B16: Imagine a World That Could See Only Mercy!

Last updated on: February 20, 2013 at 8:41 pm by Kathryn Jean Lopez

B16: Imagine a World That Could See Only Mercy! 2013-02-20T20:41:19-05:00 Kathryn Jean Lopez

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This comes from a November 2010 audience where Pope Benedict XVI was talking up a woman, Catherine of Siena. Like with everything B16, it is all worth reading, but don’t let this day end without meditating on his closer:

Dear brothers and sisters, let us learn from St Catherine to love Christ and the Church with courage, intensely and sincerely. Therefore let us make our own St Catherine’s words that we read in the Dialogue of Divine Providence at the end of the chapter that speaks of Christ as a bridge: “out of mercy you have washed us in his Blood, out of mercy you have wished to converse with creatures. O crazed with love! It did not suffice for you to take flesh, but you also wished to die!… O mercy! My heart drowns in thinking of you: for no matter where I turn to think, I find only mercy” (chapter 30, pp. 79-80). Thank you.

Mercy! The world needs divine mercy.

George Weigel writes about this mercy point in his Evangelical Catholicism. When I talked to him on its release, I asked him about this very thing:

Because of its guilt, often unconscious, but there nonetheless. The 20th century was the bloodiest in human history, by orders of magnitude. Add the new slaughter of the innocents in abortion to the slaughters of the World Wars, the death camps, the Gulag, and all the rest of the politically induced horrors, and you have a world awash in guilt over the cruelty and inhumanity it has visited upon itself. To whom can the sin that produced that guilt be confessed? By whom can it be expiated? By what authority can it be forgiven? The answers to those three questions cannot be Dr. Freud, Amnesty International, or the United Nations. The answer, I believe and the Church proclaims, is the God of the Bible, who comes into the world and into history — first in the people of Israel, and then in his Son — to offer humanity the embrace of the divine love, which alone can heal the brokenness of our lives, our societies, and our cultures.

Imagine if we started seeing God like Catherine does here. If we let him love and heal us, imagine the love we could share with a wounded world.

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Pope Benedict XVI

St. Catherine of Siena

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