Fr. Roger J. Landry
The Anchor
Editorial
December 5, 2024
Advent is a season of hope. We retrace the experience of the Jewish people awaiting the first coming of the Messiah in Bethlehem in order to prepare us for Jesus’ second coming and to embrace him in the various ways he comes to us in the present. We relive the hope of the past to discover and appreciate its first fulfillment in the present and stoke our yearning for its definitive fulfillment in the future.
Advent 2024, however, is not just preparing us to meet Jesus in history, mystery and majesty. It’s also a prelude to a much longer period of hope that will begin on Christmas Eve in St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican: the Jubilee of Hope, which will extend throughout 2025 and conclude on January 6, 2026.
In preparation for the Jubilee, Pope Francis has given us two documents to cultivate us in the hope that should mark Advent, the Jubilee, and our whole Christian life.
The first is the Jubilee’s Bull of Indiction, Spes Non Confundit, which he published on earlier this year on the Solemnity of the Ascension (May 9) to prepare the Church for the Jubilee.
The title is taken from St. Paul’s words to the Romans, “Hope does not disappoint” (Rom 5:5). The reason hope doesn’t disappoint, the Pope argues, continuing St. Paul’s quotation, is “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”
Hope, the Holy Father states, “is born of love and based on the love springing from the pierced heart of Jesus upon the cross. … Christian hope does not deceive or disappoint because it is grounded in the certainty that nothing and no one may ever separate us from God’s love.” That’s why, he states, “hope perseveres in the midst of trials: founded on faith and nurtured by charity, it enables us to press forward in life.”
In the Jubilee, he is encouraging all of the Christian faithful to continue the itinerary of Advent and become pilgrims of hope, awaiting the fulfillment of all Christ’s promises, as we journey together with God-with-us and with each other in time. “The Holy Door will be flung open,” he writes, “to invite everyone to an intense experience of the love of God that awakens in hearts the sure hope of salvation in Christ.”
He notes that during the Jubilee, we will mark the 1700th anniversary of the first Ecumenical Council, of Nicaea, which gave us the Creed Christians profess each Sunday, as we proclaim two of the themes for which Advent prepares us: that “for us men and for our salvation, [the only begotten Son of God] came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man,” and that “he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end.”
Pope Francis is praying that “the coming Jubilee will thus be a Holy Year marked by the hope that does not fade, our hope in God” and that “the witness of believers [will] be for our world a leaven of authentic hope” and “through our witness, hope [will] spread to all those who anxiously seek it… as we await with confidence the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
To ground us ever more in the reason for our Christian hope, namely, “the love springing from the pierced heart of Jesus upon the Cross,” Pope Francis published on October 24 a beautiful encyclical “on the human and divine love of the heart of Jesus Christ.” The letter, entitled Dilexit Nos or “He loved us” (Rom 8:37), is the most eloquent publication of Pope Francis’ pontificate and would make excellent, and accessible, spiritual reading in Advent and throughout the Jubilee.
Dilexit Nos was written to help mark the 350th anniversary of Jesus’ apparitions to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque from December 1673 through June 1675. To her, and through her to us, the Lord Jesus revealed the depth of his love for the human race, that his “divine Heart is so inflamed with love for men … that, no longer able to contain in itself the flames of its ardent charity, it must pour them to enrich them with its precious treasures.”
The Holy Father says that the “heart of Christ” is the “core of his being, which is a blazing furnace of divine and human love and the most sublime fulfilment to which humanity can aspire. There, in that heart, we truly come at last to know ourselves and we learn how to love.” He says that the “Sacred Heart is the unifying principle of all reality,” “the symbol of the deepest and most personal source of his love for us,” the “very core of the initial preaching of the Gospel” that “stands at the origin of our faith,” the “summa of the experience of the Christian life” and the “sublime synthesis [of] the worship we owe to Jesus Christ.”
He urged us to respond to the divine and human love of Christ’s heart by receiving and synchronizing our hearts to Christ’s loving heartbeats, allowing Christ to “make our hearts like unto” his. “Devotion to Christ’s heart,” he states, “is essential for our Christian life to the extent that it expresses our openness in faith and adoration to the mystery of the Lord’s divine and human love.”
He helpfully clarifies that such “devotion to the heart of Christ is not the veneration of a single organ apart from the Person of Jesus,” but “the whole Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, represented by an image that accentuates his heart. … Our worship is directed solely to the living Christ, in his divinity and his plenary humanity, so that we may be embraced by his human and divine love.” He says, “The Christ we see depicted with a pierced and burning heart is the same Christ who, for love of us, was born in Bethlehem,” the same Jesus who gives himself to us in the Holy Eucharist, which Jesus told St. Margaret Mary, was the “sacrament of love.”
The most beautiful section of the encyclical is when the Holy Father shares with us the thoughts of the saints with respect to the love of Christ symbolized by his pierced heart from which flowed Jesus’ divine and human love as an effusion of blood and water. The Pope quotes the fruits of the contemplation of Saints Ignatius of Antioch, Irenaeus, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, Basil, John Chrysostom, John Damascene, Bernard, Lutgarde, Mechtilde, Gertrude, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Catherine of Siena, Ignatius of Loyola, John of the Cross, Peter Faber, Vincent de Paul, Angela of Foligno, Francis de Sales, John Eudes, Claude de la Colombière, John Henry Newman, Therese of the Child Jesus, Charles de Foucauld, Daniel Comboni, Faustina Kowalska, Pio of Pietrelcina, Paul VI, Teresa of Calcutta and John Paul II, who together show how devotion to Jesus’ heart is a path to sanctity.
Pope Francis eagerly invites us, in the midst of a “powerful wave of secularization that seeks to build a world free of God” and a “proliferation of varied forms of religiosity that have nothing to do with a personal relationship with the God of love,” to renew our devotion to the “love of Christ represented in his Sacred Heart,” where “we find the whole Gospel, a synthesis of the truths of our faith, all that we adore and seek in faith, all that responds to our deepest needs.”
He similarly urges us to spread that love, in fact to “build a new civilization of love,” which is, he says, the greatest way we can do reparation for the way Jesus’ love is often rejected. Jesus “enables us to love as he loved, and in this way he loves and serves others through us,” and sends us out to bring the fire of his love everywhere. The Church’s mission, he underlines, “is the radiation of the love of the heart of Christ,” in which we share with others the love that has changed our lives.
Announcing and sharing that love is the way we become pilgrims of hope, indeed witnesses and agents of hope, in a world that urgently and always needs Christians to give reasons for the hope we bear within. That is the spirituality of Advent, of the Jubilee, and beyond.