Greg Marcar is a senior researcher at the Nathaniel Bioethics Centre for Bioethics, Te Kupenga, and a research affiliate at the Centre for Theology and Public Issues (CTPI), University of Otago (New Zealand). He is a coeditor of Søren Kierkegaard: Theologian of the Gospel (Wipf & Stock 2021) and Security, Religion, and the Rule of Law: International Perspectives (Routledge 2023). This post is based on Marcar’s contribution to The Nathaniel Report 74 (2024).

Almost 20 years ago, Pope Benedict XVI published his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (“God Is Love”) (DC 2005). In this encyclical, Benedict XVI referred to a Christian faith as one that “sees the love of God revealed in the pierced heart of Jesus on the Cross” and “gives rise to love” (DC, para. 39). In his latest encyclical, Dilexit Nos (“He Loved Us”) (DN) published on 24 October 2024, Pope Francis continues his predecessor’s focus on divine and human love, as revealed most clearly in the heart of Jesus.

Human hearts are not preestablished; rather, they must be formed and cultivated through attentiveness to others. This process solicits an appreciation for the virtue of patience. Francis notes how a return to the heart thus offers an essential corrective to societies in which people’s lives are increasingly “hectic,” “bombarded by technology,” and thereby “lacking in the patience” needed to cultivate a virtuous interior life (DN, para. 9).

Returning to the centrality of the human heart in our understanding of human beings also means recognizing the significance of both phenomenological experience (i.e., what it is like to be a human subject within the world) and personal narratives (i.e., the events and stories through which we make sense of ourselves and our relations to others). From this, Francis surmises, “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” (DN, para. 14, emphasis added).

Francis illustrates this point with reference to the increasingly prevalent issue of artificial intelligence and its online operations. If human beings are considered narrowly in terms of their reason or thoughts, on the one hand, and their will or desire, on the other, then it may be admitted that “[t]hey are easily predictable and thus capable of being manipulated” (DN, para. 14). If, however, human beings fundamentally are their hearts, then it may be said that they possess a center that cannot so easily be subjected to algorithmic control. Subsequently, Francis returns to the issue of artificial intelligence, poignantly writing,

In this age of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity. No algorithm will ever be able to capture, for example, the nostalgia that all of us feel . . . when we recall how we first used a fork to seal the edges of the pies that we helped our mothers or grandmothers to make at home (DN, para. 20).

Such moments in our individual histories are simultaneously “ordinary in themselves” and “extraordinary” in their personal meaning. This meaning, Francis again stresses, “can never be captured by algorithms” (DN, para. 21). Implicit here, and throughout Dilexit Nos, is the heart’s connection with the faculties of memory and understanding. Francis notes that just as Mary, the Mother of God, “treasured,” “pondered,” and “kept” her experiences of the child Jesus within her heart (Luke 2:19, 51), so too an integral part of all human experience is the “keeping”—the recollection of and reflection on moments of interpersonal significance in our lives (DN, para. 19–20). Whereas to neglect the heart, Francis suggests, is to invite anthropological confusion, to attend to the heart yields a more complete picture of the human being, along with a more united picture of human subjectivity.

Another central aspect of Francis’s examples of heart-centred “nostalgia” is its orientation toward one’s experience of belonging—that is, of “home.” To attend to the heart is to be attentive to the ways in which we belong to and with others, as well as the ways in which they belong to and with us. The paradigmatic example of this, of course, is found in Christ. Through his life and death, Jesus reveals what it is to have a truly and fully human heart, as well as revealing the “heart” of God in His outreach toward all of humanity, such as illuminating that “[i]n the deepest fibre of our being, we were made to love and be loved” (DN, para. 21). Francis comments that the scriptural witness that Christ “came to his own” (John 1:11) shows how, in Him, we are called into a “sense of mutual belonging typical of friends” (DN, para. 34, emphasis added).

In his Conclusion to Dilexit Nos, Francis connects this message to his social encyclicals Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti, writing that “it is by drinking of that same love [encountered in Christ] 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” (DN, para. 217). In attending to the heart, we discover what human beings actually are in relation to God, others, and the rest of creation. Love, Francis teaches, is the heart of our matter.