{"id":520,"date":"2015-04-17T11:36:19","date_gmt":"2015-04-17T15:36:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/?p=520"},"modified":"2015-04-17T11:39:11","modified_gmt":"2015-04-17T15:39:11","slug":"the-limits-of-mercy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/?p=520","title":{"rendered":"The Limits of Mercy"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Year<\/a>

\u2018May the balm of mercy reach everyone\u2019, says Francis as he proclaims Holy Year<\/p><\/div>\n

On the Second Sunday of Easter, alternatively termed Divine Mercy Sunday since the canonization of Saint Faustina in 2000 by Pope Saint John Paul II, the current Holy Father Pope Francis issued Misericordiae Vultus<\/em>, decreeing 2016 to be a year dedicated to the theme of ‘Mercy’.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

God’s mercy is a hot topic amongst theological circles of late, especially with the recent Synod on the Family, to be concluded next October, and the question of ‘divorced and remarried Catholics’ receiving Communion, a category which may be broadened to include politicians who support abortion, those living together before marriage, those who miss Sunday Mass, those addicted to pornography and so on.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This debate is only partly about the Eucharist, for the underlying question is about the relation between the mercy of God, and the state of the souls of individuals who, as the Code of Canon Law states “obstinately persist in manifest grave sin”.\u00a0 The argument is that we as a Church must be a symbol of this infinite mercy of God, which extends even to those who persist in might appear to us as ‘grave sin’, but may not be so to them.\u00a0 Or, perhaps, they are not able to give up their sin, for whatever reasons that are outside their control.\u00a0 After all, as many have quoted the Holy Father (out of context, as it turns out), ‘who am I to judge?’.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

If we dig even deeper into this question, we find hazily in the background the theological opinion of the early Church Father Origen of Alexandria (+253\/4), termed apokatastasis<\/em>, (an opinion later decreed heretical), which proposed that every rational and intellectual being will in the end be saved.\u00a0 We will all meet merrily in heaven, slap each other on the back, tussle in a big group hug, and laugh over all those ‘misunderstandings’ that a mediaeval Church and a misunderstood God once called ‘damnable sins’, offenses that ‘cry out to heaven for justice’.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Such a theory would make any sort of moral struggle in this life more or less futile, but it does raise the question of what and whither indeed is the mercy of God?\u00a0 Mercy requires that there be some offense committed, and that one ask for pardon, or for a mitigated punishment, or at the very least be open to either of these.\u00a0 The sinner who persists in his wrongdoing, who is contumacious, who refuses forgiveness and pardon, by definition cannot receive mercy.\u00a0 Even if set free, he will punish himself by his very wrongdoing, for the very effects of sin are the punishment.\u00a0 In Scriptural terms, like Pharaoh and others of his ilk, his ‘heart is hardened’, his conscience blinded.\u00a0 As Christ warned, “if the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!”.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I heard or read a story once of a zealous Christian who spray-painted on large rock-face by the side of the highway “Jesus saves”.\u00a0 Someone less zealous later added below, “From what?”.\u00a0 As I have quoted Pope Pius XII before, the greatest sin of our age is the loss of the sense of sin.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This is the only sin that God cannot forgive, the refusal to admit our sin, the resistance to His mercy, the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’.\u00a0 These are the souls that Pope Benedict alluded to in his 2008 encyclical Spe Salvi<\/em>:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

“There can be people who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and readiness to love within themselves.\u00a0 This is a terrifying thought, but alarming profiles of this type can be seen in certain figures of our own history.\u00a0 In such people all would be beyond remedy and the destruction of good would be irrevocable: this is what we mean by the word Hell.<\/em>”<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In the mystery of His providence, God created beings in His image who could, and must, choose to love Him freely.\u00a0 The primary intent of the mercy of God in this life is to prevent souls from choosing the fate of refusing love, so that they might turn back to the Lord, to goodness and truth, and repent of their sin.\u00a0 Mercy is an act of love, of agap<\/em>e, of willing the good of the other.\u00a0 Sometimes, God’s mercy can seem cruel and harsh, even ‘evil’ from our point of view.\u00a0 But as Pope John Paul II made clear in his Apostolic Letter Salvifici Doloris<\/em>, the only definitive evil is the loss of heaven and beatitude, that is, to choose eternal separation from God.\u00a0 It is from this <\/em>evil that Christ came to save us, not from all the transitory ‘evils’ of this passing age, which in fact can produce great spiritual good.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It is in this context that we should interpret the Church’s law to withhold Communion from those who ‘persist in manifest grave sin’.\u00a0 The Church is trying to prevent such individuals becoming hardened in their sin, closed not just to the mercy of the Church, but to the mercy of God Himself.\u00a0 The Eucharist signifies, at its deepest reality, communion with God and His Church.\u00a0 To offer such a sign of ‘mercy’ without repentance would, in effect, be a lie, told perhaps with good intent, but with potentially disastrous consequences.\u00a0 At the very least, we must be aware of, have sorrow for, and confess \u00a0our ‘grave sins’, so that we can clear the path in our souls for God’s mercy and grace to work.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

None of us knows our ultimate eternal destiny, nor even definitively our current state before God, which is why Pope Benedict says we must live in hope, but one that is well grounded in the infinite mercy of God (I, for one, with Saint Peter a self-confessed peccator<\/em>, am relying much upon such hope and mercy!).\u00a0 I am also hoping that we can all indeed meet merrily in heaven, but we can only do so if we open ourselves to the forgiveness of God.\u00a0 Let us pray that many souls do so in the upcoming Year of Mercy and beyond.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

April 17, 2015<\/p>\n

Saint Kateri Tekakwitha<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the Second Sunday of Easter, alternatively termed Divine Mercy Sunday since the canonization of Saint Faustina in 2000 by Pope Saint John Paul II, the current Holy Father Pope Francis issued Misericordiae Vultus, decreeing 2016 to be a year dedicated to the theme of ‘Mercy’.   God’s mercy is a hot topic amongst theological […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=520"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":524,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520\/revisions\/524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}