Catechesis Day 2: Let us allow ourselves to be touched by God's mercy

By Archbishop Thomas Wenski - The Archdiocese of Miami

Day two of the catechesis given by Archbishop Thomas Wenski to the youth in St. Catherine's Church in Krakow, Poland, as part of the World Youth Day events. July 28, 2016.

These themes were chosen by Pope Francis. Today's suggest that God's mercy is always available to us but that perhaps we don't give ourselves permission to access it. Or, that 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 could 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 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 slowing 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 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 also his mercy to touch us then we can become good. But to 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 ad 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 bumpersticker once that said, Christians aren't perfect; just forgiven.

So we might say that they 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 their "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 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 they 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 somethings that we cannot not 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 time to numb the voice of conscience but we're never totally successful. And so we feel guilt.

Now the way to get rid of the guilt is to get rid of the sin. To allow yourself to be touched by God's mercy, love yourself and listen to the voice of your conscience.

In the end, our Catholic fact 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 a self sufficient as we sometimes think. A man who does 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.

Thank you.