PRESENTATION OF THE ENCYCLICAL OF POPE FRANCIS “He loved us”
Introduction
On October 24, 2024, our Pope Francis addressed an encyclical to us; it is the fourth since the beginning of his pontificate. It is entitled “Dilexit nos” (He loved us). In five chapters, Pope Francis offers us a new deepening of the human and divine Love of the Heart of Jesus Christ and of the relevance of devotion to this Holy Heart today as yesterday.
Part 1: “The importance of the heart” That is to say, the importance of the heart in the human experience that is ours today.
Part 2: “Gestures and words of love” That is to say, contemplating Christ, what his gestures and words allow us to glimpse of his heart.
Part 3: “Here is the heart that loved everything” The Sacred Heart is a synthesis of the Gospel. Devotion to the Heart of Christ signifies our openness full of faith and adoration to the mystery of the divine and human love of the Lord.
Part 4: “Love that gives to drink” God thirsts for our love: we discover it in the Word of God and in the history of the saints.
Part 5: “Love for Love” Respond to Love with our love, with our reparation.
A conclusion: God’s free love is a river that never runs out and that always offers itself. Let us discover together the guidelines, the key words of the chapter entitled “the importance of the heart”
The Holy Father meets us where we are, where we live. When we are tempted to sail on the surface, to live in a hurry without knowing why, we must rediscover the importance of the heart. We are invited to move from the superficial, from appearance to depth: this is where God speaks to us (cf. no. 4), where God sees us and acts (Heb 4:12; Lk 24:32). 1
The heart is also the place of sincerity and truth about oneself (nos. 5 to 7), it is about what is authentic, real, truly oneself, what is neither appearance nor lie (cf. no. 5: example of Delilah and Samson). Our own heart is a treasure hidden within ourselves, a treasure that must be protected and defended from everything that can damage or pervert it (cf. no. 6). Everything is played out in the heart: we are ourselves there whatever we show and what we hide. It is the basis of any solid project for life because nothing worthwhile is built without the heart. Appearance and lies offer only emptiness (cf. metaphor of carnival biscuits n°7).
Let the decisive questions emerge from your heart instead of being satisfied with superficial satisfactions. Ask myself the real questions that bring me back to my heart (cf. n°8).
Return to the heart: it is a necessity “in this liquid world”, “in societies of mass consumers living from day to day, dominated by the rhythms and noises of technology (…)” (cf. n°9).
Pope Francis gives the reasons: The heart is that place where each person makes his or her own synthesis. The heart is that place “where the concrete being finds the source and root of all his or her other strengths, convictions, passions and choices. “Contemporary man is often disturbed, divided, almost deprived of an inner principle that creates the unity and harmony of his or her being and his or her action. » The heart has little place in anthropology and is a foreign concept to great philosophical thought (…) it would seem that the most intimate reality is also the most distant from knowledge. (…) “The idea of a personal center, where the only thing that can unify everything is ultimately love, is not widely developed either.” (cf. n°10) If the heart is devalued, then speaking with the heart, acting with the heart, maturing and caring for the heart is also devalued (…) then the answers that intelligence alone cannot give are lost (…) n°11. “The true personal adventure is the one that is built from the heart. At the end of life, that is all that will matter” n°11.
2 Pope Francis affirms the need to return to the heart with these words: “it is necessary that…”. We must affirm that we have a heart, that our heart coexists with other hearts that help it to be a “you”. (n°12) It is the heart that creates the possibilities of encounter. It is through the heart that I am at the other’s side and that the other is close to me. Only the heart can welcome and give asylum. Intimacy is the act, the sphere of the heart. (n°12) All actions must be placed under the “political control” of the heart (cf. n°13): aggressiveness and obsessive desires must calm down in the greatest good that the heart offers them and in its strength against evils; in the same way intelligence and will must put themselves at its service. Finally, imagination and feelings can let themselves be moderated by the beating of the heart. (n°13) “Ultimately, one could say that I am my heart…” (cf n°14) It is he who distinguishes me, shapes me in my spiritual identity and puts me in communion with others. It is the place where I exercise my freedom > < algorithms at work in the digital world. “the heart leads us to the depths of our person, it also allows us to recognize ourselves in our entirety and not just in an isolated aspect.” (n°15)
“When a reality is grasped with the heart, it is possible to know it better, and more completely. This inevitably leads us to the love of which the heart is capable, because the basis of reality is love (…) It is emotion that makes us think and question (…) n°16. The heart that assembles fragments: the Pope develops here the capacities of the heart in human relationships (cf n°17) The heart makes possible any authentic connection. Conversely >< “The anti-heart is a society increasingly dominated by narcissism and self-reference. (…) the other disappears from the horizon and we close ourselves in our selfishness, incapable of healthy relationships and consequently we become incapable of welcoming God” “We see thus that in the heart of each person there is this paradoxical link between self-esteem and openness to the other, between the very personal encounter with oneself and the gift of oneself to the other.” n°18 3
“The heart is also capable of unifying and harmonizing personal history, which seems fragmented into a thousand pieces, but in which everything can have meaning.” n°19 “This is what the Gospel expresses with Mary who looked with her heart. (…) “Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart.” (cf. Lk 2:19; 2:51). Not only what Mary understood, but what she did not yet understand, but which was present and alive waiting to gather everything in her heart. “In the age of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save man.” Pope Francis refers to all the childhood memories that we cherish with tenderness in our hearts. (n°20) “The core of every human being (…) is that of the whole person in his unique identity which is both soul and body. Everything is unified in the heart which can be the seat of love with all its spiritual, emotional and even physical components. (…)” Every human being was created above all for love. He is made in his deepest fibers to love and to be loved. (n°21)
“We are right to think that global society is losing its heart.” (n°22). The Pope alludes to the new wars that follow one another with the complicity or indifference of other countries (…) “When a person reflects, searches, meditates on his being and his identity, (…) when he seeks God, if he experiences the joy of having glimpsed something of the truth, this finds its culmination in love. In loving, the person feels that he knows why and for what purpose he lives. » (n°23 « Faced with one’s personal mystery, the most decisive question that each person can ask is perhaps the following: do I have a heart?
Fire: this has consequences for spirituality (cf. n°24). The theology of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. “Something unexpected begins to speak in the person’s heart, something that is born from the unknowable (…)”. This is the origin of a new “ordering of life” starting from the heart. “Where the philosopher stops his reflection, the believing heart loves, adores, asks for forgiveness and offers itself to serve in the place that the Lord gives it to choose to follow him.” (cf. n°25). Accepting his friendship is a matter of the heart and constitutes us as persons in the full sense of the term. n°26: Saint Bonaventure said that ultimately, we must ask “not for light but for fire.” And he taught that faith is in the intellect so as to provoke feeling (…) n°26.
In this line Sr John Henry Newman took as his motto: “The heart speaks to the heart” because beyond all dialectics, the Lord saves us by speaking to our hearts from his Sacred Heart.” 4 n°27: “To feel and taste the Lord, and to honor him, is a matter of the heart. Only the heart is capable of putting (…) our whole person in an attitude of reverence and loving obedience to the Lord.” The world can change from the heart The last numbers of this first chapter deal with the social consequences of our union with the heart of Christ. n°28: “For the Spirit to guide us as a network of brothers, it is only from the heart that our communities will succeed in uniting their intelligences and their wills, and in pacifying them, because pacification is also a task of the heart.” “The Heart of Christ is ecstasy, it is going out, it is gift, it is encounter. In it, we become capable of healthy and happy relationships with one another and of building the Kingdom of love and justice in this world. Our heart united to that of Christ is capable of this social miracle.” n°29
: “Taking the heart seriously has social consequences.”
As the Second Vatican Council teaches, “We all certainly have to change our hearts and open our eyes to the world, as well as to the tasks that we can undertake together for the progress of the human race.” Faced with the tragedies of the world, the Council invites us to “return to the heart (…), where it personally decides its own fate, under the gaze of God.” No. 30: “Beware: let us realize that our heart is not self-sufficient, that it is fragile and wounded.” We need the help of divine love. Let us go to the Heart of Christ, the center of his being which is a fiery furnace of divine and human love and which is the greatest fullness that man can attain. It is there in this heart that we finally recognize ourselves and learn to love. n°31: “Ultimately, the Sacred Heart is the unifying principle of reality because Christ is the heart of the world; his Easter of death and resurrection is the center of history which, thanks to Him, is the history of salvation.” (…)
Prayer of our Pope Francis so that our world may rediscover what is most important and most necessary: the heart.
Source: Presentation-de-lencyclique-Il-nous-a-aimes-limportance-du-coeur.pdf