The Relevance of Dilexit Nos

By Rev. José Granados

At the end of the Synod on Synodality, Pope Francis not only signed the final document of the Synod, but he also published an encyclical on the Sacred Heart of Jesus: Dilexit Nos.

What is the significance of this document? One could look at it with skepticism, given the many problems the Church is facing, but that would be to miss a message that we need to hear today.

We are living through a crisis of faith that threatens to dilute the Gospel in the dominant thinking of the world. There are debates, for example, about whether the Christian view of man is outdated in the face of new ways of living our human condition; whether Christian moral teaching is too difficult for ordinary people to accept; whether, in a pluralistic society, faith in Christ should still be proposed as the only way to find full communion with God.

In this context, cannot the insistence on the centrality of the love of Jesus serve as a justification for theological ideas and pastoral practices that in fact betray crucial aspects of Jesus’ preaching and mission? Possibly.

The answer depends on how one reads the encyclical and which questions one asks of it. For the crucial issues are: What Christ does the Church preach and what salvation does he offer to the human person?

Let us review some key insights present in Dilexit Nos relevant to the crisis the Church is going through.

i) The Human Person from the Perspective of Christ’s Love

Contemplation of the Sacred Heart establishes a fundamental principle of the Christian vision of man in these posthumanist times: Christ’s love fully reveals man to himself (cf. Gaudium et Spes n. 22). In a time when many think that the Church holds an outdated view of man, Dilexit Nos should be read as an invitation to understand through Christ not only who we are, but also who we are called to be.

According to Dilexit Nos, man is defined by his heart. What does it mean to make the heart the center of our identity? The encyclical answers (cf. n. 12) with reference to Romano Guardini: the heart is the place where the human person is defined by the original love he receives from the Creator and to which he responds. We recall what St. John Paul II said in Redemptor Hominis: only love reveals who man is (cf. n. 10). To which Benedict XVI added in Deus Caritas Est: our definition of love must begin by looking at the Crucified One (cf n. 12). And what vision of love does this give us?

ii) The Truth of Love

The Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, who proposed a postmodern philosophy of “weak thought,” became a Christian again at the end of his life. But according to him, the Gospel should be understood as pure love, without reference to any dogmatic content or truth. Dogma is an obstacle to our life of faith, which is called to become a “weak faith.” Many Christians today seem to agree with him.

But this separation between truth and love is rejected by looking at the heart of Jesus. For it is there that true love is revealed to us, and this love coincides with the Trinitarian structure of faith, which is the core of dogma. Dilexit Nosinsists that the Father and the Spirit are at work in the heart of Jesus, and thus the mystery of the Trinity is opened to the believer (cf. n. 70ff). Love, therefore, has a truth; it has an architecture and an order that allows love to flourish and to expand. The central axis of this order is in the Father, the source of love, to whom Christ always looks, whose love Christ receives in order to give it to us (cf. nos. 70–74).

It is in the affirmation of this primacy of God’s love that love for our neighbors can be understood. When this primacy of God’s love is denied, one no longer knows how to love one’s neighbor. The heart of Jesus reveals to us that true love is not reduced to caring for our neighbor’s material needs, nor to respecting his ideas, nor to tolerating his faults. Christ’s love for humanity goes beyond all this: “He wants to lead us to the Father” (DN n. 70).

Therefore, to love our brothers in truth is to love them from the source of God’s love and to love them so that they may love God, the Creator of the world, who has given us the commandments of love and life. From this point of view, love of enemies is also understood: to love them in such a way that they become friends of God. But this love for our brothers is not only spiritual, it also touches our flesh.

iii) The Heart of Jesus and the Relevance of the Body

To contemplate the heart of Christ is not only to understand the truth of love but also to encounter a love that has taken on flesh and therefore our carnal affections: sadness, joy, hope, fear, courage, anger... Dilexit Nos recalls what Pope Pius XII called in Haurietis Aquas the threefold love of the Heart of Christ. First, the divine love of the Son of God; second, his spiritual human love; third, his affective and therefore bodily love (cf. DN nos. 64–69).

It is well known that devotion to the Heart of Christ, although present from the beginning of Christianity, received a new impulse in the face of Jansenism, which had forgotten the importance of bodily affections. In our time, the problem is no longer the forgetting of bodily affections, but their absolutization. We no longer find in our body, and in the way it reacts to the world, a language that we receive from the Creator, but we see our body as a raw material that can be shaped according to our subjective emotions.

Now, when Christ loves us from his heart, he adopts our language of the body in order to express the fullness of his love. As Joseph Ratzinger wrote in his book Behold the Pierced One, the center of devotion to the heart of Jesus is in the Incarnation. To contemplate the heart of Jesus is to contemplate the body as the openness of the person to God, who formed the body and to whom the desires written in our bodies are directed.

To love with the heart, then, is to accept a language of the body that comes from the Creator, who from the beginning formed man and woman and entrusted them to their mutual love. According to St. Paul, the first theologian of the heart of Christ, the hearts of the pagans were darkened (cf. Rom 1:21) because they did not respect the original language of love formed by the Creator, who from the beginning made them “male and female” (Gen 2:24). Dilexit Nos should be read as an invitation to recover and deepen this original language of the body, recalling the words of Jesus to his Father: “A body you have prepared for me” (Heb 10:5).

iv) Reparation: Where Mercy and Justice Meet

Looking at the heart of Jesus also allows us to focus on the relationship between justice and mercy. Much of the theological and pastoral discourse of recent years has insisted on a mercy understood as tolerance of evil, and it has considered as Pelagian any call to repentance from sin. Looking at the heart of Jesus corrects this poor vision.

Indeed, the heart of Jesus reminds us of the seriousness of sin as an offense against the love of Christ. But this seriousness does not lead to despair, because the depth of sin is revealed together with the depth of the overflowing mercy of Christ who dies for us.

Now, God’s mercy, manifested in the death of Jesus, does not consist only in forgiving our sins but goes much further. For Christ loved the Father with a human heart, revealing to us the human response to God’s love. By dying on the cross, Christ regenerated the human heart so that we might rise from sin and live a life “worthy of God” (1 Thess 2:12). The greatest mercy is not the one that keeps us small and needy, but the one that lifts us up so that we can respond to Christ’s love to the point of becoming, with Christ, a source of love.

All of this is summed up in the doctrine of reparation, which we can offer to the Father in the heart of Jesus (cf. DN n. 181ff). We are now able to respond with love to God’s love and, with Jesus, become a source of love for others. This leads us to the need to spread the good news of the love of Jesus.

v) To Evangelize from the Heart of Jesus

Devotion to the Sacred Heart leads to the Christian proclamation of Christ’s love to all people. If some statements by Pope Francis in recent years have seemed to diminish the importance of Christian mission to all men, we find in Dilexit Nos a much needed invitation to proclaim the Gospel to every person (cf. nos. 207–211).

The heart of Jesus allows us to see this mission not as a desire to impose our convictions on others, but as an overflowing of Christ’s love. Thus, the proclamation of the Gospel consists of the communication of a love that is true. This communication takes place when we perceive, not only the greatness that Christ’s love brings to our lives, but the greatness he brings to the life of every man and woman, in every place and time. By contemplating the heart of Jesus we understand that Christ is not only the Savior of all, but also the salvation of all. That is, we understand that to be saved is to be conformed to him, so that our love is shaped by the love of Christ. We understand, then, that Christ’s love gives form to a community of persons and assumes a mission for society.

vi) The Social Dimension of Christ’s Love

Far from being an intimate cult, the Sacred Heart is a source of life that animates the common good. As Benedict XVI showed in Caritas in Veritate (cf. n. 2), the charity that comes from Jesus’ open heart is not only the principle of personal relations but also the foundation of social life. Respect for the dignity of the person, for the order of human love, for the foundation of love in God the Creator—these are not only Christian truths but also the foundations of a civilization of love.

Dilexit Nos rightly insists on this social dimension opened up by the heart of Jesus (cf. nos. 182–184). Now, the way in which the heart of Jesus inspires the common good of the Church and of society is through the Eucharist. For in the Eucharist the heart of Jesus touches the heart of the faithful in order to bestow a new form—the form of Christ’s body—on their relationships.

Thus, a fruitful reading of Dilexit Nos needs to ask how to extend the logic of the Eucharist to all different spheres of human life. In our time of secularization and of cultural devastation, this involves the formation of communities rooted in the Eucharist that create an environment in which all that is human can flourish and find its fulfillment in communion with God. These communities thus become the “patient ferment” of Christianity, to use Alan Kreider’s formula.

I have pointed out some key points that allow us to read Dilexit Nos in a way that is relevant to the life of the Church today. Seen through this lens, contemplation of the Sacred Heart can foster the hope that the Church so badly needs now.

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Rev. José Granados, dcjm, is the Superior General of the Disciples of the Hearts of Jesus and Mary and co-founder and president of The Veritas Amoris Project. He earned a Doctorate of Theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome after which he worked as Vice-President and Professor of Dogmatic Theology at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family in Rome.