Mercy

You know, it’s pretty stunning to see people immersed in the sacrament of confession, pouring out their transgressions in humility and dropping all the usual defenses, to come clean.

I’m not used to actually seeing people in confession, but in line waiting their turn to go in the confessional, which I’ve been thinking of writing about for a while now. Why? Because those confession lines are getting longer and longer, many churches are increasing their hours for priests to hear confessions, and people are patiently waiting a long time in those lines to be heard. That’s news.

The sacrament has existed since Christ established it just after the Resurrection, as today’s Gospel recounted (John 20: 19-31).

The disciples rejoiced with they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.”

(To remind readers who misunderstand confession, Catholics do not confess to the man who is the priest, but to Christ whose place he takes.)

Okay, so why was I seeing people’s faces as they talked to the man in persona Christi and noticing how transfixed some of them were by this moment of grace? Because today is Divine Mercy Sunday, and I went over to an area church for the observance this afternoon, which includes a whole scattering of priests hearing confessions in church and in the hall next door at portable screens. I barely looked, thinking I would intrude somehow, even though silently and inconspicuously. So after seeing a few people, I looked away. But I was amazed at…something I already knew. The profound transformation that takes place in a person’s mind and heart and soul when they confess, and are forgiven. And absolved.

That’s something you don’t get from internet confessions, the odd creation of a culture in need of the sacrament.

Forgiveness is healing. Period. No treatise needed to explain that, but it has to be total and unconditional. It has to be sincerely sought and freely given. Divine Mercy Sunday is about the unfathomable love of God, which is not a “cheap grace” as Pope Benedict has eloquently put it. It’s about divine forgiveness.

“God’s passionate love for his people — for humanity — is at the same time a forgiving love. It is so great that it turns God against himself, his love against his justice.”

This is a startling, radical, statement about divine mercy — the kind of declaration that one might expect to see attributed to Pope John Paul II. But it was Pope Benedict XVI who wrote it, in his first encyclical Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love).

Seven years after Pope John Paul II first announced the creation of Mercy Sunday, many priests are still wary of the feast. Why do they hold back? There is a certain assumption that the Divine Mercy is a private devotion that had a personal meaning to a particular Polish man who happened to also be Pope, but that it is not for everyone.

Reading Pope Benedict’s words about Divine Mercy should dispel that notion. Rather than attributing the popularity of the Divine Mercy devotion to Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI seems more likely to attribute the greatness of Pope John Paul II to his devotion to Divine Mercy.

After Pope John Paul II was shot, he asked for the diary of Sr. Faustina Kowalksa, the messenger of this mercy. That’s how important this message was to him. In fact, last year on Good Friday, this editorial points out, Pope Benedict said:

“The Way of the Cross is the way of mercy, the way of mercy that puts a limit on evil:  This is what we learned from Pope John Paul II. It is the way of mercy; hence, the way of salvation. … Let us pray to the Lord to help us be ‘infected’ by his mercy.”

He often noted that Pope John Paul II died after Mercy Sunday Mass. And in a March 26 homily last year, Benedict said forcefully: “The Pope, in this last text which is like a testament, then added:  ‘How much the world needs to understand and accept Divine Mercy!’”

It’s a way to come really clean.