Editor's Note: This essay is part of a week-long series of essays at Public Discourse reflecting on Pope Francis's pontificate, his legacy, and the Catholic Church's future.
What is the hermeneutical key to the pontificate of Pope Francis?
Kierkegaard famously quipped, "Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward."
I propose that to understand Pope Francis, it helps to go backward, beginning near the end of his pontificate by focusing on his final encyclical, Dilexit Nos. This is a challenge for many, since Dilexit Nos has received comparatively little attention - whether in the media, the Church, or among Catholic intellectuals.
In Dilexit Nos, Pope Francis focuses on the "heart," especially the way our participation in the dominant culture wounds the heart in a hidden, unnoticed manner. As an antidote, Pope Francis proposes participation in popular pious practices, specifically the devotion to the Sacred Heart. God's grace can work on us through these practices, to heal our hearts, shaping us in mercy and love by drawing us closer to the heart of Jesus.
That the heart would be a major theme of his pontificate was not obvious on March 13, 2013, when Jorge Mario Bergoglio, S.J., until then the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires, was introduced as the new pope. What was more obvious then was that Pope Francis had his own style: simple white robes, leading the people in familiar prayers (an Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be), and carrying himself with a casual intimacy. Immediately after being elected, he took the bus with the cardinals to gather his personal belongings, and he declined to live in the Apostolic Palace. His message seemed to be, "Live more simply."
Many noticed early on that Pope Francis proposed a distinctive view of the church. Rather than emphasizing the church as a sacramental reality imbued with the presence of God, or a conception of the church as a pilgrim people, Pope Francis voiced a preference for the church as a field hospital with a battlefield task: Heal the wounds! Start from the ground up. Encounter those on the margins. Accompany those who feel left out.
Some have questioned at times whether the message of Pope Francis was distinctively Catholic or Christian. Were his teachings based on the Gospels or the life of Jesus? After all, the major writings of Pope Francis, including his social encyclicals Laudato Si' and Fratelli Tutti, were addressed to "all people of good will," and their tone was, at times, quite similar to that of documents produced by secular state agencies or of similar contemporary documents motivated by social justice. Francis's writings emphasized promoting inclusive societies; saving the rainforests; caring for the earth; encouraging global solidarity; building a peaceful world; and avoiding bad things like selfishness, racism, poverty, the prevalence of a market logic based solely on profit, and the culture of waste.
But accounts of the pontificate of Francis that aim to go beneath the surface will emphasize deeper influences: St. Francis of Assisi, the ideas of Romano Guardini (the philosopher and theologian who was the topic of Bergoglio's unfinished doctoral dissertation), or the Argentine movement known as the "theology of the people." Others will point to his 2013 Apostolic Exhortation, The Joy of the Gospel - especially the section of Chapter 4 titled "The common good and peace in society" - as the blueprint for his pontificate and the key to understanding his purposes. To be sure, any account of the pontificate of Pope Francis must include each of these.
Still, one might wonder: What purpose united the various activities of Pope Francis? I contend that one finds it in Dilexit Nos.
Dilexit Nos: On the Human and Divine Love of the Heart of Jesus Christ, was promulgated less than two weeks before the 2024 U.S. presidential election - just as Donald Trump sat down for an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, and as thousands of Beyonce fans showed up for what the media told them would be a free concert, but which turned out to be a five-minute speech by Beyonce endorsing Kamala Harris at a rally for "reproductive freedom." It's not surprising that at the time, the media were focused almost completely on matters related to the U.S. elections (including the kerfuffle of angry Beyonce fans who felt they had been misled). Just before the elections, few had the patience to attend to a long encyclical from an aging pope that proposed to revive seventeenth-century devotional practices. Pope Francis died less than six months after promulgating it.
Pope Francis brings the encyclical's central theme into focus by calling for a retrieval of the devotion to the Sacred Heart, a practice that, in earlier centuries, had been dear to the Jesuits.
At first, we might think that Catholic devotion to the Sacred Heart is an activity for grandmothers. Indeed, in the encyclical Pope Francis tells a sweet story of baking cookies with his grandmother. But the point of his story is not sentimental. Pope Francis tells us that, "In the dialect we spoke, those cookies were called 'lies.' . . . My grandmother explained why: 'Like lies, those cookies look big, but are empty inside; they are false, unreal.'" With this story, the pope encourages his readers to examine our own hearts and the ways in which we are complicit with the distortions and alienation of contemporary culture - a culture that seems full of promises, but is actually quite empty. In this age of artificial intelligence, when there is a tendency to overemphasize the rational-technological dimension, Pope Francis worries that we act as serial consumers: hectic, bombarded by technology, and with little room in our hearts.
While there may be no algorithm to measure the size of one's figurative heart, we are all regrettably familiar with - and even experience in ourselves - the broken heart, the closed heart, the empty heart, the devious heart, the perverse heart, and those who are totally heartless. Pope Francis writes, "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."
Pope Francis aims to awaken us to the subtle ways in which each of us actively participates in and perpetuates disordered, heartless, and sinful social structures.
The pope calls for a transformation in our hearts. He recommends several quite specific practices. A few of these might seem sentimental: more poetry readings; more time considering the flowers and the birds; more time baking cookies with Grandma's recipe. But the central practices Pope Francis recommends are a postmodern retrieval of traditional Catholic devotions to the Sacred Heart: devoting oneself each Thursday to contemplative worship in a holy hour before the Blessed Eucharist, and receiving the Eucharist on the First Friday of each month.
In Dilexit Nos, Pope Francis makes reference to the Aparecida Document from the Fifth General Conference of the Latin American and Caribbean Bishops. That 2007 document praises "the soul of the Latin American peoples," describing the faith in that part of the world as "a people's Catholicism." It has a deeply inculturated popular piety that is a "precious treasure of the Catholic Church in Latin America" and "the most valuable dimension of Latin American culture." It is not clear whether Pope Francis endorses all of the claims made in the Aparecida Document. For example, we might raise a question: Is it true that the popular piety of Latin America manifests a thirst for God that "only the simple and poor can know"? Is it possible for a middle-class person or a wealthy person to have a heart that thirsts for God? Pope Francis does not quote from or endorse this aspect of the Aparecida Document. Instead, he seems to suggest that the popular piety of the poor in Latin America can be a model of hearts that are open to God's grace, and that selfish hearts can be transformed by participating in and retrieving once-popular pious practices.
Pope Francis concludes Dilexit Nos by stating explicitly that the teachings in his social encyclicals, Laudato Si' and Fratelli Tutti, are "not unrelated to our encounter with the love of Jesus Christ. For it is by drinking of that same love that we become capable of forging bonds of fraternity, of recognizing the dignity of each human being, and of working together to care for our common home."
In Dilexit Nos Pope Francis proposes that, in order to receive the teaching of the Church and to participate more fully in divine grace and mercy, we need the right sort of heart - and a change of heart comes with a change in our practices.
The teaching is not a call for a better theory of social harmony. Instead, Pope Francis is calling us to prepare for Friday, June 27th, 2025 - the 350th anniversary of the apparitions of the Sacred Heart of Jesus to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque - by reviving the practice of a holy hour each Thursday and the promotion of Eucharistic communion on the first Friday of each month.
Once we understand that the teaching of Dilexit Nos on the importance of the heart is the key to interpreting Pope Francis's earlier encyclicals, we see that, by extension, the heart is central to his entire pontificate. Indeed, his first encyclical, Lumen Fidei, promulgated in the first months of his pontificate, states, "In the Bible, the heart is the core of the human person, where all his or her different dimensions intersect: body and spirit, interiority and openness to the world and to others, intellect, will, and affectivity. If the heart is capable of holding all these dimensions together, it is because it is where we become open to truth and love, where we let them touch us and deeply transform us."
Some will point to The Joy of the Gospel as the text which holds the interpretive key to Pope Francis's pontificate. To be sure, there is something to this claim. In response, I would point to the very first line: "The joy of the gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus." In other words, the joy in The Joy of the Gospel is a joyous heart.
To those who propose that St. Francis of Assisi is central, I respond (again) that what is important is the spirituality of the heart we find in St. Francis. Laudato Si' begins by quoting the beautiful song of St. Francis and then contrasting the poetic spirituality of St. Francis with the violence and distortions in our hearts.
At its deepest level, Laudato Si' is not about environmental policy; it is a diagnosis of our malformed hearts. This diagnosis unfolds in Chapter 3, the deepest chapter of Laudato Si', where the pope draws from Guardini's account of the distortions of the human heart that come about from the dominant technocratic paradigm. Guardini, in his most famous book, The Lord, wrote, "None of the great things in human life springs from the intellect; every one of them issues from the heart and its love."
Just as R. J. Snell has argued that John Paul II's pontificate is best understood as "the pontificate of the person," I propose that the papacy of Pope Francis is best understood as "the pontificate of the heart."