).
Even more striking is what follows from this: “For these loves must be spoken of not only as existing side by side in the adorable Person of the divine Redeemer but also as being linked together by a natural bond insofar as the human love, including that of the feelings, is subject to the divine and, in due proportion, provides us with an image of the latter” (ibid.). Thus we do not ascend to a contemplation of divine love by transcending and leaving behind the feelings and passions of Jesus as though these were just elementary school from which we graduate to the abstractions of high school, but divine love is present in these feelings as feelings and all of a sudden we feel we can give ourselves because all of a sudden divine love is not an abstraction but is present to us in feelings, as feelings, and we are shocked, really, into feeling back, into devotion.
The sublimity of this encyclical is unrelenting: “Once this essential truth has been established we understand that the Heart of Jesus is the heart of a divine Person, the Word Incarnate, and by it is represented and, as it were, placed before our gaze all the love with which he has embraced and even now embraces us. Consequently . . . we cannot reach the Heart of God save through the Heart of Christ,” or, I would add, even know that God has a Heart, and so, “the honor to be paid to the Sacred Heart is such as to raise it to the rank—so far as the external practice is concerned—of the highest expression of Christian piety” (§106). Devotion to the Sacred Heart “is of its very nature a worship of the love with which God, through Jesus, loved us, and at the same time, an exercise of our own love by which we are related to God and to other human beings” (§107). Devotion to the Sacred Heart is thus anything but a privatized sentimentality. It is our own love formed by the feeling that is revealed as God’s love for us. Returning the feeling back in devoted worship is at the same time feeling an attraction to our neighbor for this is the love that loved, that felt for, this neighbor and the whole world.
“Or,” Pius says, “to express it in another way, devotion of this kind is directed towards the love of God for us in order to adore it, give thanks for it, and live so as to imitate it; it has this in view, as the end to be attained, that we bring that love by which we are bound to God to the rest of humankind” (§107). Pius recognizes that it is a distortion of this devotion to practice it, as can happen, out of self-interest, to obtain the benefits promised, even if the benefits to be obtained are indeed solemnly promised by Christ in private revelations. They are promised only for the purpose “of encouraging men to perform with greater fervor the chief duties of the Catholic religion, namely, love and expiation,” “homage to the divine love” (§114), and love of all to whom it extends, as we have seen.
Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is therefore, Pius says, a kind of school, “the most effective school,” he says, “of the love of God.” We could say that it is a kind of training of the feelings, of the sensibilities, so that our way of feeling, which, Pope Francis reminded us, can become coarsened without our even realizing it, our affective sense, begins to be pierced by the same wound of love, sensibly present in the Heart of Christ and invisibly present in the Heart, we discover, of God. We become sensitized, as it were, to our neighbor’s woundedness the more our feelings are trained in this school. Perhaps our sensibilities begin to recover from the coarseness that makes many of our neighbors invisible to us, inconvenient people we do not even see. Their wounds are as invisible to us as the wound in the Heart of God. Training in the school of the Sacred Heart makes them both rise to visibility together, an amazing thought.
Pius continues therefore that this love “must be the foundation on which to build the kingdom of God in the hearts of individuals, families, and nations” (§123). He goes on to cite Leo XIII, “The reign of Jesus Christ takes its strength and form from divine love. . . . From it these must flow: to perform duties without blame; to take away nothing of another’s right; to guide the lower human affairs by heavenly principles; to give the love of God precedence over all other creatures” (§123). It is shocking, perhaps, to us today, but devotion to the Sacred Heart, far from something privatized and inward looking, is a foundation for Catholic Social Teaching insofar as that designates the stream of encyclicals on social concerns that begins with Leo XIII. Leo’s encyclical Annum Sacrum, announcing his intention to consecrate the world to the Sacred Heart, asks that all Christians consecrate themselves to the Sacred Heart on the same day, remarking that “such an act of consecration, since it can establish or draw tighter the bonds which naturally connect public affairs with God, gives to States a hope of better things” (AS §10) because, he says, it tends to break down “a sort of wall being raised between the Church and civil society,” and, he comments, that “when religion is once discarded it follows of necessity that the surest foundations of the public welfare must give way” (§10). The public consecration to the Sacred Heart is a public consecration to the woundedness of that Heart and to a training of social sensibilities, in the persons of all those who consecrate themselves, to an attunement to the love it not only symbolizes, but is. Interpreting this and drawing it forward, Pius XII talks about training in the school of the Sacred Heart as a training in resisting “the false slogans of materialism” and “unbridled license for unlawful desires,” a combination which is, in effect, “hatred of God and of those who lawfully act in his place” (§118).
Do we not see this combination of materialism and unbridled license for unlawful desires surfacing in the seemingly irresistible concoction of lust, power, and money that is the Epstein phenomenon? A coarsening of sensibilities that goes all the way down? At root it is a problem of sensibility. The foundation of change, these texts are telling us, is in a revision of sensibility which cannot be provided by a political system, which will not go all the way down unless it is founded in the school of God’s Heart, which therefore cannot be bracketed as though it were not foundational. The constant teaching of the popes from Leo XIII to Francis himself is that it is foundational. There is a direct line from these texts to Pope Francis’s Dilexit Nos: “It could be argued that today, in place of Jansenism, we find ourselves before a powerful wave of secularization that seeks to build a world free of God” (DN §87). Social change is at bottom cultural change, which, Pope Francis says in Laudato Si’, cannot be legislated, and our hope is not deep enough if it is restricted to and defined by systemic change. Pius XII, in Haurietis Aquas, recalls, once again, Leo XIII’s Annum Sacrum:
We are pleased to address once again, to all Our dear sons in Christ those words of exhortation which Leo XIII of immortal memory, towards the close of last century addressed to all the faithful and to all who were genuinely anxious about their own salvation and that of civil society: “Behold, today, another true sign of God’s favor is presented to our gaze, namely, the Sacred Heart of Jesus . . . shining forth with a wondrous splendor from amidst flames. In it must all our hopes be placed” (HA §121, AS §12).
Finally, exposing another red herring: Far from competing with the Eucharist, Pius XII teaches that the devotional life increases our appreciation and devotion to the Eucharist. He says, “Fervent devotional practice towards the Heart of Jesus will beyond all doubt foster and advance devotion to the Holy Cross in particular, and love for the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar” (§122). He asserts that the private revelations made by Jesus Christ to Margaret Mary and to Gertrude the Great long before her, remind us that “no one really ever has a proper understanding of Christ crucified to whom the inner mysteries of his Heart have not been made known. Nor will it be easy to understand the strength of the love which moved Christ to give himself to us as our spiritual food save by fostering in a special way the devotion to the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus,” again citing Leo XIII in the background (§122).
Along with the supposed divorce between the Eucharist as source and summit of Christian life and devotionalism subverted, there is also subverted the supposed dualism between the ecclesial piety Benedict XVI referred to, a kind of devotional love of the Church, and the celebration of the Eucharist, as though these were different sensibilities and at odds with each other. This, in my view, is a particularly fatal dualism, since it pictures love of the Church, expressed in the hypostasizing of the Church as somehow personal, as “she,” as Mother, as Bride, as fatally parochial and inward-looking, a privatized sentimentalizing of the Church, as opposed to the more formal language of Eucharistic “assembly” with its “presider,” the priest, and various charisms of participation. This latter emphasis can almost make the Church seem like a civic organization, a kind of participatory club shorn of mystery, with a fraternal meal at the heart of it, shorn of sacrificial sensibilities. But Pius XII reminds us that the love that formed the Church and Eucharist both is the love of the Sacred Heart:
Under the influence of this [unbounded love, symbolized by the Sacred Heart], our Savior, by the outpouring of his blood, became wedded to his Church. . . . Hence, from the wounded Heart of the Redeemer was born the Church, the dispenser of the Blood of the Redemption . . . whence flows that plentiful stream of Sacramental grace from which the children of the Church drink of eternal life, as we read in the sacred liturgy, “From the pierced Heart, the Church, the Bride of Christ, is born” (HA §76, citing Vespers for Sacred Heart).
Love of the Church arises from love of the love that formed the Church, flowing from an eternal and invisible wound in the Heart of Christ which so loved the world that it inflamed the human will of Christ such that his burning love undertook even the desolation of the Cross in pain, rejection and mockery. In invisibility, as just another unfortunate victim of the brutal power of Rome. Who just happened to be God. Our sins are on the side of that brutal power. Sin manifests itself as a rendering invisible of the Heart of God, a willful desensitization, an in effect atheism, a formal and dry materialism, a devotion to systems of our own making, to our own works, to the Kingdom of God as though it were essentially a secular enterprise that we can effect on our own, thank you very much, no muss or crucified fuss necessary. The Church, formed by the blood pouring from the pierced heart of Christ, is not our work; it is his, and love of the Church is love of the mystery of his love that forms the Church as a sacrament not of our own righteousness but of his. Love of the Church is love of a love that opened its heart out to the world.
The whole of devotional and sacramental life is therefore, to return to Pope Francis, an invitation to reparation. As our coarsened sensibilities are healed by devoted exposure to the feelings of God’s heart, we feel the desire “to render compensation for the injuries inflicted on uncreated Love” (DN §200, citing Pius XI, MR). Our works cannot provide this compensation. The desire for reparation is rather a desire that the most burning love of this Heart “be offered new ways of expressing itself” through the transformation of our own sensibilities, as a transformation of them worked by him in the ordinary ecclesial channels of the reception of grace, the life of devotional prayer nourished by the sacraments. Truly evangelical reparation, Francis says, possesses a social dimension, but it cannot be understood, Francis says, “simply as a congeries of external works, however indispensable and at times admirable they may be” (DN §184). Rather, “these need a ‘mystique,’ a soul, a meaning that grants them strength, drive and tireless creativity. They need the life, the fire, and the light that radiate from the heart of Christ” (§184), such that social change does not terminate in justice, tout court, but in a “civilization of love,” an expression of John Paul II that St. Francis brings forward here. “Reparation” is “apostolic cooperation in the salvation of the world” (§206, again citing JP II).
Church life is to be dedicated to this understanding of reparation. It means to expose our dulled sensibilities to the burning love of the Sacred Heart in fervent devotion as he repairs these sensibilities and feelings, rather than to sidestep the needed repair. It means to allow our hearts to be re-formed in the oblation of that Heart made present as a gift of communion in the Eucharist. It means permitting to our hearts a love of the Church as a love of the love that so loved the world, the sacrament of the world as beloved. It means, as Pope Francis says in concluding his encyclical, evangelization, allowing “the flames of love of the Sacred Heart of Jesus . . . [to] expand through the Church’s missionary outreach” (§207). Here we see the dissolution of one more false dualism, that between evangelization and social change. Pope Francis, along with all of the papal teaching he sums up and along with the witness of all of the saints of the Sacred Heart, from Thomas the Apostle to Therese of Lisieux, asks us, can we drop that dualism? Can we find it in our hearts to let the dullness of sensibility on which it rests to dissolve? Can we consecrate ourselves to the Sacred Heart? That is the question, I think, with which Pope Francis leaves us.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article was originally delivered as a Saturdays With the Saints lecture, sponsored by the McGrath Institute for Church Life, on November 22, 2025. The next Saturdays With the Saints lecture will be given on November 7, by Rev. Emmanuel Katongole.
