31st Sunday
Knights of Columbus Mid-Year Meeting
National Harbor, Washington, D.C.
November 3rd, 2024
A Promise Made and Broken
Since our Supreme Knight has to listen to many of my homilies, I here and now make him this promise: I promise that when the Scripture readings at Mass include the word “heart, I won’t always mention the Core Initiative – something I’ve done a lot lately. However, I won’t keep that promise today! When the Word of God in both the Old and New Testaments tells us “to love the Lord [our] God with all our heart, with all [our] soul, with all [our] mind and with all [our] strength” … the temptation to talk about the “Core Initiative” is just too great to resist.
Both the Book of Deuteronomy and Jesus himself in Mark’s Gospel instruct us that the first and greatest commandment is to love God with all one’s heart, and Jesus adds, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” – that is to say, from the very depth of your heart.
What does it mean to love with all one’s heart? This is a question Pope Francis tackles in his new encyclical on the Sacred Heart of Jesus, entitled Dilexit Nos, taking his title from St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians where he says, “He loved me and gave his life for me” (Gal 2:20). Before we consider what it means to love God with all our heart, let us first marvel that God loves us with all of his heart, for he sent his Son to become one of us, to have a heart like ours, his beloved Son who laid down his life for us, to save us from our sins. “Love,” St. John says, “consists in this, not that we have loved God but that God has loved us first and sent his Son as an offering for our sins.” Or, as the II Vatican Council says of Christ, “He worked with human hands, thought with a human mind, acted by human choice, and with a human heart he loved” (GS 22). God loves us with all his heart, a heart of infinite love, truth, and beauty. What does it mean for us to love God and one another with all our heart?
Inmost Core
Blending the voice of Scripture with the witness of holy men and women as also with the testimony of philosophy and literature, Pope Francis teaches us that the heart is the inmost core of each person. The heart is our vital center where body and soul meet and are joined together. It is where our true identity is to be found, an identity undetectable by DNA testing or the algorithms of AI. It is that deep place in us where our true thoughts and feelings are found, that “core” where pretense and sham are placed under God’s gaze, for God judges the intentions of the each one’s heart. The heart is where we keep our most precious memories, where the threads of our personal history are woven together. In the heart, we find can find the meaning of our lives. It is where we become capable of love – capable of giving and receiving love – the love that enables us to cut through life’s Gordian knots – its dilemmas, enigmas, paradoxes, ironies, and disappointments.
But the heart is also complicated – who can understand it? On the one hand, it is the seat of sincerity, honesty, and good intentions. On the other, the heart can harbor pettiness, self-indulgence, and self-interest. It’s where plots are hatched and deceptions launched. It is where war and man-made disasters originate. To say that a leader’s interior is “heavily forested” is not a compliment. It may well mean that the leader is heartless and unprincipled. Successive spiritual writers and popes have warned that contemporary life has a way of rendering us heartless, draining us, isolating us, confusing and deceiving us. Such heartlessness is seen in abortion on a massive scale and in wars in places like Ukraine. In a word, the human heart stands in need of redemption. Left to ourselves, we are incapable of loving God with all our hearts, nor can we sincerely love our neighbor without God’s grace.
Do I Have a Heart?
In the “Core Initiative” attention is paid to the human heart, to that inmost core and sanctuary of the men, who often find themselves isolated, deceived, looking for meaning in a world that often seems to have lost its way. It is not enough to say to them, “Love God with all your hearts.” Just as we do cardio exercises to improve the flow of our physical hearts, so too we need to exercise and cultivate “the kardia” if we wish to be capable of living the great commandment of love – loving God with all one’s heart and one’s neighbor as oneself.
Pope Francis offers us, I think, a succinct description of what we’re aiming at: “Whenever a person thinks, questions and reflects on his or her true identity, strives to understand the deeper questions of life and to seek God, or experiences the thrill of catching a glimpse of truth, it leads to the realization that our fulfillment as human beings is found in love. In loving we sense that we come to know the purpose and goal of our existence in this world. Everything comes together in a state of coherence and harmony. It follows that in contemplating the meaning of our lives, perhaps the most decisive question we can ask is, “Do I have a heart?” (DN 22).
The Principle of Charity
Few Gospels are more critical to our identity as the Knights of Columbus than this passage from St. Mark that sets forth the great commandment of charity – love of God and neighbor. Just as Blessed Michael McGivney had devotion to the Sacred Heart, so too did he have the heart of a pastor, a heart that could see the struggles, fears, and temptations of Catholic men in his day and age. In the Core Initiative we are walking in Blessed Michael’s footsteps. We are responding to the challenges men face today but also the aspirations of their hearts to be the men, the husbands, the fathers that they know they should be and become. What we are doing is opening their hearts to the grace of God, opening their hearts to the abyss of charity that is the Sacred Heart of Jesus, so that they become capable of receiving and living love, loving God and their spouses and their families with all their heart, a love that extends to the widow, the orphan, the poor and the vulnerable.
Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us! Give us a heart that loves. Vivat Jesus!