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A year for mercy

  • FATHER RAYMOND J. DE SOUZA

Pope Francis inaugurates on Tuesday a special "jubilee year of mercy" by opening the holy door reserved for such occasions at St. Peter's basilica.


francis789 Catholic jubilee years, rooted in the Jewish practice of jubilees every 50 years, are generally held every 25 or 50 years, the last being the Great Jubilee of 2000 at the threshold of the third Christian millennium.  Francis has decided to have an extraordinary jubilee year dedicated to the mercy of God.

It is a bold and imaginative initiative that might have far ranging consequences for the face of religion in the 21st century.  The proposal of a God whose fundamental relationship to the world is mercy challenges both the rise of religious fanaticism and the secularism usually proposed as the liberal alternative.  Given that religion will be a dominant force in global affairs for the foreseeable future, the year of mercy might offer much needed hope.

It was St. John Paul who put divine mercy at the centre of the Church's proclamation, bringing a previously Polish devotion to "Divine Mercy" to the universal Church.  Today most Catholic parishes in Canada have images of Divine Mercy prominently displayed.  Preaching at his funeral in 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — the soon- to- elected Benedict XVI — proposed divine mercy as the central truth of John Paul's historic pontificate.

"Divine mercy is the limit God puts to evil in the world," Ratzinger quoted John Paul.  It was the insight that John Paul had formed as a young man in Kraków who endured the depredations of the Nazi occupation — Auschwitz was built by Germans nearby — only to be "liberated" by decades of communist brutality.  Totalitarianism is based on the logic of violence; he who controls the means of violence and is willing to use them wields power.  The way of mercy means the strong use instead their power to lift up the weak.  The tyrant considers it weakness, pure and simple.

The totalitarians of the 20th century were rooted in the Hegelian reading of history as a contest between masters and slaves.  Salvation for the slave meant rising up against master, overthrowing him and taking his place.  The master in turn had to keep the slave down, lest a reversal of fortune render him a slave himself.  There is no shortage of historical evidence for such a reading.

John Paul proposed that older, and more real, than the master-slave rivalry is the father-son relationship.  It is more real for it corresponds to the Trinitarian nature of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Hence when John Paul returned to Poland in 1979 and a million people chanted "we want God" in Warsaw's Victory Square, it was not merely an expression of piety, but a rejection of the logic of totalitarian violence in favour of fraternal communion.

In the 21st century, the totalitarians are largely gone.  But the proposal of mercy remains provocative.  Pope Francis has chosen the theme "merciful like the Father" for the jubilee year.  He too proposes, like St. John Paul before him, that fatherhood is the proper reading of human history in its fullest depth, rather than tyranny.  That reading of history challenges two dominant phenomenon in our common life.

The way of mercy means the strong use instead their power to lift up the weak.

First, is God to be understood primarily as a father who uses His power to lift up the weak — to bind up their wounds in the favoured phrase of Francis?  Or is He primarily the omnipotent one before whom submission is the most suitable response?  It is a theological question with a rather direct impact on world affairs, and while that question is being worked out intensely within the house of Islam, that conversation cannot be limited to Muslims alone. Second, the merciful fatherhood of God is a sharp challenge to the prevailing ethos of a militant secularism.  Not only because such secularism rejects the idea of God, but because mercy implies a need for assistance, forgiveness, reconciliation.  It flies in the face of the radical autonomy and libertarian self-sufficiency that radical secularism trumpets.  Fatherhood itself implies both filial dependence and filial gratitude, neither of which is congenial to the ideal of the self-made man.

It is noteworthy that in the push for euthanasia that the older term "mercy- killing" has been entirely left aside.  It's not only because "killing" sounds like bad public policy, but because death is to be embraced as the final act of an autonomous triumph of the will, not an dependent act marked by (pathetic) mercy.

Twenty-first century man is not so much searching for mercy and despairing of where to find it, but rather considers himself not in need of mercy at all.  He desires recognition of his own strength; he is a master, and mercy is for slaves.

That's not the Christian conception of history, and Pope Francis, popular the world over, has proposed this year to offer the gospel alternative.

This is Meaghen Gonzalez, Editor of CERC. I hope you appreciated this piece. We curate these articles especially for believers like you.

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Acknowledgement

NationalPostFather Raymond J. de Souza, "A year for mercy." National Post, (Canada) December 8, 2015.

Reprinted with permission of the National Post and Fr. de Souza.

The Author

Father Raymond J. de Souza is the founding editor of Convivium magazine.

Copyright © 2015 National Post