When it is necessary to tear down flawed institutions, we should lay the cornerstone in the heart of Jesus
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,
In his new encyclical on the Sacred Heart of Jesus, “Dilexit Nos” (“He Loved Us”), Pope Francis is acting as a good spiritual physician: He accurately identifies an illness — not just its symptoms, but its underlying cause — and prescribes a remedy for it.
Regarding the illness, he says: “The imbalances affecting the world today are in fact a symptom of a deeper imbalance rooted in the human heart.”
The deeper problem manifests in many ways: superficiality, fragmentation, sadness, lack of patience and violence. But the Holy Father sums it up powerfully when he says, about St. Gertrude’s experience of resting on the heart of Christ: “Might we think that this is indeed a message for our times, a summons to realize how our world has indeed ‘grown old,’ and needs to perceive anew the message of Christ’s love?” Indeed, some days, the world’s heart seems to have grown old and weary.
Another of the illnesses of our time is the tendency to critique what’s wrong with institutions without having the courage and patience to build something better. People think that if we tear down flawed institutions, something virtuous will automatically spring up to replace them. But that’s not how a fallen world works. Pope Francis wrote an entire section of the encyclical under the heading “Building on the Ruins.” He doesn’t deny that we live amid ruins — ruins left by our own sins. But he calls us to lay a new cornerstone in the heart of Jesus Christ and start building again.
In a beautiful phrase, he says: “Let Him draw near and sit at your side.” How consoling, in the midst of whatever troubles us and whatever broken institutions surround us, to know that Christ — the architect of the universe and the Church — draws near to help us rebuild!
But, having let Christ draw near, the next step in the building project is more radical: to let Him not only be near but to let Him live inside us! So the Holy Father says: “It is necessary that the divine heart of Jesus in some way replace our own.”
When He took on human flesh, Jesus took on a human heart. If we extend that truth and let His heart become more and more our own heart, then we’ll not only possess the cure for a weary heart within ourselves, we can let the cure flow into the weary world through us. As the Holy Father says: “I propose that we develop this means of reparation, which is, in a word, to offer the heart of Christ a new possibility of spreading in this world the flames of His ardent and gracious love.… In this way we offer the healing power of the heart of Christ new ways of expressing itself.”
The physical world is constantly breaking down, and we have to rebuild it over and over. The same is true of human institutions. Let’s take up the rebuilding project, day-by-day, with our hearts rooted in Jesus’ Sacred Heart.
