A world that has become “heartless” and indifferent to greed and war, and a Catholic Church in need of revitalising its missionary joy need to open themselves up to Christ’s infinite love, Pope Francis wrote.
By contemplating Jesus’ Sacred Heart, the faithful can be filled with the “living water that can heal the hurt we have caused, strengthen our ability to love and serve others, and inspire us to journey together toward a just, solidary and fraternal world,” the pope wrote in his encyclical, “‘Dilexit nos‘ (‘He loved us’): on the Human and Divine Love of the Heart of Jesus Christ.”
The Vatican released the 28,000-word text 24 October. While it is the pope’s fourth encyclical, he wrote that it is meant to be understood in tandem with his previous two encyclicals, “Laudato Si‘, on Care for Our Common Home” and “Fratelli Tutti, on Fraternity and Social Friendship.”
“The present document can help us see that the teaching of the social encyclicals … is not unrelated to our encounter with the love of Jesus Christ,” he wrote.
“For it is by drinking of that same love that we become capable of forging bonds of fraternity, of recognising the dignity of each human being, and of working together to care for our common home.”
Pope Francis invited Catholics to rediscover or strengthen their devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the practices connected with it, particularly Eucharistic adoration and receiving the Eucharist on the first Friday of each month.
This practice once served to remind the faithful that Communion was not a reward for the perfect, he wrote, but to renew people’s confidence in the “merciful and ever-present love” of Christ in the Eucharist and his invitation “to union with him.”
Today the First Fridays’ devotion, he wrote, can help counter “the frenetic pace of today’s world and our obsession with free time, consumption and diversion, cell phones and social media (and) we forget to nourish our lives with the strength of the Eucharist.”
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