Some initial reflections on Dilexit nos.

In this truly beautiful encyclical, Pope Francis offers the theology specific to the “revolution of tenderness” for which he has so often and so insistently called.

In one sense, I see contemplation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus as the most exalted fulfillment of the Theology of the Body. The heart of the incarnate Word of God, truly corporeal, stands as the icon par excellence of the secret inner dynamism of the Person, thereby becoming the visibility of depths hidden from us in their essence. If, as German theologian Theodor Schneider teaches, the body is the visibility of the soul, its most apt expression, then the heart – literally throbbing with life – is the visibility of the spontaneous love of the person. Although not quoted in the encyclical, we find elsewhere in St. Peter Julian Eymard, the great saint of Eucharistic devotion:

“Just as the eyes see and the ears hear, so the heart loves. It is the organ of the soul in the production of affection and love. In the vernacular, heart and love are interchangeable terms; heart means love, and vice versa.”

We see in the Sacred Heart the body become singularly expressive of truth, a concord in which is contained the apogee of divine chastity. Reading the whole encyclical very deeply in a short time has had the net effect of putting me into more intense contact with perhaps the most sublime line ever penned by Ratzinger – words I have carried with me over years. Regarding the Last Supper as the ratification of specifically covenantal love, he writes: “Body has become word, and word has become body in the act of love that is the specifically divine mode of being” – body thus “logos-ized,” Logos perfectly embodied: the ineffable convergence of Logos and body, symbolized above all in the heart of the Savior. In unbroken tradition, Dilexit nos appropriates the teaching of Trent: “through these images that we kiss, and before which we kneel and uncover our heads, we are adoring Christ.”

One night, alone in his study, the philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal had a mystical experience so powerful that he wrote a description and kept it on his person at all times; this text, found sewn into his jacket lining at his death, was headed with the single, all-capitalized word: “FIRE.” One particular paragraph of the encyclical put me in mind of this; I reproduce it here in full. I hope that you have a space of order and solitude in which to read this compilation, this quiver of blazing arrows drawn from Scripture:

The pierced side of Jesus is the source of the love that God had shown for his people in countless ways. Let us now recall some of his words:

 “Because you are precious in my sight and honored, I love you” (Is 43:4).

 “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even if these may forget, yet I will not forget you. See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands” (Is 49:15-16).

 “For the mountains may depart, and the hills be removed, but my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be removed” (Is 54:10).

 “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you” (Jer 31:3).

 “The Lord, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives you victory; he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his love; he will exult over you with loud singing” (Zeph 3:17).

Such a love is fire – the love at the heart of all being, the fire that rages yet does not consume, is jealous according to a holy jealousy, and beautiful, and impassioned. As St. John of Ávila writes, “Even the angels do not reach an understanding of how great this fire is, nor to what heights his power reaches.”

The next paragraph tells us that “when that love was spurned, the Lord could say, ‘My heart is stirred within me; my compassion grows warm and tender’.” Benedict invoked this same verse in Deus Caritas Est as he introduced the notion of the divine eros, teaching of a God, the ferocity of whose love has, as it were, split him apart – a character of deep love, imaged remotely and mysteriously in the ritual of God’s covenant with Abraham. “God's passionate love for his people—for humanity—is at the same time a forgiving love. It is so great that it turns God against himself, his love against his justice.” Behold the heart of Christ, eternally rent in love’s openness. 

As if all this were not enough, Francis continues: “The prophet Hosea goes so far as to speak of the heart of God, who ‘led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love’.” How many times have I meditated on this passage, led by St. Alphonsus Liguori, a veritable doctor of love. With respect to the Incarnation Alphonsus writes, "He wished with such a prodigy of love to be, as it were, enchained by us." Stop for a moment, and allow these words to resonate in their full force. Consider that the subject of the sentence is the uncreated Principle of an eternal and totally unconstrained liberty, complete in himself and in need of absolutely nothing; consider the astonishing kenosis of the Incarnation cast as penultimate to an even greater humility: the abasement of willing captivity before such meager and divided affection as any of us can offer. The saint continues that God wished “...at the same time to enchain our hearts by obliging us to love him, according to the prophecy of Hosea.” This idea was so dear to the heart of Alphonsus, that the Church found it appropriate to enshrine it in his Office: “I want to catch men with snares, those chains of love in which they allow themselves to be entrapped, so that they will love me.”

The current encyclical reiterates a concern of Pope Pius XII, namely that the Sacred Heart not be reduced to a “formal” image – that it not be taken as “a perfect and absolute sign of his divine love,” complete in itself. The symbol will never exhaust the reality, “for the essence of [Christ’s] love can in no way be adequately expressed by any created image whatsoever.” As seen by the saints, the love of Christ excels even his suffering, to the point that, in the words of St. John of Ávila, “much greater love remained pent up in his heart than was shown externally in his wounds.”

Dilexit nos, with its focus on the inexhaustible love of the heart of Jesus, is well suited for lectio divina. I hope to read it many times so. It facilitates contemplation. It has renewed my own faith.

Dilexit nos clearly sees in devotion to the Sacred Heart an antidote to that rampant consumerism and overvaluing of the power of money which the Holy Father has repeatedly condemned. But more: matters of the heart entail a complete divestment. To once more quote John of Ávila: “The heart is moved by love more than it benefits from it; for one who gives a benefit to another gives something that he has, but the one who loves gives himself along with what he has, and there remains nothing more to give.”

This encyclical leaves us to marvel that Christ has done so for us. The only response is to requite love for love.