I’m only a few paragraphs in and I’m incredibly impressed. This is an excellent encyclical, ranging from Homer to Plato to the Bible in just a paragraph.
Sometimes, yes, but you wouldn't be able to judge that if you throw up your hands at the length.
"Can't they just leave us alone?"
Who's 'they', and why are they nagging you about a papal encyclical? It's not like it's incumbent on Catholics to read it, and, you know, it might have something good to say. Maybe try reading some of it first before deciding to be annoyed about it.
“They” are the recent popes who have started inundating us with text books. It used to be that encyclicals were addressed to the bishops of the Catholic Church, and they used to be short. Humanae Vitae is about 10 pages long, and succinct. Now the Pontiff writes to us all (this one is just headed “Encyclical Letter”), so there is surely some expectation that we read it. But 28000 words, that just seems like quite a burden to put on us.
First of all, I want to apologize for being snarky in my original comment—it was uncharitable and unwarranted. That said, since we've started this conversation, I'd like to try and clarify my position, as well as understand yours a bit better.
By my understanding, very few papal statements command our obligation as Catholics to know, understand, and obey them. Paragraph 891 of the Catechism says "When the Church through its supreme Magisterium proposes a doctrine 'for belief as being divinely revealed,'When the Church through its supreme Magisterium proposes a doctrine "for belief as being divinely revealed,' [DV 10 § 2] and as the teaching of Christ, the definitions 'must be adhered to with the obedience of faith.' [LG 25 § 2]". Similarly, P. 892 says that when the bishops, and especially the Pope, "propose in the exercise of the ordinary Magisterium a teaching that leads to better understanding of Revelation in matters of faith and morals" (without infallible definition), the faithful "are to adhere to it with religious assent."
Taking the Catechism at its plain meaning, that would seem to only require us to pay attention when the Pope and/or the bishops put forth new teaching on faith and morals. Infallible pronouncements are rare, as is new teaching—though Humanae Vitae would certainly qualify for the latter, since it definitively prohibited contraception. Of course, even then, we need not necessarily read an entire document to comprehend the relevant teaching being put forth, as excerpts and summaries could easily communicate the vital points.
What then of the remaining profusion of papal statements, sermons, addresses, exhortations, letters, and yes, sometimes literal books? Here, I think it's important to remember three things:
1. The rise of near-instant communication and mass media has produced both the capacity for and expectation that major public figures will regularly offer comment on major events and share their thoughts and ideas with a large, public audience. I don't know that this is a good state of affairs (especially for popes), but as the esteemed philosopher Phil Collins once said, "This is the world we live in."
2. The last two popes (presumably the aforementioned "they") were uniquely intellectually gifted. JPII in particular was an academic philosopher (and, it should be said, not one prone to concision), *and* his papacy saw the rise of issues that directly intersected with the Church—the aftermath of Vatican II, the discovery of AIDS (and attendant concerns regarding homosexuality), famines in Africa, the end of the Cold War, etc—which, in combination with his very active theological mind, probably inclined him to write down his thoughts on all these things. Benedict XVI was perhaps less charismatic, but no less intellectually inclined, so he also wrote extensively.
3. Pope Francis is living in the shadow of his predecessors, in the Internet Age. I don't claim to be able to read the man's mind, but I would not be shocked if he's feeling pressured to live up to JPII and Benedict's legacy on the one hand, and to speak out about the problems he sees in modern life, on the other. How might he respond, knowing that his time on this earth is growing ever shorter? Perhaps with a lengthy encyclical expounding upon and encouraging devotion to the Sacred Heart as counter to our age's obsession with the virtual. (There is a deep irony, admittedly, in me making such a remark in an Internet comment box. C'est la vie.)
At any rate, I don't see where in the laws of the Church there is a positive obligation for us to read any particular encyclical or other statement of any given pope, so long as, if new teaching on faith and morals is proposed in such, we know understand, and assent to the teaching. Some surely only have relevance at particular times or to particular people. Even letters addressed to the whole Church, such as 'Dilexit nos', need not be beneficial for everyone. Some people may not need it, others may not be ready for it, and still others may have more pressing obligations than reading a 28k-word letter. I can hardly claim to know you or the state of your soul, so I don't know whether you fall into any of those categories or not. On the whole, however, I don't think the mere fact that a Pope has published an encyclical ipso facto puts a burden on us to read it. If you have reasoning to the contrary, however, I'd genuinely like to understand it.
We live in an age of both prolixity and egocentrism. Brevity, coherence, clear focus, and cogency would be welcome, but they're unlikely, I think, to come from this source. Francis is who and what he is.
1. I had to look up the definition of prolixity—thanks for teaching me a new word!
2. There are times when brevity is called for, but not always. Sometimes Treebeard has the right of it: "Anything worth saying is worth taking a long time to say." Some ideas need to be developed in-depth and at length, whether it be quantum mechanics or Christology. Additionally, in an age when so much information, news, media, and entertainment are cut down into bite-size videos, snippets, and (regrettably) AI summaries, I think there's a lot of good to be found in taking the time to work through and digest a longer text or other work. A certain discipline is required (not that I can claim to have perfected it, as I am quite easily distractable), but the time spent sitting with it deepens your understanding and appreciation in a way that's not really possible when you just blitz through it and move on.
A personal example: earlier this year I read Bishop Erik Varden's excellent book on chastity. In sense it could be considered prolix, being full of discursive references to literature, cinema, monastic history, the Desert Fathers, and Varden's own life. Taken uncharitably, it might even be considered self-indulgent or showy. However, the effect was rather to weave a tapestry around the meaning and practice of chastity, to tie what's often considered a dull and closed-off virtue into the world of human art and emotion, and thus to support his case that a properly chaste life is not one of suffocating vital energies, but rather one of directing those energies toward their highest ends, and in a sense living fully alive. I think the point would have been rather lost if much attempt was made to trim the book down to the bare essentials.
It's Ok to pray through and chew on it. Discernment and spiritual growth are not possible without tension. And the Church cannot become better evangelizers unless an informed you raises your hand to say this does or does not match my understanding of the world.
Evangelium vitae was nearly twice as long in terms of word-count.
The 144 pages are not 8.5x11, nor even a more modest standard print format, but is actually a pretty tight layout on a narrow sheet. I'm only seeing about 1.5 paragraphs per page on average. If you print it on 8.5x11, it would shrink page count significantly.
I totally share your sentiment of the Holy Father being terribly lengthy with not much insight to warrant such, but this might be a rare exception.
I agree with you Aidan on who Encyclicals and Apostolic Exhortations should be aimed at - Bishops. Bishops should then apply the contents to their flocks.
An Encyclical Letter is called “encyclical” precisely because it is addressed to the Church and to the world, or at least to “all people of good will.” Not just to the Bishops of the Church.
While I’ve not heard of it I expect it would be related to the agony in the garden and Our Lord’s request to the apostles “couldn’t you keep watch with me for one hour”
I believe in the Devotion to the Sacred Heart there is a Eucharistic devotion aspect from 11:00 PM -midnight, but I could be wrong and got that from somewhere else...
Our Lord asked St Margaret Mary to make a Holy Hour of Reparation from 11pm to 12am on the Thursday before the First Friday of the month. She drew back at the request, because it was not part of the Visitation nuns’ highly-regimented daily horarium. She didn’t want to stand out even more from her Sisters. Our Lord told her that He didn’t want her to do it unless her Superior gave her permission, because, Our Lord told her, “Satan has no power over an obedient heart.”
(Credit to Timothy O'Donnell, S.T.D., and his wonderful book, Heart of the Redeemer, Ignatius Press.)
When I think of Devotion the the Sacred Heart and the spirituality of St Margaret Mary, I can't help but think that this spirituality is at the center of the Traditional Latin Mass. Why do I think this. Well, a very interesting piece was written comparing the richness of the celebration of the Feast of St Margaret Mary in the old rite to what we have at present. Pope Francis, if you want to promote this devotion, then please be generous with your permission of the usus antiquor so that we can recover the spirituality of reparation for sin and the burning heart of Jesus that seems to have been lost in the reform of the liturgy. https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2024/10/his-fruit-was-sweet-to-my-taste-on.html
I am curious about how this encyclical will be received, and how it will age. The first chapters seem to try too hard to reify "heart" as a framework in opposition to "will" and "reason." But the Holy Father admits that defining "heart" clearly is hard. Perhaps it's hard because the word means different things to different people, and the concept evolves over time?
I feel like this is a more gentle form of "synodality" -- a concept that's fair enough, in the abstract, but hard to pin down specifically, and its slipperiness is part of its charm. You can make "heart" mean anything, it seems. And I'm not sure that sociolinguistic approach endorsed by Pope Francis is truly well aligned to what the average Catholic thinks a "devotion to the Sacred Heart" actually looks like.
As with so many other things with this pontiff, we want for rigor in the definition of terms. Instead, we get terms that make motte-and-bailey arguments more probable.
I have suspicions of the same, as well. This seems of far higher quality, far less self-referential (a hallmark of +Francis' writing, and there's almost no citations to his past documents), and far too coherent to be solely his work.
Of course, it is no bother if it is ghost-written if the end-product is good.
It might be the Pope's tribute to his friend and confrere, incorporating much of Fr Fares' work and bringing it to a worldwide audience. Just speculation...
This is very good stuff. I jumped around to a number of random pages throughout the text to get a brief foretaste, and every page either left me satisfied or genuinely impressed with the quality of the content. I have yet to read it in full, so I'll just say this... barring the discovery of an out-of-pocket line from this new document (and trust me, all it usually has taken is one single line to destroy a document in this pontificate), this is good stuff that's very timely and will hopefully bear spiritual fruit by God's grace. I'm firm, but fair, and give credit where it's due; I'm actually looking forward to reading this in full, praise Christ.
I was looking forward to this as I have been developing a devotion to the Sacred Heart, but was also a bit dismayed by the sheer length of it. For a "busy reader," is there any section particularly worthy of my attention if I don't have time to read the whole thing any time soon?
I bet you can probably get ChatGPT or some other AI bot to turn it into a podcast (or series of podcasts) pretty quickly. I’ll investigate and get back to back to you if I come up with anything.
(I know in Safari that Siri can read you webpages, and there seems to be no limit on length, but it would be hard to return to because Siri doesn’t keep your place, and surely this is too long for one listening session.)
Apparently, AI chat bots won’t make an audiobook out of it in case it’s copyrighted or in some other way protected. Google’s NotebookLM did make a podcast episode discussing it, but I haven’t listened to it. Caveat empetor:
Great to see an encyclical on an ancient Catholic devotion. Though I share the exasperation of other readers at its sheer length, which means that very few Catholics will read even part of it.
I recall the huge picture of the Sacred Heart on my family's dining room wall in the 1960s. The artistic style probably left much to be desired, but there was space at the bottom to insert our names and the date of our dedication to the Sacred Heart. Tacky or not, that kind of image probably did more for grass roots devotion than a library of encyclicals.
One valuable Catholic curiosity which seems to have vanished from sight is the double devotion to the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. It was popular back in the 1950s, which probably accounts for the naming of the second Catholic Church since the Reformation in my birth town of Cheltenham, 100 miles west of London. I was baptised in St Gregory's, built in 1855. It took until 1957 to get the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, two miles to the east. There are Sacred Heart churches everywhere. Not so much the joint naming, which also encompasses the love of the Holy Family.
I saved it to my Apple Books, then set a daily reminder on my phone to read a few paragraphs each day. It’s such a Millennial thing to do, I know, but I’m not in a rush and should finish around Christmas/ New Year’s. 🙏🏻
The encyclical starts out talking about the "liquid society" we live in where there is a lack of conviction, truth and faith. It then spends most of the time talking about the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and why that is the answer to our liquid society. This is the first time I've seen an encyclical quote St. Vincent de Paul, and he is quoted 3 times. Service to those in need is very much part of the answer.
I’m only a few paragraphs in and I’m incredibly impressed. This is an excellent encyclical, ranging from Homer to Plato to the Bible in just a paragraph.
141 pages, sheesh. Nearly twice the length of Deus Caritas Est. Is anything any pontiff says worth 141 pages, can’t they just leave us alone?
"Is anything any pontiff says worth 141 pages?"
Sometimes, yes, but you wouldn't be able to judge that if you throw up your hands at the length.
"Can't they just leave us alone?"
Who's 'they', and why are they nagging you about a papal encyclical? It's not like it's incumbent on Catholics to read it, and, you know, it might have something good to say. Maybe try reading some of it first before deciding to be annoyed about it.
“They” are the recent popes who have started inundating us with text books. It used to be that encyclicals were addressed to the bishops of the Catholic Church, and they used to be short. Humanae Vitae is about 10 pages long, and succinct. Now the Pontiff writes to us all (this one is just headed “Encyclical Letter”), so there is surely some expectation that we read it. But 28000 words, that just seems like quite a burden to put on us.
First of all, I want to apologize for being snarky in my original comment—it was uncharitable and unwarranted. That said, since we've started this conversation, I'd like to try and clarify my position, as well as understand yours a bit better.
By my understanding, very few papal statements command our obligation as Catholics to know, understand, and obey them. Paragraph 891 of the Catechism says "When the Church through its supreme Magisterium proposes a doctrine 'for belief as being divinely revealed,'When the Church through its supreme Magisterium proposes a doctrine "for belief as being divinely revealed,' [DV 10 § 2] and as the teaching of Christ, the definitions 'must be adhered to with the obedience of faith.' [LG 25 § 2]". Similarly, P. 892 says that when the bishops, and especially the Pope, "propose in the exercise of the ordinary Magisterium a teaching that leads to better understanding of Revelation in matters of faith and morals" (without infallible definition), the faithful "are to adhere to it with religious assent."
Taking the Catechism at its plain meaning, that would seem to only require us to pay attention when the Pope and/or the bishops put forth new teaching on faith and morals. Infallible pronouncements are rare, as is new teaching—though Humanae Vitae would certainly qualify for the latter, since it definitively prohibited contraception. Of course, even then, we need not necessarily read an entire document to comprehend the relevant teaching being put forth, as excerpts and summaries could easily communicate the vital points.
What then of the remaining profusion of papal statements, sermons, addresses, exhortations, letters, and yes, sometimes literal books? Here, I think it's important to remember three things:
1. The rise of near-instant communication and mass media has produced both the capacity for and expectation that major public figures will regularly offer comment on major events and share their thoughts and ideas with a large, public audience. I don't know that this is a good state of affairs (especially for popes), but as the esteemed philosopher Phil Collins once said, "This is the world we live in."
2. The last two popes (presumably the aforementioned "they") were uniquely intellectually gifted. JPII in particular was an academic philosopher (and, it should be said, not one prone to concision), *and* his papacy saw the rise of issues that directly intersected with the Church—the aftermath of Vatican II, the discovery of AIDS (and attendant concerns regarding homosexuality), famines in Africa, the end of the Cold War, etc—which, in combination with his very active theological mind, probably inclined him to write down his thoughts on all these things. Benedict XVI was perhaps less charismatic, but no less intellectually inclined, so he also wrote extensively.
3. Pope Francis is living in the shadow of his predecessors, in the Internet Age. I don't claim to be able to read the man's mind, but I would not be shocked if he's feeling pressured to live up to JPII and Benedict's legacy on the one hand, and to speak out about the problems he sees in modern life, on the other. How might he respond, knowing that his time on this earth is growing ever shorter? Perhaps with a lengthy encyclical expounding upon and encouraging devotion to the Sacred Heart as counter to our age's obsession with the virtual. (There is a deep irony, admittedly, in me making such a remark in an Internet comment box. C'est la vie.)
At any rate, I don't see where in the laws of the Church there is a positive obligation for us to read any particular encyclical or other statement of any given pope, so long as, if new teaching on faith and morals is proposed in such, we know understand, and assent to the teaching. Some surely only have relevance at particular times or to particular people. Even letters addressed to the whole Church, such as 'Dilexit nos', need not be beneficial for everyone. Some people may not need it, others may not be ready for it, and still others may have more pressing obligations than reading a 28k-word letter. I can hardly claim to know you or the state of your soul, so I don't know whether you fall into any of those categories or not. On the whole, however, I don't think the mere fact that a Pope has published an encyclical ipso facto puts a burden on us to read it. If you have reasoning to the contrary, however, I'd genuinely like to understand it.
We live in an age of both prolixity and egocentrism. Brevity, coherence, clear focus, and cogency would be welcome, but they're unlikely, I think, to come from this source. Francis is who and what he is.
1. I had to look up the definition of prolixity—thanks for teaching me a new word!
2. There are times when brevity is called for, but not always. Sometimes Treebeard has the right of it: "Anything worth saying is worth taking a long time to say." Some ideas need to be developed in-depth and at length, whether it be quantum mechanics or Christology. Additionally, in an age when so much information, news, media, and entertainment are cut down into bite-size videos, snippets, and (regrettably) AI summaries, I think there's a lot of good to be found in taking the time to work through and digest a longer text or other work. A certain discipline is required (not that I can claim to have perfected it, as I am quite easily distractable), but the time spent sitting with it deepens your understanding and appreciation in a way that's not really possible when you just blitz through it and move on.
A personal example: earlier this year I read Bishop Erik Varden's excellent book on chastity. In sense it could be considered prolix, being full of discursive references to literature, cinema, monastic history, the Desert Fathers, and Varden's own life. Taken uncharitably, it might even be considered self-indulgent or showy. However, the effect was rather to weave a tapestry around the meaning and practice of chastity, to tie what's often considered a dull and closed-off virtue into the world of human art and emotion, and thus to support his case that a properly chaste life is not one of suffocating vital energies, but rather one of directing those energies toward their highest ends, and in a sense living fully alive. I think the point would have been rather lost if much attempt was made to trim the book down to the bare essentials.
It's Ok to pray through and chew on it. Discernment and spiritual growth are not possible without tension. And the Church cannot become better evangelizers unless an informed you raises your hand to say this does or does not match my understanding of the world.
Evangelium vitae was nearly twice as long in terms of word-count.
The 144 pages are not 8.5x11, nor even a more modest standard print format, but is actually a pretty tight layout on a narrow sheet. I'm only seeing about 1.5 paragraphs per page on average. If you print it on 8.5x11, it would shrink page count significantly.
I totally share your sentiment of the Holy Father being terribly lengthy with not much insight to warrant such, but this might be a rare exception.
I agree with you Aidan on who Encyclicals and Apostolic Exhortations should be aimed at - Bishops. Bishops should then apply the contents to their flocks.
An Encyclical Letter is called “encyclical” precisely because it is addressed to the Church and to the world, or at least to “all people of good will.” Not just to the Bishops of the Church.
It’s a 65 page PDF from the Vatican website, FYI.
> practices such as receiving Communion on the first Friday of each month and spending an hour in Eucharistic adoration each Thursday.
First Friday I know about... can someone bring me up to speed on Thursday?
Institution of the Eucharist on Holy Thursday, maybe?
While I’ve not heard of it I expect it would be related to the agony in the garden and Our Lord’s request to the apostles “couldn’t you keep watch with me for one hour”
I believe in the Devotion to the Sacred Heart there is a Eucharistic devotion aspect from 11:00 PM -midnight, but I could be wrong and got that from somewhere else...
Our Lord asked St Margaret Mary to make a Holy Hour of Reparation from 11pm to 12am on the Thursday before the First Friday of the month. She drew back at the request, because it was not part of the Visitation nuns’ highly-regimented daily horarium. She didn’t want to stand out even more from her Sisters. Our Lord told her that He didn’t want her to do it unless her Superior gave her permission, because, Our Lord told her, “Satan has no power over an obedient heart.”
(Credit to Timothy O'Donnell, S.T.D., and his wonderful book, Heart of the Redeemer, Ignatius Press.)
When I think of Devotion the the Sacred Heart and the spirituality of St Margaret Mary, I can't help but think that this spirituality is at the center of the Traditional Latin Mass. Why do I think this. Well, a very interesting piece was written comparing the richness of the celebration of the Feast of St Margaret Mary in the old rite to what we have at present. Pope Francis, if you want to promote this devotion, then please be generous with your permission of the usus antiquor so that we can recover the spirituality of reparation for sin and the burning heart of Jesus that seems to have been lost in the reform of the liturgy. https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2024/10/his-fruit-was-sweet-to-my-taste-on.html
I am curious about how this encyclical will be received, and how it will age. The first chapters seem to try too hard to reify "heart" as a framework in opposition to "will" and "reason." But the Holy Father admits that defining "heart" clearly is hard. Perhaps it's hard because the word means different things to different people, and the concept evolves over time?
I feel like this is a more gentle form of "synodality" -- a concept that's fair enough, in the abstract, but hard to pin down specifically, and its slipperiness is part of its charm. You can make "heart" mean anything, it seems. And I'm not sure that sociolinguistic approach endorsed by Pope Francis is truly well aligned to what the average Catholic thinks a "devotion to the Sacred Heart" actually looks like.
As with so many other things with this pontiff, we want for rigor in the definition of terms. Instead, we get terms that make motte-and-bailey arguments more probable.
It wouldn’t be the first papal Encyclical authored by a ghost-writer. Is his fellow Argentine Jesuit Fr. Diego Fares the substantial author?
I have suspicions of the same, as well. This seems of far higher quality, far less self-referential (a hallmark of +Francis' writing, and there's almost no citations to his past documents), and far too coherent to be solely his work.
Of course, it is no bother if it is ghost-written if the end-product is good.
I would be quite surprised, given that Fr. Fares has been dead for nigh-on two years.
It might be the Pope's tribute to his friend and confrere, incorporating much of Fr Fares' work and bringing it to a worldwide audience. Just speculation...
This is very good stuff. I jumped around to a number of random pages throughout the text to get a brief foretaste, and every page either left me satisfied or genuinely impressed with the quality of the content. I have yet to read it in full, so I'll just say this... barring the discovery of an out-of-pocket line from this new document (and trust me, all it usually has taken is one single line to destroy a document in this pontificate), this is good stuff that's very timely and will hopefully bear spiritual fruit by God's grace. I'm firm, but fair, and give credit where it's due; I'm actually looking forward to reading this in full, praise Christ.
May the Heart of Jesus reign!
I was looking forward to this as I have been developing a devotion to the Sacred Heart, but was also a bit dismayed by the sheer length of it. For a "busy reader," is there any section particularly worthy of my attention if I don't have time to read the whole thing any time soon?
I bet you can probably get ChatGPT or some other AI bot to turn it into a podcast (or series of podcasts) pretty quickly. I’ll investigate and get back to back to you if I come up with anything.
(I know in Safari that Siri can read you webpages, and there seems to be no limit on length, but it would be hard to return to because Siri doesn’t keep your place, and surely this is too long for one listening session.)
Apparently, AI chat bots won’t make an audiobook out of it in case it’s copyrighted or in some other way protected. Google’s NotebookLM did make a podcast episode discussing it, but I haven’t listened to it. Caveat empetor:
https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/5f99207d-dfa8-48cc-a3e7-ac86d2fc4679/audio
I'd recommend the conclusion, which is about 400 words.
Thank you Luke for putting this together!
Ditto.
I’m excited to read this! Devotion to Jesus’s Sacred Heart has been a constant in my life since my reversion to the faith 17+ years ago.
(And I had no idea my son shares Martin Heidegger’s birthday! Thanks for the Wiki link that smacked me in the face.)
As a semi busy reader this was useful to me :)
Great to see an encyclical on an ancient Catholic devotion. Though I share the exasperation of other readers at its sheer length, which means that very few Catholics will read even part of it.
I recall the huge picture of the Sacred Heart on my family's dining room wall in the 1960s. The artistic style probably left much to be desired, but there was space at the bottom to insert our names and the date of our dedication to the Sacred Heart. Tacky or not, that kind of image probably did more for grass roots devotion than a library of encyclicals.
One valuable Catholic curiosity which seems to have vanished from sight is the double devotion to the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. It was popular back in the 1950s, which probably accounts for the naming of the second Catholic Church since the Reformation in my birth town of Cheltenham, 100 miles west of London. I was baptised in St Gregory's, built in 1855. It took until 1957 to get the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, two miles to the east. There are Sacred Heart churches everywhere. Not so much the joint naming, which also encompasses the love of the Holy Family.
https://www.sacredhearts.org.uk/
Is it possible to order print copies of this document?
You can pre-order it from the U.K. publisher the Catholic Truth Society:
https://www.ctsbooks.org/product/dilexit-nos/
Another option might be to download it from here and print it at home:
https://opusdei.org/en/article/encyclical-dilexit-nos-pope-francis/
That’s a great link, thank you!!
I saved it to my Apple Books, then set a daily reminder on my phone to read a few paragraphs each day. It’s such a Millennial thing to do, I know, but I’m not in a rush and should finish around Christmas/ New Year’s. 🙏🏻
TL;DR Jesus loves you. Love is important. Love God. Love your Neighbor.
I’m looking forward to reading it!
The encyclical starts out talking about the "liquid society" we live in where there is a lack of conviction, truth and faith. It then spends most of the time talking about the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and why that is the answer to our liquid society. This is the first time I've seen an encyclical quote St. Vincent de Paul, and he is quoted 3 times. Service to those in need is very much part of the answer.