What is Needed in the World

In my most recent blog articles, “The Quest for Peace” Part I and Part II,  I discussed how we are all looking for peace, but not just peace that is the absence of violence.  People, whether they know it or not, are looking for the Peace of Christ.  As we search for peace, we need hope.  Knowing the need for hope, Pope Francis selected “hope” as the theme of our Jubilee Year (see “Spes Non Confundit”).

Where can we find this hope?  We find hope in Jesus Christ, most specifically in his love for us.  As we were preparing for the beginning of the jubilee year, I think it was no coincidence that Pope Francis issued his new encyclical, Dilexit Nos (October 24, 2024).  The opening words (that are also the title) translate as, “HE LOVED US.”  These words are found in Paul’s Letter to the Romans (Romans 8:35-39, specifically verse 37).  The “he” in “he loved us” is Jesus Christ.  It is in his Sacred Heart that we find the love that gives us hope.  As Pope Francis writes, “Because of Jesus, “we have come to know and believe in the love that God has for us” (1 John 4:16)” (Dilexit Nos, 1).

How is the love of Christ made visible to us?  Jesus’ love for all people is made evident in the story of the Canaanite woman who comes to Jesus for help for her daughter (Matthew 15:21-28).

Jesus’ love for his people is seen in the stories of how He was moved with pity for his people.  He did not simply have pity for them.  His love always leads him to provide help for them (for example, see Matthew 9:36, and Matthew 14:14, cf. Dilexit Nos, 40,44).

As Pope Francis says, we live in “an age of superficiality” (Dilexit Nos, 2).  We do not look beyond the surface of what we see.  When people look at Jesus on the Cross from a secular world perspective, they see a man who was defeated by his enemies and suffered a humiliating death.  When we look at Jesus on the Cross as Christians, we see love.  “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).

As Pope Francis writes regarding this age of superficiality, we end up as “insatiable consumers and slaves to the mechanisms of a market unconcerned about the deeper meaning of our lives, all of us need to discover the importance of the heart” (Dilexit Nos, 2). 

Pope Francis then addresses the question, “What do we mean by the heart.” 

In classical Greek, the word kardía denotes the inmost part of human beings, animals and plants. For Homer, it indicates not only the centre of the body, but also the human soul and spirit. In the Iliad, thoughts and feelings proceed from the heart and are closely bound one to another.  The heart appears as the locus of desire and the place where important decisions take shape.  In Plato, the heart serves, as it were, to unite the rational and instinctive aspects of the person, since the impulses of both the higher faculties and the passions were thought to pass through the veins that converge in the heart (Dilexit Nos, 3).

When we speak of heart in matters of faith, we are speaking of something much deeper than the physical heart that pumps blood throughout our body.  We are speaking of the core of our who we are.

When Jesus spoke to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35), He spoke not just to their minds.  He spoke to their hearts.  The two disciples realize this after He departs, “Were not our hearts burning [within us] while he spoke to us on the way and opened the scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32).  The heart “is the part of us that is neither appearance or illusion, but is instead authentic, real, entirely “who we are”” (Dilexit Nos, 5).

Many people today reject faith, relying only on what can be proven (Dilexit Nos, 10).  Science does not always get it right (see Consolmagno, Guy, SJ, and Christopher M. Graney, When Science Goes Wrong:  The Desire and Search for Truth.  New York:  Paulist Press.  2023).  In faith, we use the ability to reason that God has given us but we also look beyond it. 

Unfortunately, society has become self-centered and heartless.  This affects not just our relationship with each other but also with God (Dilexit Nos, 17).  We need to let go of the radical individualism to live in solidarity with one another (see Craycraft, Kenneth, Citizens Yet Strangers:  Living Authentically Catholic in a Divided America.  Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor. 2024.)

We need to look at things with our hearts.  The Blessed Virgin Mary serves as an example for this.  In the story of the visit of the shepherds (Luke 2:15-21), Mary hears the words of the shepherds, “reflecting on them in her heart” (verse 19).

Likewise, when Mary and Joseph found Jesus in the Temple, (Luke 2:41-52), Mary took what happened and “kept all these things in her heart” (verse 51).

We need to follow Mary’s example in all that we experience, reflecting on it in our hearts.

Pope Francis writes, “for every human being is created above all else for love.  In the deepest fibre of our being, we were made to love and to be loved” (Dilexit Nos, 21).  We are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27) and “God is love” (1 John 4:16). 

I think the world is losing focus.  It has lost sight of its meaning as we have lost site of what it means to love.  Pope Francis writes, “In loving, we sense that we come to know the purpose and goal of our existence in this world.  Everything comes together in a state of coherence and harmony” (Dilexit Nos, 23).  Called to love, we are called to solidarity with one another.

I spoke above of Jesus’ Crucifixion.  In Dilexit Nos, we read, “the knowledge that Christ died for us does not remain knowledge, but necessarily becomes affection, love” (26).  Looking at Jesus on the Cross with love changes everything for us.  It reveals his Sacred Heart to us.

Pope Francis cites Gaudium et Spes from the Second Vatican Council

“Every one of us needs a change of heart; we must set our gaze on the whole world and look to those tasks we can all perform together in order to bring about the betterment of our race.”  For “the imbalances affecting the world today are in fact a symptom of a deeper imbalance rooted in the human heart” (Dilexit Nos, 29, original quotes from Gaudium et Spes, 82 and 21, Gaudium et Spes, 10).

We work for the “betterment of our race” when we work for the building of God’s Kingdom.  This is not simply a matter of building churches.  The most important building is in our hearts so that we have hearts like Jesus has.

Pope Francis writes much more on the Sacred Heart of Jesus.  I expect to write more soon.  For now, I leave you with these words that start as Pope Francis’ words but include a quote from St. Pope John Paul II

In the end, that Sacred Heart is the unifying principle of all reality, since “Christ is the heart of the world, and the paschal mystery of his death and resurrection is the centre of history, which, because of him, is a history of salvation” (Dilexit Nos, 31 with quote from St. Pope John Paul II Angelus, June 28, 1998).

Peace,

Fr. Jeff