July/August 2025: Editorial

                                                                                                              I am my heart

In what turned out to be his final papal encyclical Dilext Nos (He loved us) Pope Francis called for the renewal of the much loved but neglected devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus which has lost its meaning for many. For the late pope, devotion to the sacred heart is never a passive or purely individual or personal experience but a devotion which leads us to encounter each other and the world in which we live and the people we share our lives with in the deepest and most profound way.

As we gaze upon the image of the sacred heart and the unconditional look of love that gazes back at us we realise that we are called to a newness of heart ourselves; to the realisation of the Little Flower, St Thérèse of Lisieux that ‘love is repaid by love alone’.

 There are many people who believe that the world has lost its heart today. The daily cruelty of deliberately starved and bombed children, the disregard for truth and disrespect for human life and simple decencies are symptoms of hearts grown cold. Hearts of flesh have been replaced by hearts of stone. A change of heart, a new heart is needed.

 When he re-consecrates Ireland to the Sacred Heart at Knock on 22 June, Archbishop Eamon Martin will be issuing a call to action; to a recovery of heart not only for Ireland but for the world. For as Pope Francis concluded:

I am my heart, for my heart is what sets me apart, shapes my spiritual identity and puts me in communion with other people. The algorithms operating in the digital world show that our thoughts and will are much more ‘uniform’ than we had previously thought. They are easily predictable and thus capable of being manipulated. That is not the case with the heart…. In this age of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity. (DN 14,20)

Paul Clayton-Lea

Editor

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