If you have not yet read Pope Francis’ newly released encyclical Dilexit Nos, you are missing out on a modern spiritual masterpiece, a rich and profound meditation on the love of Christ. Of the many lessons the encyclical offers, one particularly stands out: any genuine devotion, let alone one as powerful as to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, is not peripheral to Christian spirituality but stands at its core.
Growing up in the post-conciliar confusion of the 1970s, I was led to believe that devotions—including the Rosary—were accretions that had grown over the faith through time, obscuring the true Gospel. They were optional at best, distracting or misleading at worst. They were pious practices for those who didn’t understand theology or Scripture. I recall finding holy cards bearing the image of the Sacred Heart tucked away in the corners of my grandmother’s house even though I would never dream of finding them in the vestibule (sorry: “gathering space”) or pews (whoops: “seating area”) of our stripped, whitewashed churches.
While it is true that devotions, like any other practice of prayer, can skew or distort a correct understanding of scripture and doctrine, Francis reminds us that a healthy devotion to the Sacred Heart will never “distract or separate us from Jesus and his love” (51). Rather, “in a natural and direct way, it points us to him and to him alone … the same Christ who loved us to the very end, opening wide his arms on the cross, who then rose from the dead and now lives among us in glory” (51).
In fact, Christian devotions are far from accretions but, throughout history, have been essential correctives to skewed theologies, misguided pieties, and false spiritualities. As Saint John Paul II taught, devotion to the Sacred Heart “was a response to Jansenist rigor, which ended up disregarding God’s infinite mercy” (80). Pope Francis explains that in this Jansenist context, the spread of devotion to the Sacred Heart “proved immensely beneficial, since it led to a clearer realization that in the Eucharist the merciful and ever-present love of the heart of Christ invites us to union with him” (84). All the more reason, Francis exhorts, to rediscover devotion to the Sacred Heart in our own day, since “amid the frenetic pace of today’s world and our obsession with free time, consumption and diversion, cell phones and social media, we forget to nourish our lives with the strength of the Eucharist” (84).
In short, although devotion to the Sacred Heart “may smack of pious sentimentalism,” it actually is “supremely serious and of decisive importance,” for it “finds its most sublime expression in Christ crucified” (46). “The cross,” Francis insists, “Jesus’ most eloquent word of love,” is not “shallow, sentimental or merely edifying. It is love, sheer love” (46).
There is a fitting parallel between Dilexit Nos and the recent doctrinal note on Medjugorje, in that both afford a proper place for private revelation without in any way undermining a necessary distinction between it and divine revelation. This is why the encyclical employs a clear methodology of laying out the philosophical, scriptural, and doctrinal aspects of devotion to the Sacred Heart before turning to the private revelations experienced by Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque at Paray le Monial between 1673 and 1675.
“We need to remember,” writes Francis, “that the visions or mystical showings related by certain saints who passionately encouraged devotion to Christ’s heart are not something that the faithful are obliged to believe as if they were the word of God,” yet nonetheless, they are “rich sources of encouragement and can prove greatly beneficial, even if no one need feel forced to follow them should they not prove helpful on his or her own spiritual journey” (83).
I, for one, would have been immensely helped if someone had shared with me the revelations received by Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque and their meaning as expounded by Pope Pius XII in Haurietis Aquas (1956). Be that as it may, Pius XII explains in that encyclical that devotion to the Most Sacred Heart cannot be said “to owe its origin to some private revelation,” but has rather “blossomed forth of its own accord” from true devotion to the “Redeemer and his glorious wounds” which stand as “irresistible proofs” of Christ’s “unbounded love” (96).
In other words, as Dilexit Nos demonstrates, devotion to the Sacred Heart not only rests on a thoroughly sound scriptural and theological basis, but is wholly supported by a sensus fidelium that “perceives something mysterious, beyond our human logic” since it “realizes that the passion of Christ is not merely an event of the past, but one in which we can share through faith” (154).
It is true that the holy cards I found scattered around my grandmother’s house may have ended up there for somewhat superstitious reasons. But that was no reason to ban them from the churches in which I was raised. In fact, Francis hints at a few details about how to properly depict and venerate images of the Most Sacred Heart. “Devotion to the heart of Christ,” he explains, “is not the veneration of a single organ apart from the Person of Jesus.” We rather want to contemplate and adore “the whole Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, represented by an image that accentuates his heart,” because “that heart of flesh is seen as the privileged sign of the inmost being of the incarnate Son and his love, both divine and human” (48).
That brings us to a primary motive for cultivating devotion to the Sacred Heart today, a motive Francis continuously weaves throughout the encyclical: namely, to refocus our prayer on the indivisible union of Christ’s divinity and humanity “so that we may be embraced by his human and divine love” (49). Subconsciously or consciously, we often misdirect our prayer exclusively either to the divine or human Christ, whereas it is impossible to pray to our Lord except as both.
A privileged way of correcting our prayer is to meditate on his heart, insofar as the heart, as “an expression of the totality of the person,” will “lead us to contemplate Christ in all the beauty and richness of his humanity and divinity” (55).
Similarly, if we fail to acknowledge with the ancient Greeks that the heart is the “coordinating center that provides a backdrop of meaning and direction to all that a person experiences” (3), and with the ancient Hebrews that the heart is the “core that lies hidden beneath all outward appearances, even beneath the superficial thoughts that can lead us astray” (4), we risk falling into a Gnosticism that “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.’”
By turning our gaze to the loving heart of Christ, Francis wants to “confront the dualisms, old and new, to which this devotion offers an effective response” (87).
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The Sacred Heart of Jesus is central to the mission of Cardinal Burke, who has published books on Enthronement of the image.
Sacred Heart devotion in its fullness became an epiphany for Daniel Gallagher. Not so for some of us who were long used to the sentimental image of Christ’s heart, lampooned by atheist, cognoscenti as the image of the bleeding hearts. Bead dripping Catholics. All the wall pasted images and candles left, it is true, sentimentality, and at least a semblance of tender love.
What about Francis, the ubiquitous believer whose faith seems everywhere and nowhere? Can the alleged heretic say, “A sensus fidelium that perceives something mysterious, beyond our human logic since it realizes that the passion of Christ is not merely an event of the past, but one in which we can share through faith” (DN 154).
Words taken by Gallagher from Dilexit elicit what is good and noble in man, the very purpose of the devotion. From there what direction it takes is the ‘heart’ of the issue. Is Francis’ appeal a worthy effort? Is it a gloss for his controversies?
What is genuine and good has value of itself, since all that is good has its origin in God. We do not precisely own the good we do. All good by right then belongs to its actual source. God. In a piece like this, Gallagher’s honest meditation on Francis’ Dilexit Nos we give credit to where it’s due. Including Pope Francis whatever his real motivation may be. That God alone may judge.
A good act is always ordered towards a good end seen in the effect of the act. At this stage a good effect is the work of grace. Although a well intended act whose object is good doesn’t necessarily have a good effect, sometimes due to accident, or lack of response to grace.
Such is the case with Dilexit Nos. If it effects good it’ll be due to our response to grace, not necessarily the intent of the author.
…from Jesus’ beautiful Heart flows not synodality, but the most blessed Divine Reality is WRIT large in His Creating ) – all things are not in synodality, in hierarchy, His Natural Law, they in and by this Natural Law ‘listen’, hear, obey His Hierarchical Law, Commands, Truth, respectively and according, in a wondrous divine Hymn and Canticle of Praise and Wisdom, Joy and Peace, Holiness and Fruitfulness, Life and death….synodality uproots and removes God as the Tree of Life and the Knowledge of good and evil and says ‘eat of the fruit of disobedience’ which is, we may ‘talk and chat, listen and decide among and for ourselves/ourself that this is okay to do or not to do and we ‘surely will not die’; we will see that is good and pleasing food to do so, and delightfully nourish ourselves and be just like God determining what is good or not to do, to say, to live…God no longer is the One who has Established and Bequeathed Right and Wrong, Good and evil, we stop listening to Him and listen to the ancient liar and murderer…in Jesus’ Heart this is not Found, rather from His Heart is found that perfect listening and doing, abiding and fidelity, eating and drinking of the Father of Heavens Good and Pleasing Voice and Will, not the voice and will of the father of hell or our own voice and will.
Syndoality says listen not to the Beloved, that is, dwell not in ‘His Loving Obedient Heart unto death, unto the Death of the’ Tree of Life and of the Knowledge of God and evil, that is ‘the Cross”, listen to ourselves and we will find the unholy spirit ‘making us like God’…we find doing our own thing our pleasure and delight, not loving obedience to His Good Pleasure as our delight. Then we surely die.
Come Holy Spirit through Your Immaculata, bring Christ and His Loving Obedience, alike with the Immaculata, leading Kindly, Kingly!
Confronts? Or – Propagates?
The Holy Father “ratified” the synodalist “final document” which is non-conclusive, putting it in the hands of the same 20th Century idee fixe enthusiasts that wanted it to bear out the meaning of their very lives -unconverted. The encyclical seems poised to send them “forward” upon millenialized generalizations about the Heart of Jesus.
What the Holy Father is doing here is unjust, putting these kinds of “synod” indecision upon the unsuspecting but in the hands of “dicasteries”. To say that it is an extension in “ordinary magisterium” is to enter into the absurd.
https://www.lifesitenews.com/analysis/synods-final-text-includes-openness-to-female-deacons-after-draft-versions-silence/?utm_source=most_recent&utm_campaign=usa
https://www.ncregister.com/news/here-s-how-the-synod-final-document-changed-from-the-draft
Yes; or digressing even further into the pumped-up Synod on Synodality; it’s already old news. Maybe this too-promiscuous version of synodality is now simply meandering off into the desert through a dozen demoted dicastery drainage ditches; likewise with the fragmented ten study groups…a lot like the Humpty-Dumpty thing.
How to now reconcile the awkward misfit between the hype of the past few years with the restored guardrails (inserted into the Final Report) from the 2018 International Theological Commission, including this:
“…It is essential that, taken as a whole, the participants give a meaningful and balanced image of the local Church, reflecting different vocations, ministries, charisms, competencies, social status and geographical origin. The bishop, the successor of the apostles [!] and shepherd of his flock [no longer leading from behind “primarily as facilitators”?] who convokes and presides over the local Church synod, is called to exercise there the ministry of unity and leadership with the authority which belongs to him [!]” (Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church, n. 79).
How to overlay national and even continental assemblies as possibly useful town hall meetings, while now fully respecting the higher “context” of irreducible, personal, and institutional accountability for each local bishop to some non-plebiscite guy named Jesus Christ who “sent” each of them forth as a successor of the Apostles—on His mission?
Thank you very much Beaulieu, your points I would structure “third”.
First, Christian witness takes many forms not merely in visible group.
Second, synod strictly speaking is deciding on a particular course and yet they’ve decided nothing in particular neither coherent except to proceed only as “grouping”.
Fourth, one has have to mpw do all the keeping up, quite unnatural. The natural way was already won and fixed by Christ in the Redemption. By which He already opened the paths they naturally are unable to reproduce, since it’s done.
Edit: the word I meant to type is, now, not “mpw”
Synodalism matches with the outlook/lifestyle prevalent among indigenous and (if I may) neo-indigenous, that man is spiritual and religion is something imposed; held to in such wise as to make everything including Revelation bend to “spiritual” meanings.
We ordinarily do not consider Islam as indigenous; however, Muslim thinkers I have met readily hold to this “sense of spiritual”, that theirs is spirituality and Catholicism is a made up unnatural structure.
While that “spiritual” might relate with interiorism and spiritualism generally, it has a more pertinent significance as indicator of what is unconverted – and what resists conversion; much like any other pagan form, false worship and idolatory, spanning from quietism to their own styles of tyranny.
It also reflects deeper philosophical blockades. We are talking precisely about the historical experience of the missions down through the ages.
My fourth entry would read as it should, as I edited it here:
Fourth, one has to now do all the keeping up, quite unnatural. The natural way was already won and fixed by Christ in the Redemption. By which He already opened the paths they naturally are unable to reproduce, since it’s done.
I have heard this from many types, Muslim, Hindu, Protestant, Freemason, Chinese, teenagers, politicians, your general workman, Sai Baba, Hari Krishna, Yoruba, New Age, etc.
I have never heard it from a High Anglican or from 7th Days.
I haven’t met a Mormon so I can’t say about that.
Here is a sample, “Every notion of God is the same God there is no superior one.”
PLO LUMUMBA: SPIRITUALITY VS RELIGION | RELIGION IS A MULTI BILLION BUSINESS
ONE AFRICA RIGHT NOW |SWAHILI NATION
Premiered Sep 17, 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdvAMfGmOqI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._L._O._Lumumba
Communio could even get subsumed in “spritiuality not religion”. This seems to be what Bishop Barron is getting at in his report of the last days of the so-called Synod -1P5 video minutes 17:43-20:49.
It could be Sammons and Flanders and I have happened upon and are highlighting the same idea; however, if it is merely myself for now, I am adapting what they are discussing to this analysis.
So recall how “development of doctrine” is all the rage. Is it doctrine that is developing or is it something else being developed and trading on labels, “It arises in doctrine, thus it’s the real thing”.
It IS development but in reality it is developing SOMETHING ELSE; and the something else would be PELAGIANISM. As if intellectually encapsulating Church is bound to yield grace and fruits. And enlarged Pelagianism.
Alternatively, without jumping to conclusions, questions like these could be positioned first:
Is it inspired -in what way and how can we know
Is it even grounded in faith
Is it grounding faith
Why is it assured and complete via “synodality”
How does it get to be authentic in “synodality” on account of “it isn’t a parliament”?
https://onepeterfive.com/the-synod-on-synodality-a-nothingburger/
Did the Synodality Synod Fizzle Out with a Whimper?
OnePeterFive | Nov 1, 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkfubnABV0M&t=1250s
I sit back and look at all the opinions of all these different “prophets”. With their 50$ words and PhD theses narratives. The church is dying by “a thousand cuts” from intentional shadowy decisions from this black administration that is in the Vatican. They appear to be acting as the “scribes”, pharisees”, “sadducees”, “woke preachers” making or forcing THEIR agenda and interpretations.
Be child like, be innocent and humbly and deeply bow to the DEVINE MERCY. The direction and grace will flow. Keep it simple.
You lost all credibility at calling this a masterpiece.