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Pope Francis has urged a modern-day rediscovery of devotion to the Sacred Heart in a surprise new teaching letter just published.
The Encyclical letter begins with the Latin words ‘Dilexit Nos’ – (He loved us) and is the fourth encyclical of the Pope Francis pontificate.
The style is highly personal …“For the carnival, when we were children, my grandmother would make a pastry using a very thin batter. When she dropped the strips of batter into the oil, they would expand, but then, when we bit into them, they were empty inside.
“In the dialect we spoke, those cookies were called ‘lies’… My grandmother explained why: ‘Like lies, they look big, but are empty inside; they are false, unreal’.
“Instead of running after superficial satisfactions and playing a role for the benefit of others, we would do better to think about the really important questions in life...
"Who am I, really? What am I looking for? What direction do I want to give to my life, my decisions and my actions? Why and for what purpose am I in this world? How do I want to look back on my life once it ends? What meaning do I want to give to all my experiences? Who do I want to be for others? Who am I for God? All these questions lead us back to the heart.”
He writes in his new encyclical that the way in which Christ loves us is something that He did not want to explain too much to us. He showed it in his gestures. “By watching him act, we can discover how he treats each of us...”
The Pope says we struggle to fully understand that Christianity cannot be reduced to a theory, a philosophy, a set of moral norms, or even a sequence of sentimental emotions. Instead, it is the encounter with a living Person.
Understanding the way He loves us, that is, He attracts us and calls us, and entering into a relationship with Him cannot therefore be reduced to reasoning, to a cultural identity or to a manual of rules.
Understanding how Jesus loves us, he says, has to do with the heart: it is a story of gestures, looks and words. It is a story of friendship, a matter of the heart.
"I am my heart," writes the Successor of Peter, "because it is what distinguishes me, shapes me in my spiritual identity and puts me in communion with other people."
Watching him act, we see that Jesus “gives all his attention to people, to their worries, to their suffering.”
Encountering the Christian faith means encountering the heart of Christ, that heart incapable of remaining indifferent, which by embracing us with his infinite mercy invites us to imitate him.
And this has social consequences, because the world, which is beset by wars, economic crises consumerism and the anti-human use of technology “can change starting from the heart”.