What does it mean for a Christian to have a “perverse heart,” a heart that can lead to faintheartedness, ideology, and compromise? That was the theme of His Holiness Pope Francis’ homily at the Mass at Casa Santa Marta. “Take care, brothers, that none of you may have an evil and unfaithful heart, so as to forsake the living God.” This is the harsh “message”, the “warning” as His Holiness Pope Francis calls it, that the author of the Letter to the Hebrews addresses to the Christian community in liturgy. The Pontiff focuses on three words, again taken from the First Reading, which can help us to understand: “hardness”, “obstinacy”, and “seduction”.
As reported by Vatican news, A hard heart is a “closed” heart, “that does not want to grow, that defends itself, that is closed in on itself”. In life this can happen because of many factors; as, for example, a “great sorrow”, because, as the Pontiff explains, “blows harden the skin”. It happened, he said, to the disciples of Emmaus, as well as to St Thomas the Apostle. And whoever remains in this “bad attitude” is “fainthearted”; and a “cowardly heart is perverse. The second word is “obstinacy”: In the Letter to the Hebrews we read, “Exhort each other every day, as long as this today lasts, so that none of you may be obstinate”; and this is “the accusation that Stephen makes to those who will stone him afterwards”. Obstinacy is “spiritual stubbornness”: an obstinate heart – explains His Holiness Pope Francis – is “rebellious”, is “stubborn”, is closed in by its own thought, is not “open to the Holy Spirit”. This is the profile of “ideologues”, and of the proud and the arrogant. Finally, in order to help us understand how not to slip into the risk of having a perverse heart, the Pontiff reflects on the word “seduction”: the seduction of sin, used by the devil, the “great seducer”, “a great theologian but without faith, with hatred”, who wants to “enter and dominate” the heart and knows how to do it. So, concludes the Pontiff, a “perverse heart is one that lets itself be seduced; and seduction leads him to obstinacy, to closure, and to many other things.”
The Pontiff concludes, “may the Holy Spirit, therefore, enlighten us so that no one may have a perverse heart: a hard heart, which will lead you to faintheartedness; a stubborn heart that will lead you to rebellion, that will lead you to ideology; a heart that is seduced, a slave to seduction”.
