Dear Pope Francis,
Thank you. I read your encyclical on the Sacred Heart, “Dilexit Nos,” this weekend. It is beautiful and heartwarming. I hope people read it and pray with it. When you were in Spain this June, you promised to release it in September. You’re a busy man, so we understand if you needed more time. And for Catholics in the United States, the timing was perfect.
You “touch all the bases” (that’s a baseball metaphor), showing us the Greek and Hebrew roots of our language about the human heart. In the Bible, you note, the heart is the “unity of body and soul with a coordinating center” of the human person (No. 3). The heart includes knowledge, memory, emotions and decisions. You remind us that Proverbs 4:23 calls us to “Keep your heart with all vigilance.” You reference the biblical scene from Luke 24:32, where the disciples on the road to Emmaus encounter the Risen Lord, crying out, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us?” (No. 4).
That was the Gospel at my Jesuit vow Mass, and it always touches my heart. I also appreciate that you cited the passage from Luke 2:19 that Jesus’ mother Mary’s heart is a place of prayer and contemplation, as she “treasured all these things, pondering them in her heart” (No. 19).
[Top 5 takeaways from ‘Dilexit Nos,’ Pope Francis’ new encyclical on the Sacred Heart]
I love your poetic and personal examples—the embodied memories imprinted in your heart. You write of using “a fork to seal the edges of the pies that we helped our mothers” to make, “the first game of soccer we played with a rag ball, the worms we collected in a shoebox” (No. 20). The internet, artificial intelligence and algorithms are disembodied digital images. The “shoebox, the book, the bird, the flower: all of these live on as precious memories ‘kept’ deep in our heart.” Our human experience is sacramental and relational. Children know this, grandparents know this, you know this.
“Dilexit Nos” is long, 200 paragraphs, on par with “Laudato Si’.” I read all of it; will others? Pope Benedict XVI wrote only 42 paragraphs on “Deus Caritas Est.” “Dilexit Nos” has 200 footnotes, not counting biblical citations. You cite Plato, Homer, Rahner, Heidegger and more. I know this is an important topic, and you want to show us that you’ve done your homework.
Holy Father, we met in January. I was in Rome for an international meeting of the Apostleship of Prayer, the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network. I am the national director of this ministry in the United States. Founded by young Jesuits in France in 1844, we promote the Sacred Heart devotion in the church and the world, and we invite people to pray for your monthly intentions. We pray with you and for you! The warmth and support I felt at our meeting—this is imprinted on my own heart. You thanked us for our work and said, “The first duty of a Christian is to pray.” Now you help us to pray with “Dilexit Nos” in the very Heart of Jesus.
Your timing is perfect for us here in the United States. Americans need the Sacred Heart. We are on the eve of a national election. You are right that we must choose “the lesser evil” of two candidates. TV ads portray one candidate as Hitler and the other as Stalin. In your encyclical, you wrote, “We may be tempted to conclude that our world is losing its heart” and “has grown heartless” (No. 22). It feels that way here.
We should tattoo your first sentence from “Dilexit Nos” on our hearts: “‘He loved us,’” Saint Paul says of Christ in order to make us realize that nothing can ever ‘separate us’ from that love” (Rom 8:37, 39). Not political divisions, not social animosity, nothing. St. Paul, you write, literally faced “anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword” (Rom 8:35). In our wounded nation, Jesus loves us and offers us His Heart.
You speak about reparation (Nos. 181-204). You show us how St. Thérèse and St. John Paul II labored for reparation. St. Thérèse takes “hold of Jesus by his heart” in her simple daily chores and prayers (No. 140). St. Thérèse was a member of the Apostleship of Prayer. Her “little way” was influenced by our spiritual pathway.
St. John Paul II calls us to dramatic reparation: “[O]ver the ruins accumulated by hatred and violence, the greatly desired civilization of love, the Kingdom of the heart of Christ, can be built” (No. 182). In Christ, St. John Paul II worked to repair a troubled world after World War II and the Cold War.
In the Sacred Heart devotion, reparation means to labor with Christ, “repairing” the damage caused by sin. I travel around my country speaking about the Sacred Heart of Jesus in parishes and schools. I meet faithful people who want to cooperate with Christ as channels of healing and reconciliation. Our nation looks to be in ruins at times. And yet the crush of migrants at our borders attests that many still believe that America is a land “with liberty and justice for all.”
Thank you for highlighting Jesuit saints and Jesuit leaders devoted to the Sacred Heart, including St. Peter Faber and St. Claude Colombiere (Nos. 143-147). Two different Jesuit superior generals, Peter Jan Beckx and Pedro Arrupe, consecrated the Society of Jesus to the Sacred Heart‚ the first in 1872 and the second a century later.
Today, many Jesuits need a nudge to renew their devotion to the Heart of Jesus. If this image “may smack of pious sentimentalism,” then we can revisit the Spiritual Exercises, a true “training of the heart, for in them we sense and savor with the heart a Gospel message…. Anyone who follows the Exercises can readily see that they involve a dialogue, heart to heart” with Jesus (Nos. 46, 144). With St. John Paul II, you urge Jesuits “to be even more zealous in promoting” and living devotion to the Sacred Heart (No. 147).
However, you left out something important. You didn’t mention the Apostleship of Prayer—your own prayer network! Centered in the Sacred Heart, we invite people to pray for your intentions in the heart of the church. At our 175th anniversary in 2019, you said in “the Sacred Heart of Jesus, it is good to remember the foundations of our mission…. It is a mission of compassion for the world. We can explain it as a ‘way of the heart,’ meaning a prayerful itinerary that transforms people’s lives.” Centered in Jesus’ Heart, we are with you on a “mission of compassion for the world.” A daily offering prayer, to unite my heart with the Sacred Heart, is a beautiful way to nurture this devotion.
I am also glad you released this encyclical near the end of the Synod on Synodality. Many Americans and America readers have been following the synod, asking: “What will happen? How will the church change? With “Dilexit Nos,” you teach us that we must change; the Sacred Heart can change our hearts to make them more like His Heart.
St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, a great apostle of the devotion to the Sacred Heart, writes, “He asked for my heart, which I asked him to take, which he did and then placed myself in his own adorable heart” (No. 124). Our hearts are wounded and restless in a heartless world. Our hearts find rest in His Heart. With Christ, we can bring peace and healing to all hearts through prayer and service.
Yours in Christ,
Joseph Laramie, S.J.
