Analysis
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Pope Francis offering Mass in Belgium, September 2024Vatican News/X

Those who hear these audacious, these sacrilegious assertions, are simply shocked! And yet, Venerable Brethren, these are not merely the foolish babblings of infidels. There are priests too, who say these things openly; and they boast that they are going to reform the Church by these ravings! There is no question now of the old error, by which a sort of right to the supernatural order was claimed for the human nature. We have gone far beyond that: we have reached the point when it is affirmed that our most holy religion, in the man Christ as in us, emanated from nature spontaneously and entirely.

— Pope St Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, No. 10

(LifeSiteNews) — In a previous article I explained how, in the recent Vatican document Dilexit Nos, Francis proposes a new devotion of reparation which has a completely different end to the traditional devotion of the Sacred Heart.

The traditional devotion was revealed by Our Lord to St. Margaret Mary, and for more than three centuries, has been practiced by the Catholic Church in accordance with the teaching and exhortations of the Roman Pontiffs. This authentic devotion has as its end the salvation and sanctification of souls, by means of reparation to the Divine Heart of Jesus for the, sacrileges, indifferences, and ingratitude by which He is offended.

The new devotion, which I have called the “Social Heart,” has as its end a man-centered political agenda and promotes reparation by man to man for perceived “social sins,” rather than reparation for man’s offenses against the infinite goodness and majesty of God.

“The Social Heart” is a new devotion for a new religion. The devotion of the Sacred Heart belongs to the Catholic Church, and that of the “Social Heart” to the new institution which Francis and his collaborators openly refer to as the “Conciliar/Synodal Church.”

In this article, I will examine more closely the theological and philosophical underpinnings of Dilexit Nos. This analysis will help us to understand why Francis has transformed the traditional devotion to the Sacred Heart into the new devotion of the “Social Heart.”

I will demonstrate that Dilexit Nos is underpinned by the heresy of Modernism, as exposed and condemned by Pope St. Pius X in his 1907 encyclical letter Pascendi Dominici Gregis, the opening warning of which has never been more relevant:

We allude, Venerable Brethren, to many… who, feigning a love for the Church, lacking the firm protection of philosophy and theology, nay more, thoroughly imbued with the poisonous doctrines taught by the enemies of the Church, and lost to all sense of modesty, vaunt themselves as reformers of the Church; and, forming more boldly into line of attack, assail all that is most sacred in the work of Christ, not sparing even the person of the Divine Redeemer, whom, with sacrilegious daring, they reduce to a simple, mere man.[1]

Weaponized ambiguity

The Modernist foundations of Dilexit Nos may not be obvious on a first reading of the text. The document can bear different interpretations, depending on which sections are chosen to support a given argument. The English text, on which this article is based, consists, with footnotes, of 31,359 words, and is composed of five chapters and two hundred and twenty paragraphs.

The very length of the text makes comprehensive analysis difficult. However, there are underlying tendencies which can be identified in the document, and which clearly conflict with the authentic teaching of the Catholic Church.

It is the introduction of Modernist notions alongside Catholic doctrine, rather than simply in place of it, which makes a text such as this so dangerous. Those behind it know that when someone points out the errors in one paragraph, a naive defender of the hierarchy will be able point out something orthodox in another paragraph.

Fr Edward Schillebeeckx O.P., a liberal theologian, revealed that a member of the Second Vatican Council’s doctrinal commission told him:

[W]e say it diplomatically, but after the council we will draw the implied conclusions.[2]

In other words, the drafters of the Vatican II documents placed statements into the drafts which were sufficiently vague and ambiguous to make it into the final texts, but which the authors intended to use to draw more plainly heretical conclusions later.

And this tactic of deliberate obfuscation goes back far beyond Vatican II.

My colleague S. D. Wright has already shown how the enemies of the faith have long been masters in the deployment of this technique. His article ought to be read in full, but here I draw attention to the warning given by Pope St Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis. In that document the Supreme Pontiff wrote:

[T]he Modernists (as they are commonly and rightly called) employ a very clever artifice, namely, to present their doctrines without order and systematic arrangement into one whole, scattered and disjointed one from another, so as to appear to be in doubt and uncertainty, while they are in reality firm and steadfast. [3]

And he also warned:

In the writings and addresses they seem not unfrequently to advocate now one doctrine now another so that one would be disposed to regard them as vague and doubtful.

But there is a reason for this, and it is to be found in their ideas as to the mutual separation of science and faith.

Hence in their books you find some things which might well be expressed by a Catholic, but in the next page you find other things which might have been dictated by a rationalist. [4]

Dilexit Nos, in common with other texts produced by Francis, exemplifies this approach. He mixes together “things which might well be expressed by a Catholic” with “other things which might have been dictated by a rationalist” in order to advance his agenda with some degree of cover.

But as an ancient text, cited by Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical letter Satis Cognitum, warned:

[T]hose who share many things in common with us can easily mislead innocent minds, devoted solely to God, through deceitful association, defending their own corrupt beliefs by appealing to our good ones.

For nothing is more dangerous than these heretics, who seem to proceed correctly in all things, but with a single word, like a drop of poison, corrupt the pure and simple faith of the Lord, and, through it, the apostolic tradition.

Therefore, we must take great care not to allow anything of this kind to secretly infiltrate either our understanding or our hearing, for nothing leads to death more than violating faith under the guise of faith itself. Just as gypsum mixed with water mendaciously resembles the colour of milk, so too does a hostile tradition snook in under the guise of a credible profession of faith.

For this reason, it is not the outward similarity of the profession of faith that should be weighed, but the intention of the mind by which the profession itself is established. [5]

Dilexit Nos is well positioned to “easily mislead innocent minds” because it proposes the “corrupt beliefs” of Francis and his collaborators while “appealing to our good ones.”

In Dilexit Nos, Francis appropriates aspects of the devotion of the Sacred Heart in order more easily to administer that “drop of poison” by which he may be able to “corrupt the pure and simple faith of the Lord.”

It is that “drop of poison” – and much more than a drop – which has already been exposed in my earlier article.

Now we must proceed to examine more closely the philosophical underpinnings of Francis’s treatment of the Sacred Heart.

I beg the reader’s indulgence if I first outline the fundamental principles of Modernism as described by St Pius X. Once the fundamentals of this heresy have been understood, it will be much easier to see how the approach adopted by Francis in Dilexit Nos exemplifies it.

What is Modernism?

Modernism is a heresy which manifested itself towards the end of the nineteenth century. It is the heresy which lies at the root of the crisis in the Church today.

The fundamental foundation of Modernism is the conviction that the human intellect cannot assent with certainty to any proposition which is beyond the range of sensory phenomena.

Pope St. Pius X taught:

Modernists place the foundation of religious philosophy in that doctrine which is usually called Agnosticism. According to this teaching human reason is confined entirely within the field of phenomena, that is to say, to things that are perceptible to the senses, and in the manner in which they are perceptible; it has no right and no power to transgress these limits. Hence it is incapable of lifting itself up to God, and of recognizing His existence, even by means of visible things. [6]

As a result of his agnosticism, the Modernist does not believe that man can assent to truths made known by God by supernatural revelation. Instead, he believes that religious belief and practice – including Catholic doctrine and practice – can only be the symbolic representation of internal human experiences. This includes devotions like the Sacred Heart.

As St. Pius X puts it:

Religion, whether natural or supernatural, must, like every other fact, admit of some explanation. But… all external revelation absolutely denied, it is clear that this explanation will be sought in vain outside man himself. It must, therefore, be looked for in man; and since religion is a form of life, the explanation must certainly be found in the life of man. [7]

The Modernist believes that religion begins in an internal movement of the human heart, a “religious sentiment,” and not in any external revelation made by the true God:

Moreover, [religion] is due to a certain necessity or impulsion; but it has its origin, speaking more particularly of life, in a movement of the heart, which movement is called a sentiment.

Therefore, since God is the object of religion, we must conclude that faith, which is the basis and the foundation of all religion, consists in a sentiment which originates from a need of the divine. [8]

For the Modernist, all religious doctrines and dogmas have their origin within man’s consciousness, and therefore this personal “revelation” must take precedence over the teaching authority of the Church:

Hence it is that they make consciousness and revelation synonymous. Hence the law, according to which religious consciousness is given as the universal rule, to be put on an equal footing with revelation, and to which all must submit, even the supreme authority of the Church, whether in its teaching capacity, or in that of legislator in the province of sacred liturgy or discipline. [9]

According to the Modernist theory, every aspect of Catholic doctrine and religious practice has developed over time and is ultimately just the product of internal experiences. St Pius X explains:

It is thus that the religious sense, which through the agency of vital immanence emerges from the lurking-places of the subconsciousness, is the germ of all religion, and the explanation of everything that has been or ever will be in any religion.

This sense, which was at first only rudimentary and almost formless, under the influence of that mysterious principle from which it originated, gradually matured with the progress of human life, of which, as has been said, it is a certain form.

This, then, is the origin of all, even of supernatural religion. For religions are mere developments of this religious sense. Nor is the Catholic religion an exception; it is quite on a level with the rest; for it was engendered by the process of vital immanence, and by no other way. [10]

Thus, for the Modernist what the Church teaches is ultimately determined by individual human experiences:

If you ask on what foundation this assertion of the Believer rests, they answer: In the experience of the individual. [11]

In this system, nothing is left of the divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ. He was merely a man who had profound experiences which he transmitted to his disciples, and which have continued to develop over the generations, leading to the religious system that we see today. This system is not fixed or permanent – either in its teaching or its practice – and can be revised whenever human needs require it.

Pope St Pius X explained:

For the progress of faith no other causes are to be assigned than those which are adduced to explain its origin. But to them must be added those religious geniuses whom we call prophets, and of whom Christ was the greatest; both because in their lives and their words there was something mysterious which faith attributed to the divinity, and because it fell to their lot to have new and original experiences fully in harmony with the needs of their time.

The progress of dogma is due chiefly to the obstacles which faith has to surmount, to the enemies it has to vanquish, to the contradictions it has to repel. Add to this a perpetual striving to penetrate ever more profoundly its own mysteries. Thus, to omit other examples, has it happened in the case of Christ: in Him that divine something which faith admitted in Him expanded in such a way that He was at last held to be God. The chief stimulus of evolution in the domain of worship consists in the need of adapting itself to the uses and customs of peoples, as well as the need of availing itself of the value which certain acts have acquired by long usage.

Finally, evolution in the Church itself is fed by the need of accommodating itself to historical conditions and of harmonising itself with existing forms of society. Such is religious evolution in detail. [12]

This is why, in Dilexit Nos, Francis begins by examining the needs and experiences of the human heart, rather than the teachings of the Catholic Church, and then proceeds to chart the historical development of the devotion based on the experience of various saints, until finally he presents a new devotion based on his interpretation of modern man’s experience.

The approach, from beginning to end, is that of Modernism.

The term ‘heart’ is never defined

At the outset it should be said that the “heart” is an entirely proper subject for psychological and philosophical enquiry but, unfortunately, such a treatment is not to be found in the pages of Dilexit Nos.

The term “heart” is used five hundred and twelve times in the text but is never adequately defined. Francis himself writes:

The very meaning of the term is imprecise and hard to situate within our human experience. Perhaps this is due to the difficulty of treating it as a ‘clear and distinct idea,’ or because it entails the question of self-understanding, where the deepest part of us is also that which is least known. [13]

Unfortunately, despite the admitted imprecision, many extraordinary things are asserted about “the heart.” The heart is “the ultimate judge” and “the place where every person, of every class and condition, creates a synthesis, where they encounter the radical source of their strengths, convictions, passions and decisions.”[14] The heart “is also capable of unifying and harmonizing our personal history, which may seem hopelessly fragmented, yet is the place where everything can make sense.”[15]

Such claims are made with great confidence, all without providing a clear definition of what the heart actually is, or how it relates to other aspects of man’s nature. Sometimes it seems that the “heart” is to be associated with the intellect, sometimes with the will, and at other times with emotions, the senses, or intuition. But its precise relationship to these aspects of man’s nature, all of which have clear definitions in scholastic psychology, is never made clear. Finally, some of the assertions are plainly contradictory. For example, we are told that the heart is “the locus of sincerity, where deceit and disguise have no place” yet at the same time scripture is quoted to the effect that “The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse, who can understand it?” (Jer 17:9). [16]

As the text lacks a clear definition of the heart and its relationship to more clearly defined aspects of man’s nature, it lacks clear and unambiguous meaning. This ambiguity allows makes it easier for Francis and his collaborators to pursue their agenda.

For a text purportedly exploring the depths of the human heart, it is remarkable for its banality and superficiality. The first chapter consists of little more than a jumbled assortment of quotations, presented without clear structure.

If this document was not presented to the world as the work of a pope, nobody would ever think of taking it seriously. But perhaps Francis does have some insight into the actual value of his text, because in paragraph 7 he provides an excellent summary of it. He writes:

I would repeat a story I have already told on another occasion. “For the carnival, when we were children, my grandmother would make a pastry using a very thin batter. When she dropped the strips of batter into the oil, they would expand, but then, when we bit into them, they were empty inside. In the dialect we spoke, those cookies were called ‘lies’… My grandmother explained why: ‘Like lies, they look big, but are empty inside; they are false, unreal.’ [17]

This is exactly what Dilexit Nos is. It is “big” in size, but “empty inside”; it is both “false” and “unreal.”

Let us examine some of the most problematic aspects in more detail.

The primacy of human experience

 The first paragraph of the first chapter sets the fundamental orientation of the text, raising the question of whether the heart is still a legitimate symbol of the love of Jesus Christ:

The symbol of the heart has often been used to express the love of Jesus Christ. Some have questioned whether this symbol is still meaningful today.[18]

This question is to be answered by an appeal to the experiences of modern man:

Yet living as we do in an age of superficiality, rushing frenetically from one thing to another without really knowing why, and ending up as insatiable consumers and slaves to the mechanisms of a market unconcerned about the deeper meaning of our lives, all of us need to rediscover the importance of the heart. [19]

The “heart” to be rediscovered is not the Sacred Heart of Jesus, but rather the human heart. It is through considering the experiences of the human heart, that we will be able to determine the value of the heart as a meaningful symbol of divine love. This is why the document immediately proceeds to consideration of these experiences. From this follows the reshaping of the symbol of the Sacred Heart in order to make it more “meaningful” to modern man. I have already explored this reshaping in my previous article.

Immanence vs. transcendence

We have already seen that St. Pius X saw the concept of “vital immanence” as being at the core of the Modernist approach.

The Catholic approach is transcendent. Through the use of reason, we come to know with certainty the existence of things beyond the immediate range of the senses. Through reason we come to know that God exists, and we can come to recognise that he has revealed himself in Jesus Christ. By the act of faith, we believe without doubting all the doctrines which are proposed for our belief by the Teaching Authority (Magisterium) of the Catholic Church.

The Modernist approach is immanent. Everything takes place within man. Man has internal experiences, to which he gives meaning, and these are expressed outwardly as religious concepts. These concepts are symbols of man’s internal experience. They are not knowledge of objective realties external to man They have their origin “in a movement of the heart, which movement is called a sentiment.” [20]

The approach adopted in Dilexit Nos is that of Modernist immanentism. In paragraph 8 Francis writes:

Instead of running after superficial satisfactions and playing a role for the benefit of others, we would do better to think about the really important questions in life. [21]

Francis considers the “really important questions in life” to be the following:

Who am I, really? What am I looking for? What direction do I want to give to my life, my decisions and my actions? Why and for what purpose am I in this world? How do I want to look back on my life once it ends? What meaning do I want to give to all my experiences? Who do I want to be for others? Who am I for God? [22]

And he concludes:

All these questions lead us back to the heart. [23]

For Francis, the answers to the “really important” questions, including our relation to God, are to be found in “the heart.” They are not to be found in the use of our reason to discover truths about God, or in the acceptance of a transcendent Divine Revelation, but rather the answers can be found in the immanent experiences of the human heart.

Note well the question: “What meaning do I want to give to all my experiences?” In Dilexit Nos, it is man himself who gives subjective meaning to his own experiences, and the meaning given proceeds from his own will. It is an immanent process. That is why, later in the text, Francis writes:

It follows that, in contemplating the meaning of our lives, perhaps the most decisive question we can ask is, ‘Do I have a heart?’ [24]

This is “the most decisive question” because man who finds the meaning of his own life in the movements of his own heart.

The most “decisive question” for Francis is not whether God exists, whether he has revealed Himself to mankind, whether He has died on the Cross for our salvation, or whether we will spend eternity united to Him or separated from Him. For Francis the most decisive questions relate to the meaning we give to the experiences of our own heart.

The implications of this approach

Francis rightly remarks that: “All that we have said has implications for the spiritual life.” [25]

And, therefore, he immediately follows that statement with the following remark:

For example, the theology underlying the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola is based on “affection” ( affectus). The structure of the Exercises assumes a firm and heartfelt desire to ‘rearrange’ one’s life, a desire that in turn provides the strength and the wherewithal to achieve that goal.[26]

He continues:

The rules and the compositions of place that Ignatius furnishes are in the service of something much more important, namely, the mystery of the human heart. [27]

Here begins Francis’s distortion of the teaching of St. Ignatius Loyola, in order to replace a Catholic and transcendent approach with a Modernist and immanent approach.

All the rules and compositions of place in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius have God as their end. St. Ignatius explicitly states that the “principle and foundation” of the exercises is as follows:

Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul. [28]

But Francis equally explicitly replaces “God” with the “mystery of the human heart.” That is, he redirects the spiritual life towards the immanent exploration of the mysteries of one’s own heart, and away from attaining union with the transcendent God through mediation on revealed truths.

Already, more than one hundred years ago, St. Pius X had noted the importance of this concept of the “mystery of the human heart” in Modernist thought. He explained that for Modernists the object of faith is not the transcendent God but rather that which is mysterious, which he terms the “Unknowable.” The Modernist is drawn towards this Unknowable, which becomes for him that the object of “faith.” St Pius X wrote:

For the Unknowable they talk of does not present itself to faith as something solitary and isolated; but rather in close conjunction with some phenomenon, which, though it belongs to the realm of science and history yet to some extent oversteps their bounds. [29]

He continues by noting that man himself may be the “unknowable” to which their “faith” tends:

Such a phenomenon may be an act of nature containing within itself something mysterious; or it may be a man, whose character, actions and words cannot, apparently, be reconciled with the ordinary laws of history. [30]

Hence Francis replaces “God” with the “mystery of the human heart” as the object which man moves towards in the spiritual life.

Indeed, Francis very specifically refers to the “mystery of the human heart” as the “unknown,” writing that “something unexpected and hitherto unknown starts to speak in our heart.” It is this “unknown” which is at the heart of spiritual exercises, which he insists are “not about intellectual concepts that need to be put into practice in our daily lives.” [31] Thus Francis replaces God, revealed doctrine, and the moral law, with allegedly unknowable mysteries of the human heart.

The adoption by Francis of the very approach identified and condemned by St Pius X is therefore plain.

‘Heart’ vs. intellect and will

 Throughout the text Francis draws an artificial distinction between the “heart” and man’s rational faculties of intellect and will.

A serious philosophical treatment of “the heart” would treat the integration of every aspect of man – body, external and internal senses, emotional appetites, intellect, will – as a whole. On the contrary, Francis tears them apart, setting up his own concept of “the heart” against man’s highest faculties of intellect and will.

This kind of separation of affectivity and intellect is redolent of the Modernism condemned by St. Pius X. St. Pius X notes how the Modernists dismiss the conclusions of philosophy and fundamental theology as “Intellectualism, which they call a ridiculous and long-ago defunct system.” [32] The Modernist, as we have seen, does not believe the intellect can reach certain knowledge of truths beyond the range of sensory phenomena, and that religious concepts arise from movements of the heart known as sentiments.

This manifests clearly in the following words of Francis:

Where the thinking of the philosopher halts, there the heart of the believer presses on in love and adoration, in pleading for forgiveness and in willingness to serve in whatever place the Lord allows us to choose, in order to follow in his footsteps. [33]

It is remarkable that it in this passage Francis adopts exactly the same distinction between “philosopher” and “believer” that St. Pius X regards as characteristic of Modernism.

That great pontiff wrote:

It must first of all be noted that every Modernist sustains and comprises within himself many personalities; he is a philosopher, a believer, a theologian, an historian, a critic, an apologist, a reformer. These roles must be clearly distinguished from one another by all who would accurately know their system and thoroughly comprehend the principles and the consequences of their doctrines. [34]

The saint then continued by treating of the distinction between “believer” and “philosopher.” He explains that the Modernist as a philosopher cannot accept as objective truth any religious concepts because of his doctrine of agnosticism, therefore in order to express Catholic doctrine he must take on the role of “believer.” The pope explained:

Now if we proceed to consider him as Believer, seeking to know how the Believer, according to Modernism, is differentiated from the Philosopher, it must be observed that although the Philosopher recognises as the object of faith the divine reality, still this reality is not to be found but in the heart of the Believer, as being an object of sentiment and affirmation; and therefore confined within the sphere of phenomena; but as to whether it exists outside that sentiment and affirmation is a matter which in no way concerns this Philosopher. For the Modernist Believer, on the contrary, it is an established and certain fact that the divine reality does really exist in itself and quite independently of the person who believes in it. If you ask on what foundation this assertion of the Believer rests, they answer: In the experience of the individual. [35]

To summarize: the believer must find the objects of religious belief in his own individual experience of the sentiments of his own heart, because he cannot find them outside of himself.

This is why Francis writes:

Where the thinking of the philosopher halts, there the heart of the believer presses on in love and adoration. [36]

The “believer,” for Francis, does not approach God by thought but by the heart, for the reasons that St. Pius X explains “this reality is not to be found but in the heart of the Believer, as being an object of sentiment and affirmation; and therefore confined within the sphere of phenomena.” [37]

The distortion of Cardinal Newman

Just as he attempted to co-opt St. Ignatius Loyola to his cause, so too does Francis distort the writings of John Henry Newman. Francis writes:

John Henry Newman took as his motto the phrase Cor ad cor loquitur, since, beyond all our thoughts and ideas, the Lord saves us by speaking to our hearts from his Sacred Heart. This realization led him, the distinguished intellectual, to recognize that his deepest encounter with himself and with the Lord came not from his reading or reflection, but from his prayerful dialogue, heart to heart, with Christ, alive and present. [38]

Newman would no doubt agree that prayer is a higher encounter with God than intellectual reflection. But the artificial distinction between “our hearts” and “our thoughts and ideas” is foreign to the genuine thought of Newman.

For Newman prayer begins from dogma, the truths that God has revealed to us, just as it does in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. In his sermon “On the Glories of Mary for the Sake of His Son” he writes of the way in which prayer arises from meditation on revealed truths:

The great truths of Revelation are all connected together and form a whole. Everyone can see this in a measure even at a glance, but to understand the full consistency and harmony of Catholic teaching requires study and meditation. Hence, as philosophers of this world bury themselves in museums and laboratories, descend into mines, or wander among woods or on the seashore, so the inquirer into heavenly truths dwells in the cell and the oratory, pouring forth his heart in prayer, collecting his thoughts in meditation, dwelling on the idea of Jesus, or of Mary, or of grace, or of eternity, and pondering the words of holy men who have gone before him, till before his mental sight arises the hidden wisdom of the perfect, ‘which God predestined before the world unto our glory,’ and which He ‘reveals unto them by His Spirit.’ [39]

And when addressing schoolboys on the subject of the rosary he expressed the same idea in simpler terms:

The great power of the Rosary lies in this, that it makes the Creed into a prayer; of course, the Creed is in some sense a prayer and a great act of homage to God; but the Rosary gives us the great truths of His life and death to meditate upon, and brings them nearer to our hearts. And so we contemplate all the great mysteries of His life and His birth in the manger; and so too the mysteries of His suffering and His glorified life. [40]

Religion, for Newman, is necessarily dogmatic. In his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Newman writes:

[M]y battle was with liberalism; by liberalism I mean the anti-dogmatic principle and its developments. This was the first point on which I was certain… [U]nder this first head I have the satisfaction of feeling that I have nothing to retract, and nothing to repent of… I have changed in many things: in this I have not. From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery. [41]

But for Francis, as for all Modernists, religion arises not from truths known by the intellect, but from the sentiments of the heart. As Francis writes:

It is not about intellectual concepts that need to be put into practice in our daily lives, as if affectivity and practice were merely the effects of – and dependent upon – the data of knowledge. [42]

But the practice of the Catholic faith is the precisely the effect of – and dependent upon – the data of Divine Revelation.

Is the devotion of the Sacred Heart derived from human experience?

Francis holds that the devotion of the Sacred Heart is derived from human experience. This is because, as explained above, he holds that all religious doctrine and practice ultimately has its origin in the individual experience of man in his role as “believer.”

In order to find some justification for this position he cites Pope Pius XI:

Pius XI presented this devotion as a ‘summa’ of the experience of Christian faith.[43]

However, following the footnote reveals that Pope Pius XI did nothing of the kind. In the passage cited by Francis in support of this claim, Pius XI actually taught:

For is not the sum of all religion and therefore the pattern of more perfect life, contained in that most auspicious sign and in the form of piety that follows from it inasmuch as it more readily leads the minds of men to an intimate knowledge of Christ Our Lord, and more efficaciously moves their hearts to love Him more vehemently and to imitate Him more closely? [44]

As with St. Ignatius and John Henry Newman, Francis has distorted the meaning of the source he cites. Pius XI says nothing at all about the devotion “as a ‘summa’ of the experience of Christian faith” but rather as the “sum of all religion.” Religion is the virtue by which due honor is paid to God. [45]

Thus, Pope Pius XI is praising the traditional devotion to the Sacred Heart as a supreme act of religion, which gives due honor to God, and not in any way as the “summa” of “the experience of Christian faith.” But for the Modernist, religion is nothing more than “experience.” Thus, Francis reinterprets the teaching of Pope Pius XI through a Modernist lens.

The word “experience” is to be found fifty times in the text. And the teaching and practice of saints and writers referred to Francis throughout chapter four of Dilexit Nos are consistently presented as originating in their “experiences”. In this way, the development of the devotion of the Sacred Heart is made primarily contingent on a succession of individual experiences. This “experience” is often contrasted with intellectual concepts, as when Francis writes that true missionaries “are impatient when time is wasted discussing secondary questions or concentrating on truths and rules, because their greatest concern is to share what they have experienced.” [46]

That is, for Francis, faith does not primarily consist of truths, but of experiences. And, ultimately, Francis locates the end of the Christian life in internal experiences. In the penultimate section of the document, he writes:

If you accept the challenge, he will enlighten you, accompany you and strengthen you, and you will have an enriching experience that will bring you much happiness. [47]

The Modernist religion of Francis leads, at best, to “an enriching experience.” How different to the true Catholic religion, which leads to eternal life!

Christ immanent in human history

In my previous article I discussed the way in which Francis associates the Sacred Heart of Jesus with the “Omega Point” of Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard de Chardin was a French Jesuit priest and palaeontologist whose writings sought to reinterpret Catholic doctrine in light of evolutionary theory.

As noted in the previous piece, paragraph 31 of Dilexit Nos reads:

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.’ 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.’ [48]

I also noted that the meaning of this passage would be abundantly clear to those familiar with the theories of Teilhard de Chardin.

Teilhard de Chardin regarded humanity as being in a process of evolution towards what he called the “Omega Point,” which he identified with Christ. He saw humanity, indeed the whole universe, as evolving towards this ‘Christ’ as the end point of the evolutionary process. Suffice to say, that de Chardin’s understanding of the nature of Christ is wholly different to that infallibly proposed for our belief by the Catholic Church.

In Dilexit Nos Francis identifies the Sacred Heart as the “Omega Point” towards which humanity is moving. That Francis intends this paragraph to be understood in the light of de Chardin’s theories is made explicit by the second quotation in the paragraph cited above. This quotation is taken from paragraph 83 of Laudato Si, which references “the contribution of Fr Teilhard de Chardin.”

The concluding part of paragraph 31 of Dilexit Nos reads:

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. [49]

Here Francis is quite explicit that “the most important and necessary thing of all” is the heart, and not the Sacred Heart of Jesus, but the heart of “our world”. Francis’s prayer is not that humanity may attain union with the Divine Heart, but that it regain its purely human heart. Man is the alpha and the omega of Dilexit Nos. God is, at best, an instrument for achieving a purely natural human good.

Teilhard de Chardin’s theory of the Omega Point is an example of Modernist immanence. It posits a “cosmic Christ” as the end point of the evolution of the universe. It envisions Christ as a force within the created universe culminating in a final state of maximum complexity and consciousness.

By associating the “Sacred Heart” and the “Omega Point,” Francis would seem to be positing the Sacred Heart as the endpoint of human evolution and development. The Sacred Heart is that to which the human heart moves towards as human society develops. It seems to represent, for Francis, simply the culmination of human progress. Hence, he presents his new form of the devotion of the Sacred Heart, which is concerned not with the worship of the true and transcendent God, but with the political, social, and economic progress of mankind.

Thus, Francis does precisely what St Pius X warned about more than a century ago:

[W]e have reached the point when it is affirmed that our most holy religion, in the man Christ as in us, emanated from nature spontaneously and entirely. [50]

References

References
1 Pope St Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, No. 2.
2 For the source and context of Fr Schillebeeckx’s remark see here: https://dominicansavrille.us/little-catechism-of-the-second-vatican-council-part-two/.
3 Pope St Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, No. 4.
4 Pope St Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, No. 18.
5 The text of is from Tract. de Fide Orthodoxa contra Arianos. The translation is from S. D. Wright’s article.
6 Pope St Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, No. 6.
7, 8, 20 Pope St Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, No. 7.
9 Pope St Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, No. 8.
10 Pope St Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, No. 10.
11 Pope St Pius X, Pascendi Domenici Gregis, No. 14.
12 Pope St Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, No. 26.
13 Francis, Dilexit Nos, No. 10.
14 Francis, Dilexit Nos, No. 9.
15 Francis, Dilexit Nos, No. 19.
16 Francis, Dilexit Nos, Nos 5 & 6.
17 Francis, Dilexit Nos, No. 7.
18, 19 Francis, Dilexit Nos, No. 2.
21, 22, 23 Francis, Dilexit Nos, No. 8.
24, 38 Francis, Dilexit Nos, No. 23.
25, 26, 31, 42 Francis, Dilexit Nos, No. 24.
27 Francis, Dilexit Nos, No. 24
28 St Ignatius Loyala,  “The Principle and Foundation”, Spiritual Exercises
29 Pope St Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, No. 9.
30 Pope St Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, No. 9.
32 Pope St Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, No. 6.
33, 36 Francis, Dilexit Nos, No. 25.
34 Pope St Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, No. 5.
35, 37 Pope St Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, No. 14.
39 John Henry Cardinal Newman, “On the Glories of Mary for the Sake of His Son”, Discourses to Mixed Congregations. Available at: https://www.newmanreader.org/works/discourses/discourse17.html.
40 Remarks made to schoolboys, Feast of the Holy Rosary, 1879. Available at: https://www.newmanreader.org/works/sayings/file2.html.
41 John Henry Cardinal Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, (London, 1845). Available at: https://www.newmanreader.org/works/apologia65/chapter2.html.
43 Francis, Dilexit Nos, No. 79.
44 Pope Pius XI, Miserentissimus Redemptor, No. 3.
45 See St Thomas Aquinas, ST II.II q. 81 a.2.
46 Francis, Dilexit Nos, No. 209.
47 Francis, Dilexit Nos, No. 216.
48, 49 Francis, Dilexit Nos, No. 31.
50 Pope St Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, No. 10.

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