From the Cardinal: Longing for a politics of compassion and love| November 22, 2024
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Vol. 6. No. 6
All our actions need to be put under the “political rule” of the heart. In this way, our aggressiveness and obsessive desires will find rest in the greater good that the heart proposes and in the power of the heart to resist evil (“Dilexit Nos” No. 13).
We have just concluded another difficult election season, one that threatened to divide us as a nation rather than uniting us. Now, the call is for unity among us, and rightly so, but if we truly want to heal wounds and bring together individuals, families and communities that are too often bitterly opposed to one another, we must take the time to reflect on what our unity demands of us. We also need to be aware of those things that divide us.
For Christians, the source of our unity is Christ. We are called to be one with him, members of his body, and sisters and brothers to each other. As Jesus is united with his Father, we are called to be united with him. This unity is sealed by the Holy Spirit, and it is powerfully symbolized by the experience of Pentecost wherein people of many different races and cultures who spoke diverse languages heard the Gospel proclamation (the “good news” of our salvation in Christ) as if in their own native tongues.
This great miracle of unity that begins the story of the Church in the Acts of the Apostles is both the foundation and the goal for us. We are one in Christ, and yet we must cooperate with the Holy Spirit to resist the forces of division and build a genuine communion among us.
As faithful citizens, the source of our unity is the Constitution of the United States of America. This historic document symbolizes the hopes and dreams, the philosophical principles and the heroic sacrifices, that have come together during the past 200 years to frame our nation as a beacon of hope and a promise of liberty and justice for all. We are a free people, and yet we constantly struggle to resist the divisive influences that drive us into opposing camps. In order to build a more perfect Union, we must come together, listen to one another, and work together in harmony as fellow Americans. We also must learn to welcome, and respect, those who are new to our country and those who see things differently than we do.
The challenges of maintaining, and strengthening, our unity are complex and powerful. The solution is simple, but not easy. Love is the answer. Not romantic or sentimental or erotic love, but the kind of love that truly seeks the good of another and that places the common good of all above the self-interest of a few.
As Pope Francis tells us in his new encyclical, Dilexit Nos (He Loved Us), “In a word, if love reigns in our heart, we become, in a complete and luminous way, the persons we are meant to be, for every human being is created above all else for love (No 21).” To achieve this, the pope says, “all our actions need to be put under the ‘political rule’ of the heart.” This is a foreign concept for most of us. At best, we think of politics as the pragmatic art of the possible. At worst, we view politics as a form of manipulation by individuals or groups who seek power, influence, and economic gain for themselves at the expense of others.
A political rule of the heart is a radically different concept. It is rooted, of course, in the teaching and example of Jesus who defines leadership as service and whose compassion and love extend to everyone regardless of political, economic or social status. “Every human being is created above all else for love,” the Holy Father insists. Any politics that diminishes the worth of human beings—born or unborn, native or migrant, rich or poor—is incapable of uniting people. And, as the pope warns, “A society dominated by narcissism and self-centeredness will increasingly become heartless.”
We are in danger of becoming a heartless society, one that cares only for the special interests of the few over against the common good. As Pope Francis says:
We see, then, that in the heart of each person there is a mysterious connection between self-knowledge and openness to others, between the encounter with one’s personal uniqueness and the willingness to give oneself to others. We become ourselves only to the extent that we acquire the ability to acknowledge others, while only those who can acknowledge and accept themselves are then able to encounter others.
To acknowledge and accept both our differences and the God-given human dignity that makes us “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” we must reject the all-too prevalent impulse to demonize those who are different from us or who disagree with us. Only by recognizing what we hold in common, and by respecting each other as daughters and sons of one Father, can we ever hope to encounter Christ in and through each other.
What we long for as a divided nation is a politics of compassion and love. Not a politics that tears us apart, but one that can heal wounds and build lasting relationships of trust and collaboration among us. In the years following this most recent election, we have our work cut out for us. We can either take the easy road—maintaining the status quo, blaming others for our failures, and demonizing our enemies. Or we can take the more difficult “high road” of mutual respect and self-sacrifice for the sake of the common good.
I recommend a careful reading of Dilexit Nos for all who wish to heal our nation’s wounds and build a more compassionate way of governing at the local, state, and national levels. May the pope’s words, which flow from the holy heart of Jesus, inspire us to find ways to make justice, kindness, and peace the standard for all political discourse.
As we observe the great national holiday of Thanksgiving next week, let’s pray for the grace to establish “a political rule of the heart” in our nation so that we can be governed not self-interest, but by emotions that spring from the heart for the common good of all.
Have a blessed and joy-filled Thanksgiving.
Sincerely yours in Christ the Redeemer,
Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin, C.Ss.R.
Archbishop of Newark
A Message from Pope Francis: Words of Challenge and Hope
(A selection from the Encyclical Dilexit Nos (He Loved Us))
RETURNING TO THE HEART
9. In this “liquid” world of ours, we need to start speaking once more about the heart and thinking about this 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. Yet, we find ourselves immersed in societies of serial consumers who live from day to day, dominated by the hectic pace and bombarded by technology, lacking in the patience needed to engage in the processes that an interior life by its very nature requires. In contemporary society, people “risk losing their center, the center of their very selves.” “Indeed, the men and women of our time often find themselves confused and torn apart, almost bereft of an inner principle that can create unity and harmony in their lives and actions. Models of behavior that, sadly, are now widespread exaggerate our rational-technological dimension or, on the contrary, that of our instincts.” No room is left for the heart.
10. The issues raised by today’s liquid society are much discussed, but this depreciation of the deep core of our humanity – the heart – has a much longer history. We find it already present in Hellenic and pre-Christian rationalism, in post-Christian idealism and in materialism in its various guises. 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. 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. Even encountering others does not necessarily prove to be a way of encountering ourselves, inasmuch as our thought patterns are dominated by an unhealthy individualism. Many people feel safer constructing their systems of thought in the more readily controllable domain of intelligence and will. The failure to make room for the heart, as distinct from our human powers and passions viewed in isolation from one another, has resulted in a stunting of the idea of a personal center, in which love, in the end, is the one reality that can unify all the others.
11. If we devalue the heart, we also devalue what it means to speak from the heart, to act with the heart, to cultivate and heal the heart. If we fail to appreciate the specificity of the heart, we miss the messages that the mind alone cannot communicate; we miss out on the richness of our encounters with others; we miss out on poetry. We also lose track of history and our own past, since our real personal history is built with the heart. At the end of our lives, that alone will matter.
12. It must be said, then, that we have a heart, a heart that coexists with other hearts that help to make it a “Thou”. Since we cannot develop this theme at length, we will take a character from one of Dostoevsky’s novels, Nikolai Stavrogin. Romano Guardini argues that Stavrogin is the very embodiment of evil, because his chief trait is his heartlessness: “Stavrogin has no heart, hence his mind is cold and empty and his body sunken in bestial sloth and sensuality. He has no heart; hence he can draw close to no one, and no one can ever truly draw close to him. For only the heart creates intimacy, true closeness between two persons. Only the heart is able to welcome and offer hospitality. Intimacy is the proper activity and the domain of the heart. Stavrogin is always infinitely distant, even from himself, because a man can enter into himself only with the heart, not with the mind. It is not in a man’s power to enter into his own interiority with the mind. Hence, if the heart is not alive, man remains a stranger to himself”.
13. All our actions need to be put under the “political rule” of the heart. In this way, our aggressiveness and obsessive desires will find rest in the greater good that the heart proposes and in the power of the heart to resist evil. The mind and the will are put at the service of the greater good by sensing and savoring truths, rather than seeking to master them as the sciences tend to do. The will desires the greater good that the heart recognizes, while the imagination and emotions are themselves guided by the beating of the heart.
14. It could be said, then, that 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.
15. The word “heart” proves its value for philosophy and theology in their efforts to reach an integral synthesis. Nor can its meaning be exhausted by biology, psychology, anthropology or any other science. It is one of those primordial words that “describe realities belonging to man precisely in so far as he is one whole (as a corporeo-spiritual person).” It follows that biologists are not being more “realistic” when they discuss the heart, since they see only one aspect of it; the whole is not less real, but even more real. Nor can abstract language ever acquire the same concrete and integrative meaning. The word “heart” evokes the inmost core of our person, and thus it enables us to understand ourselves in our integrity and not merely under one isolated aspect.
16. This unique power of the heart also helps us to understand why, when we grasp a reality with our heart, we know it better and more fully. This inevitably leads us to the love of which the heart is capable, for “the inmost core of reality is love.” For Heidegger, as interpreted by one contemporary thinker, philosophy does not begin with a simple concept or certainty, but with a shock: “Thought must be provoked before it begins to work with concepts or while it works with them. Without deep emotion, thought cannot begin. The first mental image would thus be goose bumps. What first stirs one to think and question is deep emotion. Philosophy always takes place in a basic mood (Stimmung).” That is where the heart comes in, since it “houses the states of mind and functions as a ‘keeper of the state of mind.’ The ‘heart’ listens in a non-metaphoric way to ‘the silent voice’ of being, allowing itself to be tempered and determined by it”.
My Prayer for You
Please join me in contemplating these final words of Pope Francis’s encyclical “Dilexit Nos” (He Loved Us):
I ask our Lord Jesus Christ to grant that his Sacred Heart may continue to pour forth the streams of living water that can heal the hurt we have caused, strengthen our ability to love and serve others, and inspire us to journey together towards a just, solidary and fraternal world. Until that day when we will rejoice in celebrating together the banquet of the heavenly kingdom in the presence of the risen Lord, who harmonizes all our differences in the light that radiates perpetually from his open heart. May he be blessed forever.