Ya Gotta Have Heart

There’s a fun number near the beginning of the musical Damn Yankees titled “Heart.” It opens with an equation for sports greatness that mixes fifty percent skill with “something else, something bigger.” Now, I’m not sure if it’s heart that will propel the Knicks to victory in the NBA playoffs or secure those critical penalty kicks for World Cup glory. But I am certain that all corners of the Church need to be talking more about what moves the heart.

This week, the Bishops of the United States of America will consecrate this country to the Sacred Heart of Jesus as a particularly Catholic way to mark the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I have some mixed feelings about this choice. On the one hand, the Sacred Heart is precisely the right Catholic image for a polarized country hearing constantly about new military strikes rather than ceasefires and an impending technological revolution. Divine providence must be aligning this consecration to the fleshy embodiment of God’s love with news of ongoing war and the arrival of ever more capable artificial intelligence. And there’s something fascinating to me about mixing the image of the Lord’s Sacred Heart with Thomas Jefferson’s language of self-evident truths about the equality of all humanity created with “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” The combination displays confidence that each and every human being has their own unique capacity to tune their heart to be more like God’s. I wonder how our sense of American freedom might change if it were understood to be the rare and precious opportunity not only to lift up our hearts to the Lord but also to go forth and follow where our hearts will lead.

On the other hand, though, I am always concerned about striking the right balance when celebrating independence in patriotic devotions to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Catholic tradition recognizes this acutely in the diversity of the rites celebrated in communion with the Bishop of Rome. The universal Church can and does supersede the boundaries of nations, but, perhaps more importantly, the universality of the Church resists the limitations of a drive toward monoculture. Just as we are called to exercise careful dominion over the biological diversity of the natural world of our common home, so too are Christians called to exercise careful dominion over the cultural diversity of the nations of the world.

Perhaps we see here one of the ways the Roman Empire got something at least “half right” by granting coercive permission for local cultures under the aegis of imperial rule. Monoculture stifles something truly human. One can draw a straight line, I think, from Pope Leo’s Augustinian patrimony to his endorsement of multilateralism in international relations rather than the “conflict ridden multipolarism” where “The force of international law is thus replaced by the claim that ‘might makes right’” (see Magnifica Humanitas 201-203).

The risks of “flattening into monoculture” also haunt any discussion about AI. The sense of magic displayed by many large language models and agentic coding tools derives from their awe-inspiring capacity for rapid synthesis. Machines learn from ingesting and recombining data and context, by rewarding and recapitulating the statistical average. But our algorithms and preferences have been training us toward the dangerous desire for sameness for a long, long time. Despite the infinite scroll of people and ideas and worlds that can appear on our screens, it is always the same device before our eyes.

A consecration of the United States to the Sacred Heart must become a Catholic commitment to teach wonder at how our heart’s participation in the sacred will be made fuller—more alive, more free, more happy—only when shared. Perhaps our hearts can take a moment to marvel at the excellence in other nations alongside our own. Is it too much to make a Christian argument about hosting the World Cup as an invitation to recognize the inherent goodness of different, “independent” nationalities? Celebrating the achievements of others cultivates in us a desire to protect the innocent, to stand firm in defense of cultures we cannot claim to be our own, to value the patriotism of the stranger as we walk together on pilgrimage to the resurrected city we will all share.

So maybe the showtune is right. All you really need to win, in the end, is heart. The alternative seems just to be a deal with the devil.

Charles A. Gillespie is associate professor in the department of Catholic Studies as well as director of Pioneer Journey at Sacred Heart University. His book—God on Broadway: Revealing the Sacred in the Spectacle was published in November 2025.