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Pope Francis’ NEW Encyclical Letter Dilexit Nos (translated: He loves us)
on the human and divine love of the heart of Jesus Christ
Given in Rome, at Saint Peter’s, on 24 October of the year 2024, the twelfth of my Pontificate.
INTRODUCTION
1. “He has loved us”, Saint Paul referring to Christ (Rom 8:37 – No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.) to make us discover that from this love nothing ‘can ever separate us’. (Rom 8:39 – nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.).
Paul affirmed this with certainty because Christ himself had assured his disciples, “I have loved you” (Jn 15:9, 12 – As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you; abide in my love. …12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you)
He also told us: ‘I have called you friends” (Jn 15:15 – No longer do I call you servant] for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.).
His open heart has gone before us and waits for us, unconditionally without demanding any prior requirement to love us and to offer us His friendship. He loved us first” (cf. 1 Jn 4:10 – In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins).
Thanks to Jesus ‘we have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us’ (1 Jn 4:16 – So we know and believe the love God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.).
PARAGRAGH 2- 216 HAS ALL THE DETAILS FOR SCHOLARS.
CONCLUSION
217. What this document expresses allows us to discover that what is written in the social encyclicals Laudato si’ and Fratelli tutti is not foreign to our encounter with the love of Jesus Christ, so that, by drinking from this love, we become capable of weaving fraternal bonds, of recognizing the dignity of every human being and of caring for our common home together.
218. Today everything is bought and paid for, and it seems that the very meaning of dignity depends on things that are obtained through the power of money.
We are driven only to accumulate, consume and distract ourselves, imprisoned by a degrading system that does not allow us to look beyond our immediate and petty needs.
The love of Christ is outside this perverse mechanism and He alone can free us from this fever in which there is no longer any room for gratuitous love.
He is able to give this earth a heart and reinvent love where we think the capacity to love is dead forever.
219. The Church also needs this, so as not to replace the love of Christ with fallen structures, obsessions of other times, adoration of one’s own mentality, fanaticism of all kinds that end up taking the place of the gratuitous love of God that frees, vivifies, makes the heart rejoice and nourishes communities.
From the wound in Christ’s side continues to flow that river that never runs out, that does not pass away, that always offers itself anew to those who want to love.
Only his love will make a new humanity possible.
