Reading Fr. Giussani, one often confronts the concept of the ‘heart’ described as the locus of the person’s innate longing for truth, beauty, goodness, and justice. But why do we experience this longing? Prior dilexit nos – “We love because He first loved us” (1 John 4: 19). “He loved us” is how Pope Francis begins his most recent encyclical, Dilexit Nos, about the human and divine love of Jesus. We asked our friend and professor of theology in Madrid, Fr. Javier Prades, to help us discover what Pope Francis is trying to show us in this document, and how it can illuminate and deepen what the ‘heart’ is.

Why do you think Pope Francis is asking us to consider the heart and the Sacred Heart of Jesus in this particular moment?

In the encyclical the Pope refers often to our present cultural and social situation. For example, he says, “all of us need to rediscover the importance of the heart” (2) and that “In this ‘liquid’ world of ours, we need to start speaking once more about the heart and thinking about this place where every person, of every class and condition, creates a synthesis, where they encounter the radical source of their strengths, convictions, passions and decisions” (9).

So, the Pope, proposing this expression of “heart”, is aware of our world as a (post)modern world, a liquid society. He is pointing us to the Sacred Heart of Jesus because, as he says, “Devotion to Christ’s heart is essential for our Christian life to the extent that it expresses our openness in faith and adoration to the mystery of the Lord’s divine and human love” (83). We find ourselves immersed in a secularized world “that seeks to build a world free of God” (87) and are “excessively caught up in external activities, structural reforms that have little to do with the Gospel, obsession reorganization plans, worldly projects, secular ways of thinking” (88). This secularization impacts the way we live in the world and the way we live our experience of faith in the Church. The Pope is pointing us to this devotion because through it we discover the possibility of an openness in faith to the mystery of the Lord's divine and human love and, consequently, of helping our society.

How is pointing to the heart the answer to modern society?
The mainstream culture is insisting on fragmentation, where there is no continuity of the “I” of the person. Pope Francis instead is insisting on the one reality, both for individuals and for society, that allows you to be yourself. As he says, the heart is “one of those primordial words that ‘describe realities belonging to man precisely in so far as he is one whole’ (as a corporeo-spiritual person)” (15). Contemporary society lacks the unity of the person, but the Pope shows how we can perceive our own history, the relationships we have, and the different aspects of our lives, as a united core. The point is that in human experience reason, affection, and love are to be considered in their deep unity, though they can also be seen in their distinction. For example, our knowledge is not only a mechanical registration of data. Fr. Giussani used to say that our reason is not like a photographic machine, which in a cold sense registers the image outside. Instead, he insisted that we learn not only when we see the logic of a sentence or the empirical proof of what is outside of us, but when we are affecti (‘touched by, affected’) – touchés by the things we find (much more the persons we meet). Affectus is a dimension of human knowledge as an integral experience.

Because of Fr. Giussani, the idea of the ‘heart’ is not unfamiliar to us in CL. In the encyclical, Pope Francis refers to it as an ‘integrating principle’ – what does this mean?

In 20th century philosophy and theology there has sometimes been an insight into regaining the philosophical and anthropological value of heart – not only as the expression of the sentimental aspect of the human spirit, but as the category which helps to understand the unity and integrity of the person. For example, Dietrich von Hildebrand has a nice book on the heart, and he, along with some other authors, have been trying to give this word a different value than only sentiment. In Scripture, in both the Old and New Testaments, ‘heart’ is used and means the deep core of the person regarding all his or her dimensions. Pope Francis is referring to the heart not only as devotional or spiritual in a narrow sense, but as that which is able to offer a cultural judgment about the moment we are living. We need to keep this in mind, otherwise we tend to say that “reason is reason, will is will, body is body” (just as many other people do) and we don’t ever arrive to see how all these aspects of the human person belong to one and the same person, and how one deals with the others, because the heart is not egocentric or individualistic; it is intersubjective or dialogic.

It is one thing to talk about the heart and perhaps another to talk about the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. What does a devotion to His Sacred Heart look like?

The images we see of the Sacred Heart of Jesus belong mostly to the 18–19th centuries with its devotion style, and they may seem strange to us today. Perhaps, it might not be the way we would express nowadays the humanity and the love of Jesus for everyone. The Pope clearly distinguishes the specific artistic, spiritual, or devotional style of that period – which comes from the devotion and visions of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque – and the ultimate reality of Jesus as a true and loving Man and Son of God. Pope Francis goes back to the Gospel to show us the crux of the matter (numbers 31-32 and 70). For example, he points us to Mary, who “kept in her heart” what she saw of Jesus. Even more, Pope Francis illuminates the heart of God Himself, using the language of the Old Testament where God Himself is moved out of passion. We tend to speak of God in an abstract way as if God was a kind of cloud over our heads – something out there and very impersonal, or even worse, a kind of Big Brother surveying every possible mistake. Of course, if we use an anthropomorphic language of love there are risks, but I am grateful that the Pope points to show us in a concrete way God’s love – Deus caritas est. He goes back through the heart and the humanity of Jesus, pointing to the closeness, the friendship, the compassion, the human love: Jesus’ heart is full of sorrow when He weeps, but His heart is also full of joy, etc.

The encyclical speaks of ‘compunction’ and how it is not our work, but a grace. What does this mean?

The document says: “The natural desire to console Christ, which begins with our sorrow in contemplating what he endured for us, grows with the honest acknowledgment of our bad habits, compulsions, attachments, weak faith, vain goals and, together with our actual sins, the failure of our hearts to respond to the Lord’s love and his plan for our lives. This experience proves purifying, for love needs the purification of tears.” (158). This language belongs to a specific tradition of spirituality, but we can understand it when we remember how Fr. Giussani explains to us the experience of Peter weeping in front of Jesus. He says that Peter was weeping not only for his sins and his feeling of guilt, but also because his great friend had been wounded by his misdeeds. It is a process of becoming one with the other that fosters a true way of feeling sorrow and feeling pain for our sins, which is not just feeling guilty, but knowing that something has been broken in the relationship with the other, and you feel a deep sorrow for that pain. Tears are not only of repentance because we’ve done something wrong but are born out of love for Christ. Even if the word ‘compunction’ is not familiar to many, we can understand the experience through the way Fr. Giussani has introduced us into an experience of relationship to Christ that moves from within out of love.

Pope Francis says “Taking the heart seriously . . . has consequences for society as a whole” (29). We just finished working on the Beginning Day text and the theme of mission. What does this encyclical show us in regard to mission?

The Pope insists that the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is not individualistic or just an inner contemplation. “We have a heart, a heart that coexists with other hearts that help to make it a ‘Thou’” (12). Every human heart is in relation. So, mission has this first anthropological foundation: if I want to be myself and take care of my heart, I must take care of other hearts. In fact, my heart is a relationship to others and the other’s heart is not created in opposition to mine. Later, he says “It is only by starting from the heart that our communities will succeed in uniting and reconciling differing minds and wills.” (28). If our heart is not touched deep inside, how could we arrive to touch another person’s heart? If we don’t strive for this full way of encounter, we will only try to convince others and/or impose our ideas on others, or we will be satisfied with improving organization or communication techniques. Instead, the interesting question for us in our mission is: What does it mean to touch another person’s heart? How does a human being arrive so deeply at the other so as to move his or her heart? How did it happen in our encounter? We can give everything, serving others in our daily mission, because only when we are reached deep in our hearts we can move all of ourselves.

What does it mean to “give everything”?

The unity of the ‘I’ appears when my heart has been so deeply moved in an encounter that I discover the ‘Thou’ that I fully consist of. If we arrive at the point of discovering this, the whole person moves. “Giving everything” is the following step: you don’t just give your time or your money, but you commit yourself to the task, for the sake of community, which is also your fulfillment. At the end of the encyclical, the Pope quotes St. John Paul II, “Over the ruins accumulated by hatred and violence, the greatly desired civilization of love, the Kingdom of the heart of Christ, can be built” (182). This passion for the other person and for our communities is also a way to build over the ruins. This is a fantastic image, because our world is full of tragic ruins – persons, societies, nations – but the Pope says, “The Christian message is attractive when experienced and expressed in its totality” (205). This is very important: we don't have to add one thing to the other, we have the need to take integral care of our heart, which implies, as an essential dimension, the heart of the others. In this way, we discover once and again that deep in our hearts there is an openness to the other. This is love, and this makes possible the civilization of love. Otherwise, so called “love” would just be a competition – in families, in marriage, in friendship, in the workplace – where the other would always be a rival. Instead, Christ allows me to discover that I need you because you belong to my heart. We should be engaged in this education as much as possible, to avoid, as Pope says, the risk of being caught by mere external activities or structural reforms.

What is the relationship between Dilexit Nos, Fratelli Tutti, and Laudato Si’?

I would first point to what I see to be a continuity between Pope Francis, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope St. John Paul II. I have been struck by how Pope Francis has integrated many texts by Benedict XVI and St. John Paul II. Secondly, to answer your question, Pope Francis himself says that “the present document can help us see that the teaching of the social encyclicals Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti is not unrelated to our encounter with the love of Jesus Christ. For it is by drinking of that same love that we become capable of forging bonds of fraternity, of recognizing the dignity of each human being, and of working together to care for our common home” (217). The person who can take care of creation and deal with social problems is the same one who is moved out of love for God. Pope Francis says that Christ’s love can give a heart to our world and revive love wherever we think that the ability to love has been definitively lost. We should read Fratelli Tutti and Laudato Si’ considering, or in the continuity with, this encyclical. As he says, ultimately we can translate the heart of Jesus as “the incarnate synthesis of the Gospel” (90). “The incarnate synthesis of the Gospel”! This is the heart of Jesus.