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Dilexit Nos (He Loved Us), the Pontiff’s fourth encyclical — a rich meditation on the Sacred Heart of Jesus brimming with Scripture, Tradition, and the saints — has met with very little criticism across the theological spectrum. For the Pope’s defenders, it’s a welcome addition to his ongoing emphases on love and mercy, and for his critics, a welcome return to a Christocentric focus after two social encyclicals — although, as the Pope himself insists, the two bodies of teaching are very much connected (see paragraph 217).
With providential timing, Francis has refocused a fractured Church on its principle of unity: the Spirit of love emanating from Christ her Savior, the Way to the Father. For a pope who has been no stranger to controversy, it is an almost controversially uncontroversial document about the love of God and neighbor.
Yet while the Sacred Heart devotion might seem like rather straightforward and sentimental religious business — the sort of thing popular with pious grandmothers, who make a few cameos in the encyclical (7, 20) — the devotion was, at least in its early days, quite controversial, and there are flashes throughout the document of this scandal now largely lost to history.
We read a veritable roll call of heavyweight saints who have cemented the Sacred Heart into the Church’s consciousness, including Doctors of the Church like Francis de Sales and Thérèse of Lisieux. But we also read “checks” on certain distortions of the devotion from both its naysayers and sayers — a reminder that, as in all things, the Church must find and keep its Catholic balance.
Those who didn’t like the Sacred Heart
The encyclical’s first mention of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, the 17th-century French nun widely credited with kickstarting the devotion, is in a quotation from Pope St. John Paul II:
“Devotion to the Sacred Heart, as it developed in Europe two centuries ago, under the impulse of the mystical experiences of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, was a response to Jansenist rigor, which ended up disregarding God’s infinite mercy” (80).
The Jansenists, a hyper-Augustinian movement that began around the same time in France, are most remembered for their moral rigorism, but they first rose to prominence for combatting the frequent reception of the Eucharist (a battle alluded to in paragraph 84 of Dilexit Nos). Their desire was for a smaller, purer Church; they were resolutely “vertical” Christians deeply suspicious of human nature, the world, and all things horizontal — thus portraying Christ on the cross with his tortured arms stretched upward rather than outward.
Unsurprisingly, many Jansenists thus found the Sacred Heart devotion “difficult to understand”; in Francis’ words, “they looked askance on all that was human, affective and corporeal, and so viewed this devotion as distancing us from pure worship of the Most High God,” who was “sublime, separate and distant” (86). For cozying up too closely to the anthropological, the emotional, and the universal, Sacred Heart devotees were lambasted by Jansenists as “cordicoles” (literally, “heart worshipers”), and in 1786, a Jansenist bishop, Scipione de’ Ricci, held a synod in Pistoia condemning the devotion — a condemnation that was, in turn, condemned by the Holy See eight years later.
Tenderness … and sacrifice
But while Francis reminds us of this wrongheaded Jansenist critique, which fell on the wrong side of Church history, he also nods in the direction of their concerns.
In the first place, he emphasizes that “devotion to the heart of Christ is not the veneration of a single organ apart from the Person of Jesus. What we contemplate and adore is the whole Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man” (48). To this end, Pope Francis makes a striking declaration in paragraph 54:
“While the depiction of a heart afire may be an eloquent symbol of the burning love of Jesus Christ, it is important that this heart not be represented apart from him.” Footnote 33 adds that while “the Church has forbidden placing on the altar representations of the heart of Jesus or Mary alone,” the use of such images in private devotion is permissible, though it still “risks taking the heart as an object of adoration.”
Thus, the Pope fiercely guards against the very “heart worshiping” Jansenists were afraid of.
Francis also emphasizes the importance of Christ’s sufferings and the “devotion of consolation” — “The deep wound inflicted by the lance and the wounds of the crown of thorns that customarily appear in representations of the Sacred Heart are an inseparable part of this devotion” (151) — and accentuates compunction, reparation, and a struggle against sin that might reasonably be described as rigorous:
“Self-accusation is part of Christian wisdom. . . . It is pleasing to the Lord, because the Lord accepts a contrite heart” (188).
Just as the devotion to the heart of Christ can’t be separated from his divine person, devotion to his tenderness can’t be separated from his sacrifice on the cross — nor devotion to his openness to humanity separated from each person’s participation in that cross. In all of this, Francis protects the vertical dimension, lest the Sacred Heart devotion devolve into a feel-good humanism.
From controversial to mainline
In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas’ use of Aristotle was decried as a dangerous innovation threatening the integrity of faith; today, Thomism is a touchstone for Catholic philosophy. We see a similar trajectory in the Sacred Heart devotion: What began as a highly controversial form of piety has evolved into a mainline celebration of the love of Christ for humanity.
By tracing its rich pedigree, Dilexit Nos reminds us that the Church always thinks in centuries, and that today’s “dangerous innovation” might be tomorrow’s legitimate development; but by drawing clear lines around the devotion, it also reminds us that the Church’s balancing act never ends — and that today’s “small development” might prove to be tomorrow’s gigantic corruption.
And in all of this, the wisdom of G.K. Chesterton — whom Pope Francis has long admired — rings out:
It is exactly this which explains what is so inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history of Christianity. I mean the monstrous wars about small points of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word. It was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you are balancing. The Church could not afford to swerve a hair’s breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium. Once let one idea become less powerful and some other idea would become too powerful. It was no flock of sheep the Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers, of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world. Remember that the Church went in specifically for dangerous ideas; she was a lion tamer. …
This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy.
And today we celebrate...