(Fuente de la noticia The Pillar Catholic)

In October, Pope Francis published the fourth encyclical letter of his papacy, Dilexit nos, “On the human and divine love of the Heart of Jesus Christ.”

The encyclical was received relatively quietly, without the media coverage and controversy of other papal documents. But it has been applauded as a spiritually valuable document on one of the most beloved Catholic devotions in the Church.

Archbishop Francisco Cerro Chaves of Toledo believes Dilexit nos is both beautiful and enlightening, containing profound insights and deep spiritual reflections.

Even before becoming a bishop, Cerro Chaves was one of Spain’s best-known spiritual authors, holding a doctorate from the Pontifical Gregorian University in spiritual theology and authoring more than 50 books on spirituality, including many on the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

The Pillar spoke with Cerro Chaves about the pope’s most recent encyclical, and devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

The interview was conducted in Spanish. It has been translated and edited for length and clarity.

Why is this encyclical so important?

I have written much about the Sacred Heart throughout my life and found Pope Francis’ encyclical to be very luminous. It is the first encyclical a pope has written on the Sacred Heart after the Second Vatican Council. Before the Council, Pius XII had already written Haurietis Aquas. This is an encyclical in which Pope Francis, as a good Jesuit, has also expressed a great love and devotion to the Sacred Heart.

Deep inside, [the encyclical] shows a desire to show that the Sacred Heart is the essence of the Gospel, of Christianity. It expresses a desire to focus our gaze on Jesus Christ, on his redeeming heart, a gaze that refocuses on that mystery of love which is the living heart of Christ.

Some Catholics lament that devotion to the Sacred Heart has declined. Why is it important to recover it?

Because it is a devotion to Jesus Christ in the context of the Most Holy Trinity. It is the love of God, our Father, who gives us his Holy Spirit to shape in us the sentiments of the Sacred Heart of His Son. So, to return to the Sacred Heart is to return to the core of Christianity: the person of Jesus, who is fully divine and fully human.

Why has devotion to the Sacred Heart declined? Well, many things are said. Sometimes it is said that it has fallen because the images lack beauty, but I think it is because the spiritual activity of Christians has fallen. When this spiritual awareness increases, the person encounters the living Jesus Christ, as Benedict XVI says: one begins to be a Christian from an encounter with Christ that changes one’s life.

Then, when we have a profound experience of the love of Jesus, we can look at his heart, which is, as [theologian Hans Urs] von Balthasar said, that red dot where divinity and humanity meet. I insist, the Sacred Heart allows us to discover the reality that Jesus Christ is fully divine and fully human. And who is Jesus Christ? He is the God-Love who loves us with a human heart.

How can we speak of the heart to a world that goes from ideologized rationalism to empty sentimentalism?

The pope explains it when he speaks about the word “heart” in the first paragraphs of the encyclical. The great theologians, whom the pope quotes, have said it: the heart expresses the person seen from his affection and interiority.

In today’s language, there is much talk of the heart. “That person has no heart,” “My heart doesn’t fit in my chest.” It is used to express many things, when someone is not authentic or sincere we say, “You have not spoken to me from the heart.” The heart is the antidote to this rationalism and sentimentality you mention.

The pope claims that Christianity is a religion of the heart and especially of the heart of Christ, who loved men with a real heart. The heart of Christ speaks to us of how Jesus loved, of the feelings of his heart, which was moved by the weeping of the widow of Naim, which weeps at the tomb of his friend Lazarus. If there is one thing we can say about Jesus Christ, it is that he has a heart.

Moreover, the heart is an expression of the authenticity of the person, [for example in the phrase,] “tell this to me from the heart.” In the Old Testament, when Samson tells Delilah the secret of his strength, the Scripture says that “he opened his whole heart to her.”

The word “heart” has all these rich connotations of the inner world, because it expresses the totality of the person loving, the totality of the person in his desire for authenticity. In short, it is the expression of the capacity to go beyond the superficial.

And that is a problem of today’s society: it is very superficial because it has no roots. It has no heart.

What you say about interiority reminds me of the cor ad cor loquitur of John Henry Newman’s episcopal motto.

Eighteen years ago, I chose as my episcopal motto “The Sacred Heart, source of evangelization of the poor.” There is a phrase by Romano Guardini that says that “the essence of Christianity is Christ” and if this is so, then the essence of Christianity is the heart of Christ, because it is Christ loving with a human heart.

What saved me was the redeeming love of Christ, the love of Christ’s heart, the love that led him to give his life on the Cross, “having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” This is the expression of his heart.

In the encyclical, Pope Francis says, “The heart has been ignored in anthropology, and the great philosophical tradition finds it a foreign notion, preferring other concepts such as reason, will, or freedom. The very meaning of the term is imprecise and hard to situate within our human experience.”

How do we recover the intellectual and philosophical relevance of the “heart”?

That is part of what the pope is trying to do… He even quotes philosophers who have nothing to do with the Christian world.

It is a question of recovering the heart not as superficiality, but as the totality, the interiority of the person. It is about a return to the heart, as the pope says.

Well, this return to the heart also has an intellectual, philosophical, and anthropological dimension. Pius XII in Haurietis Aquas gave an example that seems to me to be very illustrative.

If someone asks if you know Mary or Peter and you say “Yes, I know them,” it doesn’t say much – you may know them because you met them on the stairs of an apartment or in the supermarket.

But if you say “I know them with all my heart,” that changes a lot. The word “heart” adds a lot in philosophy – and intellectually and anthropologically. Because it is to speak of the person not from the emotional or the purely intellectual, but from his totality. It is to speak of affection from the interiority. The heart provides a deeper knowledge of the person.