The Name of God Is Mercy (6 page)

Jesus moves according to a different kind of logic. At his own risk and danger he goes up to the leper and he restores him, he heals him. In so doing, he shows us a new horizon, the logic of a God who is love, a God who desires the salvation of all men. Jesus touched the leper and brought him back into the community. He didn’t sit down at a desk and study the situation, he didn’t consult the experts for pros and cons. What really mattered to him was reaching stranded people and saving them, like the Good Shepherd who leaves the flock to save one lost sheep. Then, as today, this kind of logic and conduct can be shocking, it provokes angry mutterings from those who are only ever used to having things fit into their
preconceived notions and ritual purity instead of letting themselves be surprised by reality, by a greater love or a higher standard. Jesus goes and heals and integrates the marginalized, the ones who are outside the city, the ones outside the encampment. In so doing, he shows us the way. This excerpt from the Gospel shows us two kinds of logic of thought and faith. On the one hand, there is the fear of losing the just and saved, the sheep that are already safely inside the pen. On the other hand, there is the desire to save the sinners, the lost, those on the other side of the fence. The first is the logic of the scholars of the law. The second is the logic of God, who welcomes, embraces, and transfigures evil into good, transforming and redeeming my sin, transmuting condemnation into salvation. Jesus enters into contact with the leper. He touches him. In so doing, he teaches us what to do, which logic to follow, when faced with people who suffer physically and spiritually. This is the example we need to follow, and in so doing we overcome prejudice and rigidity, much in the same way that the apostles did in the earliest days of the Church when they had to overcome, for example, resistance from
those who insisted on unconditionally following the Law of Moses even for converted pagans.

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what about the risk of “contamination,” the risk of letting oneself be contaminated?

We need to enter the darkness, the night in which so many of our brothers live. We need to be able to make contact with them and let them feel our closeness, without letting ourselves be wrapped up in that darkness and influenced by it. Caring for outcasts and sinners does not mean letting the wolves attack the flock. It means trying to reach everyone by sharing the experience of mercy, which we ourselves have experienced, without ever caving in to the temptation of feeling that we are just or perfect. The more conscious we are of our wretchedness and our sins, the more we experience the love and infinite mercy of God among us, and the more capable we are of looking upon the many “wounded” we meet along the way with acceptance and mercy. So we must avoid the attitude of someone who judges and condemns from the lofty heights of his own certainty, looking for the
splinter in his brother’s eye while remaining unaware of the beam in his own. Let us always remember that God rejoices more when one sinner returns to the fold than when ninety-nine righteous people have no need of repentance. When a person begins to recognize the sickness in their soul, when the Holy Spirit—the Grace of God—acts within them and moves their heart toward an initial recognition of their own sins, he needs to find an open door, not a closed one. He needs to find acceptance, not judgment, prejudice, or condemnation. He needs to be helped, not pushed away or cast out. Sometimes, when Christians think like scholars of the law, their hearts extinguish that which the Holy Spirit lights up in the heart of a sinner when he stands at the threshold, when he starts to feel nostalgia for God.

I would like to mention another conduct typical of the scholars of the law, and I will say that there is often a kind of hypocrisy in them, a formal adherence to the law that hides very deep wounds. Jesus uses tough words; he defines them as “whited sepulchers” who appear devout from the outside, but inside, on the inside…hypocrites. These are men who live attached
to the letter of the law but who neglect love; men who only know how to close doors and draw boundaries. Chapter 23 of the Gospel of Matthew is very clear on this; we need to return there to understand what the Church is and what it should never be. He describes the attitudes of those who tie up heavy burdens and lay them on other men’s shoulders, but who are unwilling to move so much as a finger; they are those who love the place of honor and want to be called master. This conduct comes when a person loses the sense of awe for salvation that has been granted to him. When a person feels a little more secure, he begins to appropriate faculties which are not his own, but which are the Lord’s. The awe seems to fade, and this is the basis for clericalism or for the conduct of people who feel pure. What then prevails is a formal adherence to rules and to mental schemes. When awe wears off, we think we can do everything alone, that we are the protagonists. And if that person is a minister of God, he ends up believing that he is separate from the people, that he owns the doctrine, that he owns power, and he closes himself off from God’s surprises. “The degradation of awe” is an expression that
speaks to me. At times I have surprised myself by thinking that a few very rigid people would do well to slip a little, so that they could remember that they are sinners and thus meet Jesus. I think back to the words of God’s servant John Paul I, who during a Wednesday audience said, “The Lord loves humility so much that sometimes he permits serious sins. Why? In order that those who committed these sins may, after repenting, remain humble. One does not feel inclined to think oneself half a saint, half an angel, when one knows that one has committed serious faults.”

A few days later, on another occasion, the very same Pope reminded us that Saint Francis de Sales spoke of “our dear imperfections,” saying, “God hates faults because they are faults. On the other hand, however, in a certain sense he loves faults, since they give him an opportunity to show his mercy and us an opportunity to remain humble and to understand and to sympathize with our neighbors’ faults.”

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have often quoted examples of closed attitudes; what distances people from the Church?

Just recently I received an email from a lady who lives in a city in Argentina. She told me that twenty years ago she went to the ecclesiastical tribunal to begin the process for the annulment of her marriage. Her reasons were serious and well-founded. A priest told her that she would not have any problem because as far as the annulment was concerned it was an easy case to ascertain. But first, he said when meeting with her, she would need to pay him five thousand dollars. She was scandalized and left the Church. I called her and spoke to her. She told me that she had two daughters who were very involved in the parish. She also told me about an incident that had recently taken place in her city: a newborn had died in a clinic without being baptized. The priest refused to let the parents bring the coffin into the church, he insisted they stop at the doorway because the baby had not been baptized and therefore could not cross the threshold. When people experience these kinds of ugly examples, in which self-interest, lack of mercy, or closed attitudes prevail, they are shocked.

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your apostolic exhortation
Evangelii Gaudium
, you wrote: “A small step, in the midst of great human limitations, can be more pleasing to God than a life that appears outwardly in order but moves through the day without confronting great difficulties.” What does that mean?

To me it seems quite clear. This is the Catholic doctrine, it is part of the great law of the Church: the law of
et et
and not
aut aut
. For some people, either because of the condition in which they find themselves or because of the human drama they are living, a small step, a small change, means a great deal in the eyes of God. I recall meeting a girl in front of a shrine. She was smiling and pretty. She said to me, “I am happy, Father, I am here to thank the Madonna for receiving grace.” She was the oldest of her siblings, she didn’t have a father, and to help support her family she worked as a prostitute. “There is no other work in my village,” she said. She told me how one day a man came to the brothel. He was in her town for work and he came from a big city. They liked each other and eventually he asked her to join him. She had prayed to
the Madonna for a long time for a job that would allow her to change her life. She was very happy to stop what she was doing. I asked her two questions. First, I asked her the age of the man whom she met. I wanted to make sure that it was not an older man who only wanted to take advantage of her. She told me he was young. And then I asked, “Will you get married?” “I would like to,” she replied, “but I don’t dare ask him out of fear, I don’t want to scare him off.” She was so happy to leave the world she had been forced to inhabit in order to provide for her family.

Another example of a gesture that seems small but that really is large in the eyes of God is what a lot of mothers and wives do on Saturdays and Sundays: they line up in front of the jails to bring food and presents to their imprisoned sons or husbands. They undergo the humiliation of being searched. They don’t disown their sons or husbands, even though they have made mistakes, they go and visit them. This seemingly small gesture is great in the eyes of God. It is a gesture of mercy, despite the errors that their dear ones have committed.

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the Bull of Indiction of the Holy Year of Mercy, you wrote, “If God limited himself to only justice, he would cease to be God and would instead be like human beings who ask merely that the law be respected. But mere justice is not enough. Experience shows that an appeal to justice alone risks destroying it.” What relationship is there between mercy and justice?

In the Book of Wisdom (12:18–19) we read: “But though you are master of might, you judge with clemency, and with much lenience you govern us. You taught your people, by these deeds, that those who are righteous must be kind; and you gave your children reason to hope that you would allow them to repent for their sins.” Mercy is an element that is important, even indispensable, for human relationships, so that
brotherhood may exist. Justice on its own is not enough. With mercy and forgiveness, God goes beyond justice, he subsumes it and exceeds it in a higher event in which we experience love, which is at the root of true justice.

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mercy also have a public value? What kind of echoes can it have in society?

Oh, yes, it does. Let us think of the region of Piedmont at the end of the nineteenth century, of the Houses of Mercy, of the saints of mercy, Cottolengo, don Bosco…Cottolengo worked with the sick, don Cafasso accompanied criminals to the gallows. Let us think of the work that Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta began and its importance today, something that goes beyond all human expectations: she gave her life to help the elderly and ill, to help the poorest of the poor die with dignity in a clean bed. This comes from God. Christianity has assumed the legacy of the Hebrew tradition, and the teachings of the prophets regarding the protection of orphans,
widows, and strangers. Mercy and forgiveness are also important in social relationships and relations between countries. Saint John Paul II, in his message for the World Day of Peace in 2002, which came in the wake of the terrorist attacks in the United States, stated that there is no justice without forgiveness and that the capacity for forgiveness underlies all plans for a more just and supportive future society. A lack of forgiveness and a return to the law of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” could lead to an endless escalation of conflicts.

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I ask how you conciliate earthly justice with mercy, especially as regards those who are stained by serious misdeeds and terrible crimes?

Even in terms of earthly justice and laws, a new kind of awareness is developing. In another part of this conversation we discussed the
in dubio pro reo
rule. Think of how global awareness has grown in people’s rejection of the death penalty. Think of how much is being done to help ex-prisoners regain a place in society
so that he who has erred, after settling his debt to justice, can find work more easily and not be left on the margins of society.