The Name of God Is Mercy (4 page)

H
OW
do we recognize that we ourselves are sinners? What would you say to someone who doesn’t feel like one?

I would advise him to ask for the grace of feeling like one! Yes, because even recognizing oneself as a sinner is a grace. It is a grace that is granted to you. Without that grace, the most one can say is: I am limited, I have my limits, these are my mistakes. But recognizing oneself as a sinner is something else. It means standing in front of God, who is our everything, and presenting him with our selves, which are our nothing. Our miseries, our sins. What we need to ask for is truly an act of grace.

D
ON
Luigi Giussani used to quote this example from Bruce Marshall’s novel
To Every Man a Penny
. The protagonist of the novel, the abbot Father Gaston, needs to hear the confession of a young German soldier whom the French partisans are about to sentence to death. The soldier confesses his love of women and the numerous amorous adventures he has had. The young priest explains that he has to repent to obtain forgiveness and absolution. The soldier answers, “How can I repent? It was something that I enjoyed, and if I had the chance I would do it again, even now. How can I repent?” Father Gaston, who wants to absolve the man who has been marked by destiny and who’s about to die, has a stroke of inspiration and asks, “But are you sorry that you are not sorry?” The young man answers impulsively, “Yes, I am sorry that I am not sorry.” In other words, he apologizes for not repenting. The door was opened just a crack, allowing absolution to come in….

It’s true, that’s how it is. It’s a good example of the lengths to which God goes to enter the heart of man,
to find that small opening that will permit him to grant grace. He does not want anyone to be lost. His mercy is infinitely greater than our sins, his medicine is infinitely stronger than our illnesses that he has to heal. There’s a Preface to the Ambrosian Rite that says: “You bent down over our wounds and healed us, giving us a medicine stronger than our afflictions, a mercy greater than our fault. In this way even sin, by virtue of your invincible love, served to elevate us to the divine life” [Sunday XVI]. Thinking back on my life and my experiences, to September 21, 1953, when God came to me and filled me with wonder, I have always said that the Lord precedes us, he anticipates us. I believe the same can be said for his divine mercy, which heals our wounds; he anticipates our need for it. God waits; he waits for us to concede him only the smallest glimmer of space so that he can enact his forgiveness and his charity within us. Only he who has been touched and caressed by the tenderness of his mercy really knows the Lord. For this reason I have often said that the place where my encounter with the mercy of Jesus takes place is my sin. When you feel his merciful embrace, when you let yourself be
embraced, when you are moved—that’s when life can change, because that’s when we try to respond to the immense and unexpected gift of grace, a gift that is so overabundant it may even seem “unfair” in our eyes. We stand before a God who knows our sins, our betrayals, our denials, our wretchedness. And yet he is there waiting for us, ready to give himself completely to us, to lift us up. Thinking of the episode cited in Marshall’s novel, I start from a similar premise and point in the same direction. Not only is the legal maxim of
in dubio pro reo
—which says that when in doubt, decisions should be made in favor of the person being judged—still pertinent, there is also the importance of the gesture. The very fact that someone goes to the confessional indicates an initiation of repentance, even if it is not conscious. Without that initial impulse, the person would not be there. His being there is testimony to the desire for change. Words are important, but the gesture is explicit. And the gesture itself is important; sometimes the awkward and humble presence of a penitent who has difficulty expressing himself is worth more than another person’s wordy account of their repentance.

Y
OU
have often defined yourself as a sinner. When you met with the prisoners in Palmasola, Bolivia, during your 2015 journey to Latin America, you said, “Standing before you is a man who has been forgiven for his many sins….” It’s truly striking to hear a Pope say these things about himself.

Really? I don’t think it’s so unusual, even in the lives of my predecessors. For example, in the documents related to the process of the beatification of Paul VI, I read that one of his secretaries confided that the Pope, echoing the words I have already quoted from “Thoughts on Death,” said, “For me it has always been a great mystery of God to be in wretchedness and to be in the presence of the mercy of God. I am nothing, I am wretched. God the Father loves me, he wants to save me, he wants to remove me from the
wretchedness in which I find myself, but I am incapable of doing it myself. And so he sends his Son, a Son who brings the mercy of God translated into an act of love toward me….But you need a special grace for this, the grace of a conversion. Once I recognize this, God works in me through his Son.” It is a beautiful synthesis of the Christian message. And then there is the homily with which Albino Luciani began his bishopric at Vittorio Veneto, when he said he had been chosen because the Lord preferred that certain things not be engraved in bronze or marble but in the dust, so that if the writing had remained it would have been clear that the merit was all and only God’s. He, now bishop and future Pope John Paul I, called himself “dust.” I have to say that when I speak of this, I always think of what Simon Peter told Jesus on the Sunday of his resurrection, when he met him on his own, a meeting hinted at in the Gospel of Luke (24:34). What might Peter have said to the Messiah upon his resurrection from the tomb? Might he have said that he felt like a sinner? He must have thought of his betrayal, of what had happened a few days earlier
when he pretended for three times not to recognize Jesus in the courtyard of the High Priest’s house. He must have thought of his bitter and public tears. If Peter did all of that, if the Gospels describe his sin and denials to us, and if despite all this, Jesus said, “Tend my sheep” (John 21:16), I don’t think we should be surprised if his successors describe themselves as sinners. It is nothing new. The Pope is a man who needs the mercy of God. I said it sincerely to the prisoners of Palmasola, in Bolivia, to those men and women who welcomed me so warmly. I reminded them that even Saint Peter and Saint Paul had been prisoners. I have a special relationship with people in prisons, deprived of their freedom. I have always been very attached to them, precisely because of my awareness of being a sinner. Every time I go through the gates into a prison to celebrate Mass or for a visit, I always think: Why them and not me? I should be here. I deserve to be here. Their fall could have been mine. I do not feel superior to the people who stand before me. And so I repeat and pray: Why him and not me? It might seem shocking, but I derive consolation
from Peter: he betrayed Jesus, and even so he was chosen.

W
HY
are we sinners?

Because of original sin. It’s something we know from experience. Our humanity is wounded; we know how to distinguish between good and evil, we know what is evil, we try to follow the path of goodness, but we often fall because of our weaknesses and choose evil. This is the consequence of original sin, which we are fully aware of thanks to the Book of Revelation. The story of Adam and Eve, the rebellion against God described in the Book of Genesis, uses a richly imaginative language to explain something that actually happened at the origins of mankind.

The Father sacrificed his Son and Jesus humbled himself, he allowed himself to be tortured, crucified, and annihilated to redeem us for our sins, to heal that wound. That is why the guilt of our forefathers is celebrated as a
felix culpa
in the hymn of Exultet, which is sung during the most important celebration of the
year, Easter Night: the fault was “happy” because it deserved such a redemption.

W
HAT
advice would you give a penitent so that he can give a good confession?

He ought to reflect on the truth of his life, of what he feels and what he thinks before God. He ought to be able to look earnestly at himself and his sin. He ought to feel like a sinner, so that he can be amazed by God. In order to be filled with his gift of infinite mercy, we need to recognize our need, our emptiness, our wretchedness. We cannot be arrogant. It reminds me of a story I heard from a person I used to know, a manager in Argentina. This man had a colleague who seemed to be very committed to a Christian life: he recited the rosary, he read spiritual writings, and so on. One day the colleague confided, en passant, as if it were of no consequence, that he was having a relationship with his maid. He made it clear that he thought it was something entirely normal. He said that “these people,” and by that he meant hired help,
were there “for that, too.” My friend was shocked; his colleague was practically telling him that he believed in the existence of superior and inferior human beings, with the latter destined to be taken advantage of and used, like the maid. I was stunned by that example: despite all my friend’s objections, the colleague remained firm and didn’t budge an inch. And he continued to consider himself a good Christian because he prayed, he read his spiritual writings every day, and he went to Mass on Sundays. This is arrogance, and it is the opposite of the shattered heart mentioned by the Church Fathers.

W
HAT
advice would you be inclined to give a priest if he asked you: how can I be a good confessor?

I believe I have already partially answered this with the things I mentioned earlier. A priest needs to think of his own sins, to listen with tenderness, to pray to the Lord for a heart as merciful as his, and not to cast the first stone because he, too, is a sinner who needs to be forgiven. He needs to try to resemble God in all his mercy. This is what I would be inclined to say. We
need to think—with our heart and our mind—of the parable of the Prodigal Son. The younger of two brothers, who squandered his part of his inheritance by living a dissolute life, was forced to be a swineherd in order to survive. When he realized his mistake, he returned to his father’s home to ask if he could, at the very least, live among the servants. His father was waiting for him, he had been staring out at the horizon waiting for his son’s return, and he approached his son even before the man could say anything; before he even confessed his sins, the man’s father hugged him. This is the love of God. This is his overabundant mercy. There is one thing to meditate on—the attitude of the older son, the one who had stayed home and worked with the father, the one who was always well behaved. When he speaks, he is really the only one to say something truthful: “Look, all these years I served you and not once did I disobey your orders; yet you never gave me even a young goat to feast on with my friends. But when your son returns who swallowed up your property with prostitutes, for him you slaughter the fattened calf”(Luke 15:29–30). He speaks the truth, but at the same time he disqualifies himself.