The Sacred Heart in the Age of Synodality: Leo XIV’s Jubilee Church and the Loss of Supernatural Politics

Franciscan sentiment, humanistic gloss, and the postconciliar papacy’s quiet war against the reign of Christ

The modern papacy has perfected a style: draped in solemnity, rich in historical references, and clothed in Latin when convenient, but beneath the surface, something else entirely. Instead of witnessing the continuity of St. Peter confirming his brethren in the Faith, we are witnessing a post-conciliar office, ever more hollowed of supernatural clarity, trying to convince the world that its therapeutic voice is the echo of Tradition.

The recent flurry of papal texts surrounding the Jubilee of Governments and the Sacred Heart anniversary offers a case study in this phenomenon. Leo XIV, whose election was hailed as a return to reverence, is shaping up to be something else entirely: Francis with better footnotes.

Here is what we’re seeing.

A Sacred Heart Without Reparation

The most overtly traditional of Leo XIV’s recent acts, his Latin epistula data appointing Cardinal Bustillo as papal legate for the 350th anniversary of the Sacred Heart apparitions, reads, at first glance, like a solemn reaffirmation of Catholic piety. The letter begins with a quote from St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. It uses traditional papal formulas. It closes with an apostolic blessing.

But look closer.

Not once in this document, meant to mark the conclusion of a major Jubilee year centered on the Sacred Heart, is the word reparation used. Not once is the devotion’s foundational warning mentioned: that Christ appeared to Margaret Mary because of sacrilege, indifference, and coldness toward the Blessed Sacrament.

Instead, the Heart of Jesus becomes a warm current of “living water” helping us build a “just, fraternal, and solidaristic world.” It’s not the flaming wound of love that demands penance, as it was for Leo XIII and Pius XI. It’s now a UN-compatible icon of collective healing.

When even the Sacred Heart is sanitized of judgment, sin, and the Kingship of Christ, what remains?

AI Ethics and the Religion of Dignity

Leo’s message to the Second Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence, delivered inside the Apostolic Palace, is an elegant hymn to human dignity and concern for the common good. But it is also an astonishing display of how thoroughly the horizontal worldview has colonized Vatican discourse.

There is no mention of divine law. No concern about the use of AI to enforce abortion, euthanasia, or global surveillance. No invocation of the Gospel, or even of the Holy Name.

What replaces these? A gentle sermon about how children should be guided, how truth and beauty matter, and how intelligence is not the same as wisdom.

This is the religion of Anthropocentric Sentimentality: sincere-sounding, moderately poetic, and utterly void of supernatural confrontation. AI ethics becomes a platform for Vatican applause lines, not a field of spiritual warfare.

Natural Law without Christ the King

When Leo XIV addressed the Inter-Parliamentary Union, a gathering of global legislators, he quoted both Cicero and Francis. He praised natural law as eternal and binding. He cited the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And he proposed St. Thomas More as the model of political service.

But in nearly 3,000 words, there was no mention of Jesus Christ, the Catholic Church, or the Social Kingship of Our Lord.

Natural law, once the philosophical foundation for divine revelation, is now the ceiling of Catholic engagement, not the floor. By framing it as “above other more debatable beliefs,” Leo tacitly accepts that the truths of the Catholic Faith are too divisive for public discourse.

This is not the doctrine of Quas Primas, where Pope Pius XI taught that rulers and laws must submit to Christ. It is the doctrine of Fratelli Tutti, where peace is built through horizontal consensus, and the “primacy of conscience” replaces the authority of the Church.

Mission Without Conversion

Leo’s June 20 address to priests of the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, freshly returned from missionary year assignments, would have been the perfect moment to encourage evangelization. Instead, he urges them to be pastorally close, meek, and listening. He praises their openness to other cultures. He does not mention the sacraments, the Gospel, or the salvation of souls.

There is no spiritual danger being faced, no call to defend truth, no need to bring Christ to the nations. The missionary priest is not an apostle, but a diplomatic facilitator.

The postconciliar Church has reframed missio as mutual encounter. The priest is no longer sent into the world to baptize and teach. He is sent to empathize and accompany.

Religious Life as Bureaucratic Synodality

In his speech to the Franciscans and Trinitarians, Leo XIV offers a sentimental reflection on an image of Innocent III receiving both St. Francis and St. Juan de Mata. He uses this to justify the modern Church’s balance between charismatic inspiration and bureaucratic process.

What should be a stirring exhortation to imitate the poverty, penance, and zeal of these saints becomes a meditation on “regulation,” “discernment,” and “listening to signs of the times.” Francis is reduced to a role model of transparency. Authority is redefined as service through process, not through truth.

The Trinitarians are praised for their social work. The Franciscans are told to revise their governance documents to reflect fraternity and synodality. The actual religious mission (sanctification, mortification, evangelization), is nowhere in sight.

Far from the Church Militant, this is a soft bureaucracy dressed in rope belts and smiling.

Conclusion: The Jubilee Church and the Devotion It Cannot Understand

What we are witnessing is the latest stage in a slow revolution: the outward symbols of Catholicism are preserved, sometimes in Latin, sometimes in lace, but the substance beneath has shifted. The devotion of the Sacred Heart has been emptied of its warnings. The Kingship of Christ has been quietly buried beneath the language of global consensus. Evangelization has become empathy. Authority has become facilitation. Truth has become dialogue.

Leo XIV is not reversing course. He is not restoring Tradition. He is not undoing Francis. He is completing him; with more elegance, more polish, and more plausible deniability.

The true irony is that all of this is happening during a Jubilee supposedly dedicated to restoring “communion with God.” But a Church that cannot speak of sin, judgment, or conversion cannot produce communion. It can only manufacture a counterfeit peace: fraternal, horizontal, and sterile.

Let us pray and work for the true reign of the Sacred Heart. Not the one co-opted for synodal brochures, but the one that demands reparation, penance, and submission to Christ the King.

Because in the end, as Our Lord told Margaret Mary, His Heart is still pierced; not just by the world, but by His own ministers.