‘To return to the Sacred Heart is to return to the core of Christianity’
"The Sacred Heart allows us to discover the reality that Jesus Christ is fully divine and fully human."
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.
Isn't “love” or “heart” something too superficial, too corny, to have to do with a solution to the world's wars and conflicts?
It is a very profound approach that is in line with what other popes have said.
I was recently reading something [Pope Francis] said: “the world cannot recover peace if first the peace of the human heart is not recovered.”
One cannot transmit and give what one does not have. If the heart does not have love, it cannot give love, it cannot evangelize and it cannot work for peace.
That doesn't sound corny to me.
We are in a world at war, and the solution will only be found if the human heart is transformed according to the heart of God. We will not achieve a solution with exclusively social or political approaches, but with a human and anthropological approach.
Peace and war begin in the human heart. What the pope is proposing here is a conversion of the human heart.
There has been some discussion about Dilexit nos as an interpretative key to the papacy of Francis. Do you think this is the case, or is it a rather secondary document after the more well-known ones, such as Laudato si' or Evangelii gaudium?
I see a very clear case of continuity without rupture. It is in line with his programmatic document Evangelii gaudium and his social encyclicals.
There cannot be a contradiction between a profoundly spiritual approach and evangelization, especially for the poor and the peripheries.
I was ordained in 1981 by Don Marcelo Gonzalez, Archbishop of Toledo at that time, and I think his episcopal motto is very illustrative: “Pauperes evangelizatur.” The poor are evangelized. Don Marcelo was a man very much in love with the Sacred Heart and hence my own episcopal motto that I mentioned previously.
It is a matter of looking at the living Sacred Heart of Christ with this gaze, to be able to see the wounded people on the road of life, so many men and women who live wounded. And the pope speaks of a universal heart that incarnates this universal fraternity, that looks at the poorest, at those who suffer, and he speaks of this from the Gospel, as it could not be otherwise.
The encyclical says that “the heart of Christ also frees us from another kind of dualism found in communities and pastors excessively caught up in external activities, structural reforms that have little to do with the Gospel, obsessive reorganization plans, worldly projects, secular ways of thinking and mandatory programmes...”
It seems that the pope may be indirectly talking about certain views on Church reform and synodality that are obsessed with everything he mentions here.
What is the relationship between devotion to the Sacred Heart and understanding synodality correctly?
Synodality is to have a Church in communion with heart. This means we are not each one on his own, but we live and walk together with Christ.
We must live with this fundamental approach in our own life, [we must] live with the sentiments of the heart of Christ.
[Synodality] has always been in the Church, it is not something that the pope invented. The 1917 Code of Canon Law said that dioceses should hold a diocesan synod every 10 years. The Archdiocese of Toledo has been characterized as a diocese of great councils and synods, some with worldwide repercussions.
Now, synodality is co-responsibility, but it is not a democracy…. The faith has been given to us; even morality springs from what has been revealed to us in the commandments and we also discover it in natural law.
We cannot think that we will transform the world and vivify the Church only with structures and words, without a return to the heart, without a conversion of the heart, without a desire that our life be totally filled by Christ.
This is why the idea of synodality is so important: because it is listening to God in contemplation, in order to listen to our brothers and sisters. But always from the clarity that this expression of the Church as communion has been there since Pentecost.
The Church at Pentecost did not go out into the world to build structures, she went out to evangelize, she went out to bring the Gospel to mankind. Every conversion carries with it the mission to evangelize.
It is often said that synodality is walking together and it is true, but always with Christ. It is not walking together with human strategies, it is walking together with Christ to be transformed according to His heart and to bring the Gospel to people. The Gospel is to evangelize the world for the love of Christ, to paraphrase Pope St. Paul VI.
Finally, could you give us some advice for living this devotion?
The Sacred Heart is my life. It has balanced my spiritual life in such a way that could only be explained as a grace. The Sacred Heart has given me an immense joy and a deep love for Jesus Christ, fully human and fully divine.
Secondly, the Sacred Heart has shown me that Christ is alive, that I relate to a living Christ, who has a heart, who is in the Eucharist. The Eucharist is the living Sacred Heart and the living Sacred Heart is the Eucharist.
Therefore, I recommend people – and whenever I can, I do it myself – spend long periods of Eucharistic adoration, praying in front of the Lord.
The pope in the encyclical speaks of holy hours, which is something that is in the tradition of the Church but also in the Gospel itself - when Jesus says to his disciples in Gethsemane, “Couldn’t you watch with me even for one hour?” The practice of the holy hour springs from our accompanying Jesus in his agony in Gethsemane.
Jesus Christ is alive and is alive in the Eucharist. This for me is a marvel.
Third, the Sacred Heart leads me to live in charity. Think of what we pray in Compline every day, “and your neighbor as yourself.” This helps me understand that I must care for myself in order to care for others. That is not selfishness. If I don't have bread, I can't give it; if I don't have God, I can't share it with others.
And then, Matthew 25 says: “When have we seen you naked, in prison, sick…?” and Christ answers, “Every time you saw one of the least brothers of mine.” This is the charity of the Heart of Jesus. I discover His presence in the poorest, in the face of those who suffer, and have a hard time.
Finally, John 13 tells us to love with the same heart with which Christ loves. A few days ago someone told me that this is a utopia, and yes, but Jesus told us as much: “Love one another as I have loved you.”
Therefore, what Christ wants from us is that we love with His heart. This has brought in my life peace, serenity, joy - an immense joy because it is to see, quoting Cardinal Newman’s motto that you mentioned before, how “the heart speaks to the heart.” This brings me great peace.
It is possible to be radical, in the sense of going to the root of the Gospel, to seriously live a life of holiness, but with a kind and human heart. With a heart that is interested in the problems and conflicts of humanity and of our country, such as the recent DANA [weather phenomenon and flooding] in Spain, in which more than 200 people have died.
This concerns me, just as it concerns me that there are so many people who do not know the Gospel. I care about all human endeavors because Jesus keeps all human endeavors in His heart. This has been my greatest discovery through the Sacred Heart.
Thank you very much for this commentary. I read the encyclical the weekend after it came out and it most impressed me with its beauty and fervor. Truly a gift to us all.
Great interview and reflection! Thank you!