Pope Francis is a pope of the poor and for the poor. However, he is not an academic revolutionary, an armchair critic propounding big theories. What the pope proposes for the poor—and that is all of us, in one way or another—is not a theory but Jesus.
Thus, the pope’s latest encyclical, Dilexit Nos (Latin for “He Loved Us” and subtitled “On the Human and Divine Love of the Heart of Jesus Christ”), must be seen in conjunction with his well-known social encyclicals that describe his vision for a world of civic and political love.
How so? Let’s first understand what Francis means when he focuses on the Sacred Heart. Devotion to the image of the Sacred Heart started with the visions of the 17th-century religious St. Margaret Mary Alacoque; Francis wrote his encyclical to commemorate the 350th anniversary of her first vision. However, the importance of “the heart” runs throughout scripture and tradition.
Francis contrasts that biblical anthropology with our “liquid world” in which people run after “superficial satisfactions” or simply “play roles.” The biblical focus on the heart has nothing to do with sentiment. In the Catholic tradition, the heart is the vital center that unites reason, will, and emotions in a way that allows us to be a “whole self.” While the heart is (literally and figuratively) hidden, a person’s heart can only live by receiving and giving love. Living from the heart can only be done with and toward others.
Francis writes, “In the heart of each person there is a mysterious connection between self-knowledge and openness to others.” This is “heart-to-heart” love, where we know the other and know ourselves because we are known by them.
This understanding of “heart” goes beyond mere emotion in two further ways. First, the heart Francis talks about is not ephemeral and fleeting. The heart does not love for a moment only. Drawing from Pius XII’s 1956 encyclical on the Sacred Heart, Haurietis Aquas (On Devotion to the Sacred Heart), Francis echoes the idea that Jesus’ heart involves a “threefold love”: a divine love that is infinite, a burning love that is strong enough to endure any difficulty, and a sensible love that is constantly tender and sensitive.
A passing emotional connection may include one of these elements, but it is like a firework that explodes for a moment and then is gone. Here is one of the key concepts of Francis’ papacy: How can we become people who love with constant tenderness and true fervor, without lapsing into a sentimentalism that puts us on a rollercoaster of feelings?
This is the love that Jesus embodies, a truly human love involving the whole person but untainted by sin. Second, the heart goes beyond emotional responses because it exercises “political rule.” This is not a term we commonly associate with the heart.
Francis explains: “All our actions need to be put under the ‘political rule’ of the heart. . . . The mind and the will are put at the service of the greater good by sensing and savouring truths, rather than seeking to master them as the sciences tend to do.”
He repeats here a theme of his other social encyclicals, that there are two different ways to think about knowing the world; we might assume the pope is talking about an emotional versus an intellectual approach, but instead, he points to mastery versus savoring.
We have become so entranced by what Francis, in Laudato Si’ (On Care for Our Common Home), calls “the technocratic paradigm” that we end up thinking in terms of what something can allow us to master: how it can give us power to impose our will.
“The heart has its reasons,” writes Blaise Pascal, “which reason does not know.” He goes on to say, “It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason.”
The forms of “reason” possessed by “artificial intelligence” or “algorithms,” both of which Pope Francis mentions as threatening imitations of the mastery approach, will never bring us to God. Instead, Francis calls us to approach life with an attitude of “savoring”—tasting, experiencing, and delighting in God’s gifts.
Pope Francis’ latest encyclical is very much about what human personhood really is—yet even more important, Dilexit Nos describes who God really is. And here we find key bridges to the pope’s teachings on larger social issues.
Put simply, Francis thinks that some people in today’s world have the wrong god. He calls them “Jansenists,” a term he uses for a moral rigorism practiced to please a distant “god.”
Historically, the 17th-century Jansenists were suspicious of the devotion to Jesus’ heart; they feared that a god of the heart would be weak and changeable (and perhaps they also feared facing their own and others’ hearts).
But if we have understood “heart” properly, the Sacred Heart does not indicate God is a kindly and passive grandfather. The Sacred Heart instead symbolizes a God who ardently pursues us with a fullness of affection. It is no accident that images of Christ’s Sacred Heart show his chest open and vulnerable.
So, on the one side, a God of the heart challenges religious rigorists. But on the other hand, Francis says, “today, in place of Jansenism, we find ourselves before a powerful wave of secularization that seeks to build a world free of God.”
An aggressive secularism might tolerate a kindly old grandfather god (who largely stays out of the way) but not a God of strong and burning love.
French history reflects a secular discomfort with such an image of God; in the late 18th century, revolutionaries called for a “religion of reason,” but, as theologian Timothy O’Malley notes, images of the Sacred Heart united Catholics’ political resistance to secularism.
Notice how secularists and Jansenists, despite very different beliefs, might well agree that a God of the “heart” is a foolish idea. Why is this?
Underneath both secularism and Jansenism lies a belief in the strength and independence of the ego, that superficial self that demands mastery. This creed creates a society built on defensive individualism in politics and reckless consumerism in the economy. It buries hearts beneath the pursuit of possessions.
This belief is Pope Francis’ ultimate target in his writing about the Sacred Heart. Catholic social teaching doesn’t reject rights and property, but it puts those things under the reign of God’s passionate, enduring, tender love.
God’s strength is not in chariots and armies but in love. When we too experience this same love for others, the natural outcome will be the reformation of all society.
This article also appears in the March 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 3, pages 10-15). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
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