It is only by starting from the heart that our communities will succeed in uniting and reconciling differing minds and wills, so that the Spirit can guide us in unity as brothers and sisters. Reconciliation and peace are also born of the heart. The heart of Christ is “ecstasy”, openness, gift and encounter. In that heart, we learn to relate to one another in wholesome and happy ways, and to build up in this world God’s kingdom of love and justice. Our hearts, united with the heart of Christ, are capable of working this social miracle.
Taking the heart seriously, then, has consequences for society as a whole. The Second Vatican Council teaches that, “every one of us needs a change of heart; we must set our gaze on the whole world and look to those tasks we can all perform together in order to bring about the betterment of our race”. 20Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, 82. For “the imbalances affecting the world today are in fact a symptom of a deeper imbalance rooted in the human heart”. 21Ibid., 10. In pondering the tragedies afflicting our world, the Council urges us to return to the heart. It explains that human beings “by their interior life, transcend the entire material universe; they experience this deep interiority when they enter into their own heart, where God, who probes the heart, awaits them, and where they decide their own destiny in the sight of God”. 22Ibid., 14.
This in no way implies an undue reliance on our own abilities. Let us never forget that our hearts are not self-sufficient, but frail and wounded. They possess an ontological dignity, yet at the same time must seek an ever more dignified life. 23Cf. DICASTERY FOR THE DOCTRINE OF THE FAITH, Declaration Dignitas Infinita (2 April 2024), 8. Cf. L’Osservatore Romano, 8 April 2024. The Second Vatican Council points out that “the ferment of the Gospel has aroused and continues to arouse in human hearts an unquenchable thirst for human dignity”. 24Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, 26. Yet to live in accordance with this dignity, it is not enough to know the Gospel or to carry out mechanically its demands. We need the help of God’s love. Let us turn, then, to the heart of Christ, that core of his being, which is a blazing furnace of divine and human love and the most sublime fulfilment to which humanity can aspire. There, in that heart, we truly come at last to know ourselves and we learn how to love.
In the end, that Sacred Heart is the unifying principle of all reality, since “Christ is the heart of the world, and the paschal mystery of his death and resurrection is the centre of history, which, because of him, is a history of salvation”. 25SAINT JOHN PAUL II, Angelus, 28 June 1998: L’Osservatore Romano, 30 June-1 July 1998, p. 7. All creatures “are moving forward with us and through us towards a common point of arrival, which is God, in that transcendent fullness where the risen Christ embraces and illumines all things”. 26Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ (24 May 2015), 83: AAS 107 (2015), 880. In the presence of the heart of Christ, I once more ask the Lord to have mercy on this suffering world in which he chose to dwell as one of us. May he pour out the treasures of his light and love, so that our world, which presses forward despite wars, socio-economic disparities and uses of technology that threaten our humanity, may regain the most important and necessary thing of all: its heart.