In his latest encyclical, Dilexit nos, Pope Francis invites us to contemplate the Heart of Jesus as a symbol of human and divine love. Lucilo Echazarreta, OAR, highlights in this article the profound links between this text and the spirituality of St. Augustine, underlining the centrality of the heart as the place of encounter with God.
Pope Francis’ latest encyclical: a legacy of human and divine love
Pope Francis published on October 24, 2024 the encyclical Dilexit nos. He loved us. On the human and divine love of the heart of Jesus Christ. . This was the last magisterial document that the recently deceased pope gave to the Church, inviting all Christians to adore Christ through the veneration of the image of the Heart of Jesus: the heart that he loved so much and that gives drink to those who thirst for God’s love.
The symbol of the heart is presented by the Jesuit Pope as a polyhedral synthesis of the love of Jesus Christ, who loves as man and, at the same time, as Son of God. The gaze directed to the Heart of the Lord puts us in tune with his flesh, his humanity, his sensitive love; a love with affection and feelings like ours. But in this contemplation of the human, the Pope warns us that we must transcend into the contemplation of the infinite love of Jesus Christ as God and Lord. Thus, the “human” heart of Jesus is not only a physical symbol, but “his human feelings become the sacrament of an infinite and definitive love” (n. 60).
In synthesis, the legacy that the Pope wishes to leave us is to emphasize that the Lord’s love for us contains its entire human component, and that, consequently, we should love Jesus and our brothers and sisters with a “whole heart”: that is, with feelings of human affection and with divine charity. Pius XII masterfully and magisterially expressed this intrinsic unity of the two loves in his encyclical Haurietis aquas (1956): “There is no doubt that the heart of Christ, hypostatically united to the divine Person of the Word, throbbed with love and every other sensitive affection” (n. 61).
Interiority and heart: the Augustinian roots in Dilexit us
In this brief article I would like to highlight the multiple relationships that the encyclical has with the principles of St. Augustine’s spirituality, especially when the pope repeatedly uses ideas and terms such as “interiority” and “heart”.
In fact, the first chapter of the document is entitled “The Importance of the Heart,” and from its very first point it evokes Augustinian resonances when it states: “When we live enslaved by the gears of a market that is not interested in the meaning of our existence, we need to recover the importance of the heart” (n. 1). One section of this introduction is entitled “Return to the heart”, where the ideas of that classic master of the heart seem to be paraphrased in contemporary ink: Noli foras ire, “do not want to go outside yourself”.
The Pope writes: “In this liquid world it is necessary to speak again of the heart… We are dominated by the rhythms and noises of technology, without much patience to make the processes that interiority requires. In today’s society, the human being runs the risk of losing his center, the center of himself… The heart is missing…” (n. 9).
St. Augustine repeated: “Go back, go back to your heart, what is it to go far from yourselves and disappear from your sight…”(On the Gospel of John, 18:10). This call to “interior tourism” appears several times in the encyclical: “Because of the difficulty involved in knowing oneself, it would seem that the most intimate (the heart) is also the furthest thing from our knowledge”.
And that radical affirmation of St. Augustine: Deus intimior intimo meo, “God is more intimate to me than I am to myself,” seems to inspire the Pope when he describes the heart as “a personal center where the only thing that can unify everything is, in the end, love” (n. 10). And he continues with Augustinian resonances: “Ultimately, I am my heart, because it is what distinguishes me, configures me in my spiritual identity and puts me in communication with other people” (n. 14). Augustine wrote earlier in his Confessions (10:3,4): “In my heart I am what I am”.
The way of the heart: a proposal for our times
It will be worthwhile to make a more detailed study of the Augustinian reminiscences present in the encyclical Dilexit nos. Especially in the first chapter, we find many correlations with hidden quotations from the Bishop of Hippo, which allows us to intuit that this part of the papal text has flowed from the rich spirituality built around the “heart” as a referential symbol and unifying center of the person.
Pope Francis even invites us to walk the path of interiority with a new strength, always born of the heart, when he asks us: “Faced with our own personal mystery, perhaps the most decisive question that each of us can ask ourselves is: Do I have a heart?
This was the last encyclical of Pope Francis, who recently passed away. The invitation is to read in depth this testament that introduces us to the person of Jesus Christ in order to focus on his human and divine love. The Pope, by presenting to us in the Heart of Jesus a devotion proper to his Jesuit tradition, offers us – oh, prophecy! – waters that drink from the fountain of Augustinian wisdom, projecting us towards the construction of an authentic theology of the heart.
Lucilo Echazarreta, OAR
Lima, 2025