Cor ad cor loquitur—“Heart speaks to heart.”
—St. John Henry Newman

On June 11, the bishops of the United States, together with Catholics in parishes across the country, will consecrate the United States to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The consecration coincides with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

At first glance, the image of the Sacred Heart alongside the celebration of American independence may seem incongruous. Yet this unusual nationwide consecration makes much more sense when one understands the history of devotion to the Sacred Heart and its spread across the United States.

As a child growing up in a Catholic family with an Irish mother, we had two large images of the Sacred Heart in our home. I must admit that I found this all slightly cringe-worthy at the time. One image hung in the hallway that I tried to avoid when possible. Another had a glowing red vigil light beside it that could be seen from outside the house. Not great for a self-conscious young American girl.

Many years later, however, I visited Sacré-Cœur Basilica in Montmartre. There, I began to understand the depth behind this devotion. In the 17th century, Christ appeared to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque and revealed His desire for the renewal of France. Jansenism, with its emphasis on original sin, human depravity, and predestination, had infected much of the Church in France, giving it a rigidity and a coldness, anchoring belief in an utter unbiblical and unhealthy fear of God. Against all this, one of the most moving lines from Christ’s revelations to Margaret Mary was essentially this: “If only people knew how much My Heart loves them.”

Sit with that for a moment—“If only people knew how much My Heart loves them.”

Sacred Heart Devotion in the United States

St. Margaret Mary’s spiritual director, Jesuit Fr. John Croiset, ultimately gave credibility and theological weight to the revelations and helped spread the message that Christians must both receive the love of God and make reparation for sins committed against His Heart. Devotion to the Sacred Heart spread far and wide through the work of the Jesuits—through their schools, their parishes, their missions, and their publications. It eventually took deep root in immigrant Catholic communities throughout the United States. By the 1950s and early 1960s, many Catholic families enthroned the Sacred Heart in their American homes as a sign that Christ stood at the center of their family life. My Irish Catholic American mom—my Irish Catholic American home—was not alone.

Sacré-Cœur itself was built after the upheavals of the 19th century and consecrated after World War I. It was conceived as an act of reparation for the sins and violence of France from the French Revolution through the horrors of the Paris Commune. Obviously, the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution were profoundly different, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed.

The French Revolution was highly ideological and struck at the roots of monarchy, religion, and the Catholic Church itself. Priests and religious were murdered, churches desecrated. Its revolutionaries, when they weren’t busy slaughtering each other, even turned Notre-Dame de Paris into the so-called “Temple of Reason.” France has arguably never fully recovered spiritually from that rupture. The American Revolution, by contrast, was fundamentally rooted in ordered liberty. It largely respected religion and the institutions through which religion flourished. Indeed, Tocqueville believed that one of America’s great strengths was precisely this partnership between liberty and religious belief.

So why, then, is the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence an opportune moment to consecrate the nation to the Sacred Heart? Christianity must begin with the recognition that we are loved by Christ. One must first love Christ—and know oneself to be loved by Christ—in order truly to serve others. Otherwise, Christianity risks becoming merely humanitarianism or social work detached from its divine source.

The devotion to the Sacred Heart calls each of us to continual examination of our own hearts: our motives, our sins, our failures in love, and our need to make reparation not only for sins against Christ, but also against one another. As a country, America has accomplished extraordinary things. It has been a tremendous force for good in the world. Yet honesty and candor also require us to acknowledge the suffering we have sometimes caused others—at home and abroad. Ultimately, reparation is an act of truthfulness, humility, and love for individuals and countries.

So, back to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. One of the most beautiful discoveries that one can make in learning about St. John Henry Newman is how profoundly tenderhearted he was. He was not only intellectually brilliant but deeply personal in his understanding of Christianity. His famous motto, cor ad cor loquitur—“heart speaks to heart”—captures something essential about the Christian life: God’s Heart speaks to our hearts, and our hearts, transformed by His love, speak to others through friendship, sacrifice, and love.

The American bishops are undertaking a great act of patriotism—love of country—by consecrating the United States to the Sacred Heart of Jesus on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. We are grateful for their patriotism and pastoral leadership.

—Ann Corkery, attorney, Washington, D.C.

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Man is something that shall be overcome. –Friedrich Nietzsche

No one is more human than God. –Father Thomas Joseph White

Pope Leo’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas is not without its critics—across the political, cultural, and religious spectrum. Some believe it is too pessimistic regarding the many benefits that technological advances have brought (see, for example, essays in The Wall Street Journal , Washington Post, and by Yuval Levin in The New Atlantis). Others regard the encyclical as insufficiently alarmed by the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) and transhumanism.

These friendly criticisms seem fair to the Holy Father. Granted, Magnifica Humanitas is no hair-on-fire screed on much of anything—that’s not Leo; for the most part, he’s Leo the Listener—but Leo does gently but powerfully speak into the growing discussion surrounding transhumanism and posthumanism, which can “foster enthusiasm for new technologies through a futuristic vision of an ‘enhanced human being’ or ‘human-machine hybrid.’” And he certainly seems prepared to stand athwart this vector of artificial future and yell, “Stop!”

“If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable, or less worthy,” he warns, before pointing out with great clarity that “[i]n the name of progress, ‘necessary sacrifices’ may be justified. Such sacrifices will inevitably place the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of the optimization of the species and the creation of these so-called ‘enhanced human beings.’”

The less useful, the less desirable, the less worthy, the most vulnerable in the pursuit of the optimization of the species? I’m sure you can imagine the candidates. It’s not that history—fairly recent history—hasn’t provided us with a guide to what grows out of the pursuit of “enhanced human beings” and the “super race.”

The Gift of the Vulnerable

All of us have encountered individuals who bring extraordinary light into our lives—people whom a culture obsessed with optimization, efficiency, and enhancement might wrongly regard as “less than.” Yet they often reveal the deepest truths about what it means to be human. As Sean Trende recently wrote so movingly of his son, some of the most vulnerable among us become our greatest light.

One person who comes to mind in this context is my grandson Philip. Philip is three years old and has autism. He received his name because his mother, attending daily Mass while pregnant, would often sit below an image of the Apostle Philip and felt drawn to his name.

Recently, I called him “darling.” As many parents and grandparents of children with autism know, they often appreciate precision and literalness. Philip looked at me and replied, “My name is Philip, not darling.”

I apologized and explained I called him darling because I love him. The next day, however, he said, “Gran, you can call me darling.” I did. Then the following day, he said, “Gran, I love it when you call me darling.” How could I not be moved to tears at his beautiful innocence and vulnerability? He is our family superhero and enhances the dignity of us all.

Here’s another paradox—a profound one—that Leo points us to in Magnifica Humanitas. We, all of us, already have the capacity to become transcendent or, you might say, enhanced human beings. He reminds us that human beings are called to become “more than human,” but not by escaping reality or manifesting contempt for our limitations. Rather, we are called to become more than human through self-transcendence fulfilled in love. The closer we draw to God, transcending our selfish desires and disordered wants, the more fully ourselves we become. It’s a paradox we have witnessed in the lives of saints. It’s a paradox that we can glimpse when we forgive, we sacrifice, we surrender, we love.

Pope Leo’s response to the Übermensch? The Magnificat.

In this respect, Leo offers a striking response to Nietzsche’s Superman or Übermensch and AI champions who chatter about transhumanism and posthumanism. Human beings are not perfected through power, mastery, or the conquest of their nature. They become most fully themselves through love, humility, sacrifice, and unity with God.

It is no coincidence that Leo concludes his meditation on Magnificent Humanity with the Magnificat: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” He reflects on how God chose “a young, poor, and humble girl for his plan of salvation.” Everything changes within Mary and, because of this transformation, she is able to see “what is invisible.”

A dear friend of mine, while converting to Catholicism, memorized the Magnificat. She was filled with joy through her encounter with Christ and through the transformation brought by grace. Before all this, her days were dark and marked by illness. She still suffers, yet every morning she wakes and says, “My soul magnifies the Lord.”

Perhaps this, in the end, is Pope Leo’s answer to the age of AI: Not fear, not naïve optimism, not self-assertion. No, not any of that, but gratitude, humility, wonder, and love—the stuff of truly magnificent humanity that no machine can ever replace.

—Ann Corkery, attorney, Washington, D.C.

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“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

The grand Latin title of Magnifica Humanitas immediately brought to mind Lorenzo de’ Medici—Lorenzo il Magnifico—the magnificent political and cultural leader of Florence’s golden age, the man who fostered artists such as Sandro Botticelli and Michelangelo while promoting education, civic life, and the arts. The great flowering of Christian culture in Renaissance Florence, for all its flaws, reflected a profound understanding of the human person and human dignity.

Magnifica Humanitas presents an even broader vision of human identity and argues that artificial intelligence may, to put it lightly, mar that identity. Though Leo stands somewhere between naïve enthusiasm and unfounded fear about AI, he also speaks to those of us who stand—or would like to stand—on the sidelines, “watching and waiting, observing from afar and merely hoping for the best.” What can we learn and put into practice after meditating on these reflections that are so clearly close to the Holy Father’s heart?

I’ll make a confession right up front. The pope’s first encyclical occasioned a few brief moments of cynicism on my part. Could I detect a few faint strains of “Imagine” in parts? Perhaps. But Magnifica Humanitas far more often prompted profound admiration for this Servant of the Servants of God, who calls all of us to discern the dangers of an “illusion of unlimited self-assertion.” Leo warns that humanity can be “misled by deceitful goals, such as the prospect of a technology that promises to free us from all weaknesses,” even as we embrace models that leave entire populations behind.

The beginning and end of Leo’s vision is an understanding of the magnificence—the grandeur—of humanity. That magnificence, that grandeur, is “revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace.” The human person is made in the image and likeness of God. The human person possesses reason and will but, most importantly, the ability to love and to make a “sincere gift of self” to others. We are also given the power to cooperate with divine creativity itself by loving and bringing children into the world.

We are also called to work, which Pope Leo describes as a “fundamental good” in which “human beings bring their freedom, creativity, and capacity for cooperation into play, contributing to the cultural and moral elevation of society.” Work is one of our callings. It is not, therefore, as some would have it, simply a “problem to be dealt with.”

Leo’s discussion of what it means to be human dovetails beautifully with O. Carter Snead’s What It Means to Be Human. If the pope has not read Snead’s work, one suspects he would value the insight at its heart. According to Snead, to be human is to be “an embodied, vulnerable, dependent creature made for love, friendship, sacrifice, and mutual care—not merely autonomous self-expression.” Human flourishing requires “networks of uncalculated giving and graceful receiving.”

Leo speaks of this mutual care as the measure of a civilization: “The ability to care for one another is a fundamental dimension of our humanity… Reading stories to a child, offering company to an elderly person, and arranging a home so that it is welcoming are simple gestures often rooted in family life. They teach us to value care at a societal level and train us to recognize others as persons worthy of attention.”

Speaking at the Vatican just as Leo’s encyclical was released, Chris Olah said that many working in AI sincerely want to “do the right thing,” but also admitted with refreshing candor that they face enormous pressures to remain commercially viable and to stay at the research frontier—never mind the age-old temptations of pride and ambition. Olah emphasized the importance of engagement from people outside the AI industry who are not captive to these pressures—people “who care about things going well and insist on safety, who are paying close attention, who are willing to say hard things, who are willing to be our earnest, thoughtful critics.”

The AI executive also admitted that although AI models are made from us, they remain in many ways “mysterious” and even “unsettling.” In other words, even their creators do not fully understand them.

So what is a sincere bystander to all this to do?

Tolkien may provide an answer—or at least a hint of one. We are not called to master all the tides of the world. We are called to cultivate the fields nearest to us: our families, our children, our communities, our schools, our churches, our work, and our moral imagination.

Most importantly, we are called to resist the quiet temptation to surrender our humanity—our loves, our duties, our friendships, our sacrifices, our creativity, our worship, and our wonder—to systems that cannot comprehend what it means to be human.

Ann Corkery, attorney, Washington, D.C.

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Mollie Hemingway would have had to work hard not to write a good book, given her topic—the estimable Samuel Alito—but the best-selling author of Justice on Trial has written a grand book. Deeply sourced, clearly written, and chock-full of biographical details and viewpoints that readers are unlikely to find in the legacy media, Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution is a work for any serious student of the current Supreme Court and how we got here.

Which points to the surpassing strengths of Hemingway’s book: It is a study in character—specifically the good character on display over the course of Justice Alito’s life. From Alito’s early days in school in working-class Trenton to his tenure on the Supreme Court, however brilliant, however successful, however consequential, the justice has been the same solid guy—modest, even-tempered, caring, courageous, a man who never raises his voice or calls attention to himself. Only after three years did his fellow Little League coach learn that the man he had coached with was a federal appeals court judge—and then only by accident.

Despite the high regard Alito was held in as a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, Alito never campaigned, never angled, for a spot on the Supreme Court. (If this diehard Philadelphia Phillies fan wanted anything it was to be the Major League Baseball Commissioner.) Indeed, when the current wars over Supreme Court justices kicked off with the defeat of Robert Bork’s nomination, Alito said publicly—when asked—that he thought Ronald Reagan’s nominee Robert Bork was “unjustifiably rejected.” Probably not a smart career move when you consider the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee (Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden) and their “living Constitution” cheerleaders in the media.

Alito has never seemed to care about their good opinion of him or his jurisprudence. The result is twofold: One, the justice is more interested in what the Constitution and our laws say, and he’s not swayed by the media pressure and political and protest campaigns that have made—or are meant to make—some conservative justices go weak in the knees. Two, Justice Alito and his family have, along with Justice Clarence Thomas, been subjected to unfair and scurrilous assaults.

One of the great strengths of Hemingway’s book is that she examines the judicial wars over the “living constitution” and originalism and Supreme Court nominations, as well as the coordinated campaigns against Alito and Thomas, in an informative and readable way.

The author is at her best in dissecting the so-called ethics violations of Alito and Thomas, providing context and countervailing facts that undercut the allegations and evidence of the selective persecution by the mainstream media and Democrats of Alito and Thomas. Their trips and associations are flyspecked, questioned, and condemned. Not so the high court’s liberal justices. The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg continues to enjoy celebrity, not to say secular saint status. Yet, for example, there was nary a peep when an Israeli billionaire, Morris Kahn, favored her with a private tour of Israel in 2018—weeks after a favorable Supreme Court decision for his company. Justice Sonia Sotomayor enjoyed her own European swing in the summer of 2024 without the media getting worked up. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson accepts $4,000 in free concert tickets from Beyoncé and $12,500 in artwork to decorate her chambers and, well, isn’t this all so cool. Why, it’s almost as if there’s a double standard.

“If both conservative and liberal justices were being criticized, then everyone would be in the same boat,” Hemingway writes. “It is one thing to be treated poorly but entirely another to have one’s peers held up as a model when they engage in more objectionable behavior.”

Exactly.

Yes, there’s much in Hemingway’s book that can make the blood boil—the recounting of the unfair attacks, the hypocrisy. In the end, however, this is an uplifting work, because of its subject: Justice Samuel Alito. Brilliant, courageous, and consequential, yet prudent, humble, humorous, and self-effacing. For readers who are serious about the Supreme Court, the Constitution and character, Mollie Hemingway’s Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution merits a place on your bookshelf next to My Grandfather’s Son, by Justice Clarence Thomas.

—Ann Corkery, attorney, Washington, D.C.

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