Everyone knows to what extent Pope Francis dares to touch wounded flesh, and to name the spiritual illnesses that distance us from God as much as from our brothers and sisters in humanity. There is such affection in him for today’s world, wounded in many ways, that he felt impelled to propose to the whole Church a new development on the love of Christ “represented in his holy Heart” (n. 89).
The reader of the encyclical finds himself joined; he feels understood, and “called to be led to the best place” (n. 43). Already, in the encyclical Praised yesand in Brothers allwe were called to a broad emotional solidarity, going as far as that which Saint Francis of Assisi embodied towards the entire creation.
No break with previous encyclicals
Here there is no break with previous encyclicals, but rather a new deepened attitude of humility and confidence, making room for the great authors of the spiritual life, and making room through them for what will never be reducible to words, because it relates to the poetics of love. “We cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save man” (n. 20). Anyone who knows Francis’ commitment to the heart of suffering peripheries will understand that this expression is far from naive! Could we hear the cry of a wounded earth if we had lost love?
Who wouldn’t aspire to become “true in love” (Ep 4, 15). “Though our hearts do not have love, yet there is a desire for love,” wrote François de Sales to Jeanne de Chantal (n. 115). Who would not aspire to find a first, unconditional love that precedes us “without requiring any prerequisites to love us and offer us friendship” (n. 1)? This is the love of Christ for me, says the Apostle Paul, and this is the love from which the Church always seeks to drink anew.
This living water, this breath which reconciles and gives the courage to move forward (1), we will not drink it, we will not breathe it in the isolation of a disembodied or intellectualist spirituality, nor in a surface sentimentalism. In contact with the Scriptures and the living tradition of the Church, we will find that personal spiritual experience and community and missionary commitment cannot be separated (91).
Devotion to the heart of Christ
The great witnesses of faith and charity, notably Saint Marguerite-Marie and Saint Claude La Colombière, to whom Francis gives so much space, contemplate in Jesus “a heart without gall, without bitterness, full of true tenderness for its enemies” (n. 129). These witnesses, of whom we read in the encyclical to what extent was their devotion to the heart of Christ, truly translated through their actions what they experienced in their spiritual experiences, and developed a missionary “originality”.
How could we hear the beating of God’s heart now, infinite in the finiteness of the incarnation, and therefore his living Word, without already asking ourselves what the heart means? The encyclical offers a meaningful reflection on our post-modern sensibilities, touching “the place where everyone (…) makes his synthesis; where the concrete being finds the source and root of all its other forces, convictions, passions and choices” (n. 9). Reflecting on the movements that agitate the human heart is what we knew how to do, at least a little! Francis ventures to ask a more radical question, which I intend to ask for each of us and for society: “Do I have a heart? » (n. 23). Because it is possible not to have any!
This is the case of a sinister character in a novel by Dostoyevsky, whom Romano Guardini describes as an incarnation of evil: “Stavrogin has no heart, so his mind is somewhat cold and merciless, and his body is poisoned by inertia and bestial sensuality. He cannot therefore reach other men, and none of them can really reach him, because it is the heart which creates the possibilities of meeting (…). Only the heart can welcome and give asylum (…). Stavrogin is a distant person (…) He is very far away, including from himself, because the most intimate part of man is in the heart and not in the mind” (12).
A concrete life
Devotion to the Sacred Heart is not a gadget for idle people! It refers to a reality that lovers understand. Through contact with my loved one, I gain knowledge of myself, and I am able to unite through love.
True devotion, in the sense that Francis de Sales understands it, is not a series of devotions, it is a concrete life, entirely relaxed and driven by charity, almost naturally, to do good without rest, to love while experiencing that the yoke of love is so much gentler and easier to bear than that of moralizing rigors. The Pope, in this sense, has this expression: “The Lord sends you to do good and pushes you to it from within” (n. 215).
The believing heart is driven internally to console, to repair, to love in deed and in truth in a continuity of the loving heart of Christ, opened by the spear on the cross. The heart of Christ does not stop loving.
(1) He loved us was published the day after the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, a holiday in which water is a central element (94).
