By Archbishop Thomas Wenski - The Archdiocese of Miami
Archbishop Thomas Wenski delivered this talk to nearly 900 teens and young adults gathered Oct. 21, 2016 for the Mercy Night youth rally sponsored by the archdiocesan Office of Youth and Young Adult Ministry.
"Now is the time for mercy" begs the question, "Why now?" Without mercy, there is no hope. Today we live in a world that has lost hope. Am I exaggerating? I think not. Many of the problems that confront us are symptoms of the loss of hope. Terrorism is perpetrated by people who usually end their own lives as well as those of others. They do so in the service of an essentially hopeless ideology. The social pathologies of our times — drug addiction, abortion, promiscuity — are symptoms of a loss of hope. Even the drop-off in Mass attendance points to a loss of hope — for only people who have hope pray. The whole sacramental system of the Church is based on hope — for the Mass itself is the anticipation of future glory, the heavenly banquet.
Where does this hopelessness come from? From the closing of our minds and hearts to infinity, to transcendence, to the God who made us for himself. Without acknowledging transcendence, then we exist just so that we can die one day. This is the crisis of our age — the modern and/or postmodern times that we live in. This age is defined by secularism, which is a way of thinking, a way of living and organizing our societies as if God does not matter.
This crisis has been going on for some time. In the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, some thought that the root of the crisis was that modern man — with the advances in science and technology — lost his capacity to believe. We are too sophisticated to believe in God, in heaven, in the teachings of the Church. And so, to make the Church attractive to the modern mind, it was thought that the Church and her teachings had to be "modernized" by downplaying what seemed to be too incredible.
But the problem is not that people today can't believe in anything; the problem is that they will believe anything. Without a hope in what is beyond ourselves, without the hope of heaven, we look to ideologies that are poor substitutes for hope. In the 20th century we saw ideologies like Marxism and Nazism that attempted to build heavens on earth. They ended up making the earth a hell. There are other substitutes for real hope: consumerism as well as those ideologies of sexual liberation that, in the name of freedom, "free" sex from consequences and from meaning. Pope Benedict said it this way: A world without God is a world without hope; a world without God is a world without a future. As I said earlier, people without hope don't pray; but they also don't have kids or form families.
So is this a time for mercy? You betcha. Hope in God's mercy opens our horizons and gives us true freedom. It provides us with a future — a future made possible because God's grace is more powerful than our disgrace. Jesus in suffering, dying and rising again broke the chains of death and in doing so opened the doors to hope. Jesus is the human face of God and the divine face of Man — in him is our hope.
We too are called to witness to hope. We do this through prayer and participation in the sacramental life of the Church. We do this by loving as Jesus himself has loved us. Jesus gives us his Holy Spirit who teaches us a new language — a language that enables the youth of the world to communicate with each other at a World Youth Day. It is the language of love.
So let us allow ourselves to be touched by God’s mercy. God's mercy is always available to us but perhaps we don't give ourselves permission to access it. Or, we don't give God permission to touch us with his mercy.
Why might that be? Why would we resist God's mercy? One reason might be we don't like ourselves too much and so we don't think that God couldn’t like us too much.
In Scripture we hear the commandment: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. But if you don't love yourself, you are not going to love you neighbor either. Those criminals that might mug you in a bad part of town obviously do not love you, do they? But their stealing is not meant to feed their hungry kids; rather they steal to feed their habit. They don't love their neighbor because they don't love themselves. If they loved themselves they wouldn't be poisoning themselves with drugs; they wouldn't be killing themselves slowly, which is what they're doing.
So we find people who hate themselves — and they think that they are unlovable. Maybe they did something really terrible, or something terrible was done to them and they blame themselves. This happens often with victims of abuse, or with children whose parents divorce. They blame themselves, even though it wasn't their fault.
People who hate themselves live in a lot of pain. And sometimes this results in inappropriate "self-medication" — abusing drugs or alcohol or sometimes through sexual promiscuity.
So, if we going to allow ourselves to be touched by God's mercy, we have to believe that God loves us. God doesn't make junk. As Scripture says, everything God made he made good and beautiful. And even when we fall — through the original sin of our first parents and our own actual sins — God doesn't stop loving us. Even though we are flawed, we are inherently lovable. God loves us, and we should love ourselves, for we were made in his own image and likeness. If God is love, and he is, his image, which we are, is also lovable. His love was so great that his Son became a man. Jesus came to save not the righteous but sinners.
God's love is not conditional: good or bad he loves us. But if we allow his mercy to touch us then we can become good. But to do that, we need to give ourselves a break. You got to give yourself a break — and be compassionate with yourself as God is compassionate with you. We are greater than our failings, our shortcomings; we are bigger than our sins.
Love yourself enough to be touched by God's mercy. Love yourself more than you love your sin.
We are also sinners. Shortly after Pope Francis was elected pope, a journalist asked him: Who is Jorge Bergoglio? He answered, I am sinner — but a sinner touched by grace and made through the waters of baptism a child of God.
If we want to put ads in the papers or on the Internet to recruit new members for the Church, the ad copy might read, "Only sinners need apply." God doesn't condemn us, he doesn't reject us. If you read the lives of the saints, you will note how often they speak about their sinfulness. This is not some sort of false humility; it's just a statement of harsh reality. Every saint has a past, you know; but because of God's mercy, every sinner has a future. I saw a bumper sticker once that said, Christians aren't perfect; just forgiven.
So we might say that there are two types of sinners: those who have been touched by God's mercy and those who have not. But hopefully soon they will be.
Sometimes you might hear of people talk about "Catholic guilt." They usually brag that they’re "growing out of it"; but at the same time they do seem to be very angry at the Church for "laying guilt trips on them." Now the Church does invite us to consider our participation in sin and urges us to seek God's forgiveness. We do dare to speak about things that are unpopular, politically incorrect things like sin. But this is not so much a "guilt trip" as it is a "reality check."
I remember a story about a young woman who was raised in the faith but drifted away. She was a little like the Samaritan woman Jesus met at the well. She was with a man that was not her husband and he had a wife that wasn't her. She began to feel guilty and went to a psychiatrist to see if he could do anything about those guilt feelings.
He was an honest man and quickly realized after some conversation that she wasn't completely amoral. And so he told her that there was nothing wrong with her. He explained that since she was raised in the Catholic faith with certain values, the fact that she felt guilty about her "situation" was in no way a pathology. What she was experiencing was not a guilt trip but a reality check. Her voice of conscience was not completely numbed — it still knew the moral law written in every human heart, a law that makes us understand that there are some things that we cannotnot know are wrong. We cannot not know that killing is wrong, that stealing is wrong, that adultery is wrong. We can try to rationalize, we can try to numb the voice of conscience but we're never totally successful. And so we feel guilt. Allow yourself to be touched by God's mercy, love yourself and listen to the voice of your conscience.
In the end, our Catholic faith is not about guilt — that is our sad reality whether we accept it or not. Our Catholic faith is more concerned about mercy. Like I said, every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.
The door to that future is always opened to us — it is the door of the confessional. Allow yourself to be touched by God's mercy, go to confession.
Of course, the moment we ask for forgiveness we have to acknowledge our weakness and our failures — and this means that we have to allow ourselves to look with mercy on the weakness of others. In the Our Father, we pray "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
To confess, we have to acknowledge that we are not as self-sufficient as we sometimes think. A man who does not need to ask for forgiveness never needs to forgive others. The self-sufficient man has not room for human weakness and thus he mocks and reviles every sign of weakness in his fellow man.
To allow yourself to be touched by God's mercy, recognize that there is a God and that you're not him.
So to sum up: allow yourself to be touched by God's mercy, by loving yourself enough to realize that you are lovable in God's eyes. By listening to the voice of your conscience and submitting yourself to a "reality check." That reality check can help you overcome any sense of self-sufficiency.
Then, get rid of the guilt by getting rid of the sin in the Sacrament of Penance, which is the tribunal of God's mercy.
We all are called to witness to hope. We do this through prayer and participation in the sacramental life of the Church. We do this by loving as Jesus himself has loved us. Jesus gives us his Holy Spirit who teaches us a new language — a language that enables the youth of the world to communicate with each other at a World Youth Day. It is the language of love.
Now is the time for mercy. If love is the language that the Christian speaks, the language that defeats the Babel of confusion, conflict and suspicion, that language also has a grammar. To speak a language well, to be understood and to understand a language, you need to master the grammar. People can speak ungrammatically but they're not always well understood; misunderstandings occur, etc. Well, love has a grammar and the grammar of love is mercy.
Now is the time of mercy, to learn the grammar of love through the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, to learn the grammar of love by forgiving and offering forgiveness. Mercy makes hope possible in a world that has lost hope.
Thank you.
