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(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis led a retreat for priests on Thursday, offering a series of three meditations on the theme of mercy.

The retreat was part of the Jubilee of Priests, one of a series of special Jubilees for various groups within the Church during the Holy Year of Mercy.

The Jubilee for Priests began on Wednesday, and will conclude tomorrow, on the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

The Holy Father delivered his meditations for the priest’s retreat in the Papal Basilicas of St John Lateran, St Mary Major, and St Paul’s Outside the Walls.

“God’s name is mercy,” Pope Francis said in his first meditation. “If we reflect on this natural feeling of mercy we begin to see how God Himself can be understood in terms of this defining attribute by which Jesus wished to reveal Him to us.”

At the papal Archbasilica of St John Lateran, Pope Francis focused on the parable of the prodigal son. He reflected on the “embarrassed dignity” of the son who returned to his father – he is embarrassed by what he has done, but his father restores him to his dignity. Mercy, the Pope said, helps us to maintain the balance between acknowledging that we are sinners, and recognizing our dignity as children loved by the Father. If we can see ourselves in the place of the son, who was shown mercy by the father, we in turn will be led to be merciful to others. 

Below, please find the full text of Pope Francis’ prepared remarks for his first meditation for the Retreat for Priests:

RETREAT FOR PRIESTS 2016

            Mercy, seen in feminine terms, is the tender love of a mother who, touched by the frailty of her new-born baby, takes the child into her arms and provides everything it needs to live and grow (rehanim). In masculine terms, mercy is the steadfast fidelity of a father who constantly supports, forgives and encourages his children to grow. Mercy is the fruit of a covenant; that is why God is said to remember his covenant of mercy (hesed). At the same time, it is an utterly free act of kindness and goodness (eleos) rising up from the depths of our being and finding outward expression in charity. This all-embracing character means that everyone can appreciate what it means to be merciful, to feel compassion for those who suffer, sympathy for those in need, visceral indignation in the face of patent injustice and a desire to respond with loving respect by attempting to set things right. If we reflect on this natural feeling of mercy, we begin to see how God himself can be understood in terms of this defining attribute by which Jesus wished to reveal him to us. God’s name is mercy.

            When we meditate on mercy, something special happens. The dynamic of the Spiritual Exercises takes on new power. Mercy helps us to see that the three ways of classical mysticism – the purgative, the illuminative and the unitive – are not successive stages that, once experienced, can then be put behind us. We never cease to be in need of renewed conversion, deeper contemplation and greater love. Nothing unites us to God more than an act of mercy, for it is by mercy that the Lord forgives our sins and gives us the grace to practise acts of mercy in his name. Nothing strengthens our faith more than being cleansed of our sins. Nothing can be clearer than the teaching of Matthew 25 and the Beatitude, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy” (Mt 5:7), for our understanding of God’s will and the mission he has entrusted to us. We can apply to mercy the Lord’s statement that “the measure you give will be the measure you receive” (Mt 7:2). Mercy makes us pass from the recognition that we have received mercy to a desire to show mercy to others. We can feel within us a healthy tension between sorrow for our sins and the dignity that the Lord has bestowed on us. Without further ado, we can pass from estrangement to embrace, as in the parable of the prodigal son, and see how God uses our own sinfulness as the vessel of his mercy. Mercy impels us to pass from personal to the communal. We see this in the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves, a miracle born of Jesus’ compassion for his people and for others. Something similar happens when we act mercifully: the bread of mercy multiplies as it is shared.

THREE SUGGESTIONS

             The free and joyful familiarity that comes about at every level between those who treat one another with mercy – the familiarity of the Kingdom of God as Jesus describes it in his parables – leads me to offer three suggestions for your personal prayer today.

            The first has to do with two practical counsels that Saint Ignatius gives. He tells us that “it is not great knowledge that fills and satisfies the soul, but the ability to feel and savour the things of God interiorly” (Spiritual Exercises, 2). Saint Ignatius adds that whenever we encounter and savour something we desire, we should pray in peace, “without being anxious to move forward as long as I am satisfied” (ibid., 76). So too, in these meditations on mercy we can begin with what we savour most and linger there, for surely one work of mercy will lead us to others. If we start by thanking the Lord for having wondrously created us and for even more wondrously redeemed us, surely this will lead us to a sense of sorrow for our sins. If we start by feeling compassion for the poor and the outcast, surely we will come to realize that we ourselves stand in need of mercy.

            My second suggestion for your prayer has to do with the way we speak about mercy. By now you have realized that in Spanish I like to use “mercy” as a verb: “We have to ‘show mercy’ [misericordiar] in order to ‘receive mercy’ [ser misericordiados]”. Mercy joins a human need to the heart of God, and this leads to immediate action. We cannot meditate on mercy without it turning into action. In prayer, it doesn’t help to intellectualize things. With the help of grace, our dialogue with the Lord has to focus straightaway on that sin for which I most need the Lord’s mercy, the one of which I am most ashamed, the one for which I most desire to make reparation. From the outset, too, we have to speak of what most moves us, of all those faces that make us want to do something to satisfy their hunger and thirst for God, for justice, for tenderness. Mercy is contemplated in action, but in a kind of action that is all-inclusive. Mercy engages our whole being – our feelings and our spirit – and all other beings as well.

            My last suggestion has to do with the fruit of these Exercises, namely the grace that we ask to receive. It is, in a word, the grace to become priests ever more ready to “receive mercy” (misericordiados) and to “show mercy” (misericordiosos). We can concentrate on mercy because it is what is most essential and definitive. By the stairway of mercy (cf. Laudato Si’, 77), we can descend to the depths of our human condition – including our frailty and sin – and ascend to the heights of divine perfection: “Be merciful (perfect) as your Father is merciful”. But always for the sake of “reaping” even greater mercy. This fruit should also be seen in a conversion of our institutional mindset: unless our structures are vibrant and aimed at making us more open to God’s mercy and more merciful to others, they can turn into something very bizarre and eventually counterproductive.

            This retreat, then, will follow the path of that “evangelical simplicity” which sees and does all things in the key of mercy. That mercy is dynamic, not so much a noun with a fixed and definite meaning, or a descriptive adjective, but rather a verb – “to show mercy” and “to receive mercy” – that spurs us to action in this world. Even more, it is a mercy that is “ever greater” (magis), a mercy that grows and expands, passing from good to better and from less to more. For the model that Jesus sets before us is that of the Father, who is ever greater and whose infinite mercy in some sense constantly “grows”. His mercy has no roof or walls, because it is born of his sovereign freedom.

FIRST MEDITATION: FROM ESTRANGEMENT TO CELEBRATION

            If, as we said, the Gospel presents mercy as an excess of God’s love, the first thing we have to do is to see where today’s world, and every person in it, most needs this kind of overflow of love. We have to ask ourselves how such mercy is to be received. On what barren and parched land must this flood of living water surge? What are the wounds that need this precious balm? What is the sense of abandonment that cries out for loving attention? What is the sense of estrangement that so thirsts for embrace and encounter?

            The parable which I would now propose for your meditation is that of the merciful Father (cf. Lk 15:11-31). We find ourselves before the mystery of the Father. I think we should begin with the moment when the prodigal son stands in the middle of the pigsty, in that inferno of selfishness where, having done everything he wanted to do, now, instead of being free, he feels enslaved. He looks at the pigs as they eat their husks… and he envies them. He feels homesick. He longs for the fresh baked bread that the servants in his house, his father’s house, eat for breakfast. Homesickness… nostalgia. Nostalgia is a powerful emotion. Like mercy, it expands the soul. It makes us think back to our first experience of goodness – the homeland from which we went forth – and it awakens in us the hope of returning there. Against this vast horizon of nostalgia, the young man – as the Gospel tells us – came to his senses and realized that he was miserable.

            Without dwelling on that misery of his, let us move on to the other moment, once his Father had embraced him and kissed him. He finds himself still dirty, yet dressed for a banquet. He fingers the ring he has been given, which is just like his father’s. He has new sandals on his feet. He is in the middle of a party, in the midst of a crowd of people. A bit like ourselves, if ever we have gone to confession before Mass and then all of a sudden found ourselves vested and in the middle of a ceremony.

            AN EMBARRASSED DIGNITY

            Let us think for a moment about the “embarrassed dignity” of this prodigal yet beloved son. If we can serenely keep our heart balanced between those two extremes – dignity and embarrassment – without letting go of either of them, perhaps we can feel how the heart of our Father beats with love for us. We can imagine that mercy wells up in it like blood. He goes out to seek us sinners. He draws us to himself, purifies us and sends us forth, new and renewed, to every periphery, to bring mercy to all. That blood is the blood of Christ, the blood of the new and eternal covenant of mercy, poured out for us and for all, for the forgiveness of sins. We contemplate that blood by going in and out of his heart and the heart of the Father. That is our sole treasure, the only thing we have to give to the world: the blood that purifies and brings peace to every reality and all people. The blood of the Lord that forgives sins. The blood that is true drink, for it reawakens and revives what was dead from sin.

            In our serene prayer, which wavers between embarrassment and dignity, dignity and embarrassment, let us ask for the grace to sense that mercy as giving meaning to our entire life, the grace to feel how the heart of the Father beats as one with our own. It is not enough to think of that grace as something God offers us from time to time, whenever he forgives some big sin of ours, so that then we can go off to do the rest by ourselves, alone.

            Saint Ignatius offers us an image drawn from the courtly culture of his time, but since loyalty among friends is a perennial value, it can also help us. He says that, in order to feel “embarrassment and shame” for our sins (but without forgetting God’s mercy), we can use the example of “a knight who finds himself before his king and his entire court, ashamed and embarrassed for having gravely wronged him, after having received from him many gifts and many favours” (Spiritual Exercises, 74). But like the prodigal son who finds himself in the middle of a banquet, this knight, who ought to feel ashamed before everyone, suddenly sees the King take him by the hand and restore his dignity. Indeed, not only does the King ask him to follow him into battle, but he puts him at the head of his peers. With what humility and loyalty this knight will serve him henceforth!

            Whether we see ourselves as the prodigal son in the midst of the banquet, or the disloyal knight restored and promoted, the important thing is that each of us feel that fruitful tension born of the Lord’s mercy: we are at one and the same time sinners pardoned and sinners restored to dignity.

            Simon Peter represents the ministerial aspect of this healthy tension. At every step along the way, the Lord trains him to be both Simon and Peter. Simon, the ordinary man with all his faults and inconsistencies, and Peter, the bearer of the keys who leads the others. When Andrew brings Simon, fresh from his nets, to Christ, the Lord gives him the name Peter, “Rock”. Yet immediately after praising Peter’s confession of faith, which comes from the Father, Jesus sternly reproves him for being tempted to heed the evil spirit telling him to flee the cross. Jesus will go on to invite Peter to walk on the water; he will let him sink into his own fear, only then to stretch out his hand and raise him up. No sooner does Peter confess that he is a sinner than the Lord makes him a fisher of men. He will question Peter at length about his love, instilling in him sorrow and shame for his disloyalty and cowardice, but he will also thrice entrust to him the care of his sheep.

            That is how we have to see ourselves: poised between our utter shame and our sublime dignity. Dirty, impure, mean and selfish, yet at the same time, with feet washed, called and chosen to distribute the Lord’s multiplied loaves, blessed by our people, loved and cared for. Only mercy makes this situation bearable. Without it, either we believe in our own righteousness like the Pharisees, or we shrink back like those who feel unworthy. In either case, our hearts grow hardened.

            Let us look a little more closely at this, and ask why this tension is so fruitful. The reason, I would say, is that it is the result of a free decision. The Lord acts mainly through our freedom, even though his help never fails us. Mercy is a matter of freedom. As a feeling, it wells up spontaneously. When we say that it is visceral, it might seem that it is synonymous with “animal”. But animals do not experience “moral” mercy, even though some of them may experience something akin to compassion, like the faithful dog keeping watch at the side of his ailing master. Mercy is a visceral emotion but it can also be the fruit of an acute intellectual insight – startling as a bolt of lightning but no less complex for its simplicity. We intuit many things when we feel mercy. We understand, for example that another person is in a desperate state, a limit situation; something is going on that is greater than his or her sins and failings. We also realize that the other person is our peer, that we could well be standing in his or her shoes. Or that evil is such an immense and devastating thing that it can’t simply be fixed by justice… Deep down, we realize that what is needed is an infinite mercy, like that of the heart of Christ, to remedy all the evil and suffering we see in the lives of human beings… Anything less than this is not enough. We can understand so many things simply by seeing someone barefoot in the street on a cold morning, or by contemplating the Lord nailed to the cross – for me!

            Moreover, mercy can be freely accepted and nurtured, or freely rejected. If we accept it, one thing leads to another. If we choose to ignore it, our heart grows cold. Mercy makes us experience our freedom and, as a result, the freedom of God himself, who, as he said to Moses, is “merciful with whom he is merciful” (cf. Dt 5:10). By his mercy the Lord expresses his freedom. And we, our own.

            We can “do without” the Lord’s mercy for a long time. In other words, we can go through life without thinking about it consciously or explicitly asking for it. Then one day we realize that “all is mercy” and we weep bitterly for not having known it earlier, when we needed it most!

            This feeling is a kind of moral misery. It is the entirely personal realization that at a certain point in my life I decided to go it alone: I made my choice and I chose badly. Such are the depths we have to reach in order to feel sorrow for our sins and true repentance. Otherwise, we lack the freedom to see that sin affects our entire life. We don’t recognize our misery, and thus we miss out on mercy, which only acts on that condition. People don’t go to a pharmacy and ask for an aspirin out of mercy. Out of mercy we ask for morphine, to administer to a person who is terminally ill and racked with pain.

            The heart that God joins to this moral misery of ours is the heart of Christ, his beloved Son, which beats as one with that of the Father and the Spirit. It is a heart that chooses the fastest route and takes it. Mercy gets its hands dirty. It touches, it gets involved, it gets caught up with others, it gets personal. It does not approach “cases” but persons and their pain. Mercy exceeds justice; it brings knowledge and compassion; it leads to involvement. By the dignity it brings, mercy raises up the one over whom another has stooped to bring help. The one who shows mercy and the one to whom mercy is shown become equals.

            That is why the Father needed to celebrate, so that everything could be restored at once, and his son could regain his lost dignity. This realization makes it possible to look to the future in a different way. It is not that mercy overlooks the objective harm brought about by evil. Rather, it takes away evil’s power over the future. It takes away its power over life, which then goes on. Mercy is the genuine expression of life that counters death, the bitter fruit of sin. As such, it is completely lucid and in no way naïve. It is not that it is blind to evil; rather, it sees how short life is and all the good still to be done. That is why it is so important to forgive completely, so that others can look to the future without wasting time on self-recrimination and self-pity over their past mistakes. In starting to care for others, we will examine our own consciences, and to the extent that we help others, we will make reparation for the wrong we ourselves have done. Mercy is always tinged with hope.

            To let ourselves to be drawn to and sent by the beating heart of the Father is to remain in this healthy tension of embarrassed dignity. Letting ourselves be drawn into his heart, like blood which has been sullied on its way to give life to the extremities, so that the Lord can purify us and wash our feet. Letting ourselves be sent, full of the oxygen of the Spirit, to revive the whole body, especially those members who are most distant, frail and hurting.

            A priest once told me about a street person who ended up living in a hospice. He was consumed by bitterness and did not interact with others. He was an educated person, as they later found out. Sometime thereafter, this man was hospitalized for a terminal illness. He told the priest that while he was there, feeling empty and disillusioned, the man in the next bed asked him to remove his bed pan and empty it. That request from someone truly in need, someone worse off than he was, opened his eyes and his heart to a powerful sense of humanity, a desire to help another person and to let himself be helped by God. A simple act of mercy put him in touch with infinite mercy. It led him to help someone else and, in doing so, to be helped himself. He died after making a good confession, and at peace.

            So I leave you with the parable of the merciful Father, now that we have we have entered into the situation of the son who feels dirty and dressed up, a dignified sinner, ashamed of himself yet proud of his father. The sign that we have entered into it is that we ourselves now desire be merciful to all. This is the fire Jesus came to bring to the earth, a fire that lights other fires. If the spark does not take, it is because one of the poles cannot make contact. Either excessive shame, which fails to strip the wires and, instead of freely confessing “I did this or that”, stays covered; or excessive dignity, which touches things with gloves.

            AN EXCESS OF MERCY

            The only way for us to be “excessive” in responding to God’s excessive mercy is to be completely open to receiving it and to sharing it with others. The Gospel gives us many touching examples of people who went to excess in order to receive his mercy. There is the paralytic whose friends let him down from the roof into the place where the Lord was preaching. Or the leper who left his nine companions to come back, glorifying and thanking God in a loud voice, to kneel at the Lord’s feet. Or the blind Bartimaeus whose outcry made Jesus halt before him. Or the woman suffering from a haemorrhage who timidly approached the Lord and touched his robe; as the Gospel tells us, Jesus felt power – dynamis – “go forth” from him… All these are examples of that contact that lights a fire and unleashes the positive force of mercy. Then too, we can think of the sinful woman, who washed the Lord’s feet with her tears and dried them with her hair; Jesus saw her excessive display of love as a sign of her having received great mercy. Ordinary people – sinners, the infirm and those possessed by demons – are immediately raised up by the Lord. He makes them pass from exclusion to full inclusion, from estrangement to embrace. That is the expression: mercy makes us pass “from estrangement to celebration”. And it can only be understood in the key of hope, in an apostolic key, in the key of knowing mercy and then showing mercy.

            Let us conclude by praying the Magnificat of mercy, Psalm 50 by King David, which we pray each Friday at Morning Prayer. It is the Magnificat of “a humble and contrite heart” capable of confessing its sin before the God who, in his fidelity, is greater than any of our sins. If we put ourselves in the place of the prodigal son, at the moment when, expecting his Father’s reproof, he discovers instead that his Father has thrown a party, we can imagine him praying Psalm 50. We can pray it antiphonally with him. We can hear him saying: “Have mercy on me, O God, in your kindness; in your compassion blot out my offence” … And ourselves continuing: “My offences, truly I (too) know them; my sin is always before me”. And together: “Against you, Father, against you, you alone, have I sinned”.

            May our prayer rise up from that interior tension which kindles mercy, that tension between the shame that says: “From my sins turn away your face, and blot out all my guilt”, and the confidence that says, “O purify me, then I shall be clean; O wash me, I shall be whiter than snow”. A confidence that becomes apostolic: “Give me again the joy of your help; with the spirit of fervour sustain me, that I may teach transgressors your ways, and sinners may return to you”.

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At least 300,000 children across India are drugged, beaten and forced to beg every day, in what has become a multi-million rupee industry controlled by human trafficking cartels, say police and trafficking experts. 

Writing in a report which is about to be circulated across the country's police forces, the authors urged law enforcers to carry out greater surveillance of children living on the streets. According to the National Human Rights Commission, up to 40,000 children are abducted in India every year, of which at least 11,000 remain untraced.

"The police don't think begging is an issue because they assume that the adult with the child is either family or a known person," said co-author Anita Kanaiya, CEO of The Freedom Project India, which works on trafficking issues. "But for every 50 children rescued there will be at least 10 who are victims of trafficking. And there has to be a constant vigil to identify them," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Children are sometimes maimed or burned to elicit greater sympathy and get more alms, said the report. The money they earn is usually paid to the traffickers, or to buy alcohol and drugs. The report is based on the experiences of police and charities in Bengaluru in Karnataka. There is a seasonal pattern to begging, local police said. Cities like Bengaluru see a sharp rise in the numbers of children wandering the streets just before festivals or after a natural disaster.

In 2011, Bengaluru police launched "Operation Rakshane" ("To Save"). In coordination with various government departments and charities, they drew up a blueprint to help children forced into begging. Months before carrying out a series of rescues, they spread out across the city, taking pictures of children on the street, documenting their daily activities and shadowing them back to their homes.

"When we started, we had nothing to prove the connection between begging and trafficking. But we went about meticulously recording any signs of forced labour on the streets of the city," Kanaiya said.

According to inspector general of police, Pronob Mohanty, who spearheaded the operation, teams of police and health workers rescued 300 children on a single day across the city. The traffickers were arrested and later imprisoned.

"Operation Rakshane is meant to be a template which can be replicated as a model of inter agency cooperation," Mohanty said in the handbook, which includes suggestions for surveillance, data collection and rehabilitation, as well as listing relevant laws.

Kanaiya said: "We are now initiating a planned campaign to take the book to every police headquarter in the country and follow it up with a workshop on child (begging) and rescue operations for policemen."

(source: Thomas Reuters Foundation)  

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(Vatican Radio)  What can interreligious dialogue contribute to combating climate change?  A lot according to the U.S. State Department’s Special Representative for Religion and Global Affairs, Shaun Casey.  In Part II of a wide ranging interview with Vatican Radio’s Tracey McClure, Casey recounted his involvement in the 30 November - 12 December 2015 UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, and how his office was intrigued to see the participation of so many religious groups.

“We discovered that across the globe and across the religions, there was this moral imperative to push the world to come together and get as strong a Convention to mitigate climate change as possible,” Casey said.  “So, we conducted a lot of interreligious meetings among religious communities that are trying to support us in reaching the strongest, best climate change convention we could get. 

We discovered all the world’s religions had some form of organization – whether it was the Catholic Church, whether it was Protestants, Orthodox – the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew is known as the ‘green’ patriarch because he discovered climate change as a Christian theological issue decades before any leader of his stature discovered that that was a powerful moral issue.

We discovered Sikh, Hindu, Muslim organizations that had made statements on the need to combat climate change.  So, we began to convene interreligious conversations around what that dialogue might look like, what kind of outcomes did we want from Paris, and what we brought to the table was making sure they understood the policy options that were being debated in the lead-up to Paris.  So when they did their public advocacy, they had the best policy and scientific information [available] to make as an informed moral decision as they could.”

Religion: a new ally on global policy issues

“Prior to our work, the State Department had never seen this diverse constellation of faith groups working together as a powerful ally.  But at the time the convention met, the last time in Paris, there were literally hundreds of religious groups around the world essentially singing from the same message sheet or hymnal if you will, in support  of the strongest agreement possible. So that’s just one example where we partnered with a number of religious groups to help get as strong a global outcome as we could on a policy issue.”

Government can learn from Religious communities, often the first responders to crises

Asked what can religions contribute to the debate on climate change, Casey said:

“In many cases, religious communities are first responders to crises, so if the crop fails in your village, the religious leader – be it the imam, be it the Orthodox priest, be it the Pentecostal preacher – is going to see the staggering economic impact” in the faces of his religious community.  “So they feel the pain, they feel the suffering in a way that very few other civil society groups do.  When the scourge of HIV AIDS hits a village, the same is true.  The religious communities feel the pain, they see the suffering in the families and extended families and in the community as well and they’re often motivated out of their own compassion, out of their own theological underpinnings, to address the human need, the human suffering they see. 

So in many ways, religious communities bear firsthand knowledge of human suffering in a way governments only learn about down the road.  So in that sense, they have the power to educate us in government about what we need to be doing to alleviate suffering, to raise the tide of justice around the country.

They bring empathy, the witness of the community, but [also] the moral resources to try to persuade those of us in government to do the right thing, to address those kinds of massive injustices.”

Vatican, Pope can “play huge role”

The Vatican, and the Pope, Casey stressed, “can continue to play a huge role” on the world stage, particularly in advocacy and interfaith dialogue."

“Certainly the Holy Father himself is a world historical figure of just inestimable value.  The fact that he called for this Muslim dialogue over two years ago and he’s beginning to implement that in the Vatican in very powerful ways.  I think another concrete issue I would look at is the refugee crisis which is - some people talk about the ‘European refugee crisis’ – it’s a global refugee crisis.  The powerful moral voice that [the Pope] has used to call governments to live up to their best lights as governments to respond to this outpouring of huge need – at one end of that issue, if you trail it all the way back, we have to look at the root causes so many of the refugees are coming out of Syria and Iraq.  Others are coming out of Africa and we need to think about what are the political changes that need to be made in those two contexts to turn off the flow and on the front end, Europe has had over 1.1 million people show up on its shores since this crisis began. 

In the United States, in the last three years, we’ve accepted 70,000 refugees a year.  The current year we’re in, we’ve upped that to 85,000.  The President has established a goal in 2017 along with Congress, to bump that up to 100,000.  So we’ve grown our capacity in two years by 40%. 

But there’s so much more that needs to be done. And this is where the Vatican can continue to play a huge role.  Can we bring together some of the Muslim countries to contribute more money and perhaps formally join the United Nations Convention on Refugees which was promulgated in 1951?  So the Vatican is in a unique position to continue to call the world to some sense of justice in addressing this set of issues.  The pressures politically that have led to this explosion in refugees are not going to go down in the short run.  The presenting root causes are very, very complicated.  Ironically, climate change is probably going to lead to more, both internally displaced people, but also in actual refugees. But at the end of the day, we’ve got over 20 million refugees and we’ve got 40 million internally displaced people.  We have not seen these kinds of numbers since the end of World War II.  So, we’re facing a planetary, global problem that’s going to require Muslim nations, secular nations, all nations, to find a way to shoulder their part of that burden.  And right now, the trend lines don’t look good.”

Climate Change Convention, Sustainable Development Goals cause for hope

Asked where there is room for hope; Casey pointed to the Climate Change Convention as “a really amazing first step [in the right direction].  If we fulfill all the obligations of that, most scientists say that’s not going to stop the planet from warming but we’re bending the trend line in the right direction.  So I’m actually quite hopeful now that we can begin to address that more effectively.  I think if you look at the trend line on addressing extreme poverty, we’ve actually had a couple of decades of progress there that many people felt was not possible.”

 “Recently again, the world came together to agree last September on the [UN’s] Sustainable development goals – 17 different goals that are going to measure the globe’s progress through 2030 and one of those goals is to eliminate extreme poverty.  And you talk to economists, you talk to ethicists, to development professionals, and there are people who are saying ‘that is actually achievable!’ Think about that.  In fifteen years, we might be able to eliminate extreme poverty around the world.  So I would point to this agreement where the world has come together and held up some very ambitious targets.  We made many of the Millenium Development Goals, the last fifteen years’ worth of monitoring goals, so I’m actually hopeful that this gives us a framework to make a huge dent in one of the truly diabolical issues, that of global poverty around the world.

There are a set of religious and moral voices which have come around endorsing that, and you’re seeing more and more ngos align their strategic goals with fulfilling these sustainable development goals.  So I think this is one of the most hopeful global initiatives I am aware of and religious communities of all kinds are hitching their wagon to those goals so it’s going to be very interesting to see what the next 15 years hold in that space."

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(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis delivered his second meditation for the retreat for priests at the papal Basilica of St Mary Major.

Thursday’s retreat is part of the Jubilee for Priests taking place from 1-3 June.

In his second mediation, Pope Francis reflected on the “vessel of mercy.” “Our sin is like a sieve, or a leaky bucket,” he said, “from which grace quickly drains.” But God keeps forgiving us, and applies mercy to our weakness, creating a clean heart within us. It is precisely our experience of mercy that leads us to be merciful to others.

This, the Pope said, is seen in the life of saints, such as Peter and Paul, John, Augustine, Francis, and Ignatius. In fact, it is precisely those who have experienced mercy who often are the “best practitioners of mercy.”

But it is the sinless Virgin Mary who is the “simple yet perfect vessel that receives and bestows mercy.” The Holy Father contrasted Mary’s “yes” to grace with the sin of the prodigal son, the subject of his first meditation.

Pope Francis, recalling his visit to Mexico and his prayer before the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, reflected on the maternal gaze of the Blessed Virgin.

He concluded his second meditation by leading the priests in the prayer of the Salve Regina.

Below, please find the full text of Pope Francis’ prepared remarks for his second meditation for the Retreat for Priests:

SECOND MEDITATION:  THE VESSEL OF MERCY

The vessel of mercy is our sin.  Our sin is usually like a sieve, or a leaky bucket, from which grace quickly drains.  “For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water” (Jer 2:13).  That is why the Lord had to teach Peter the need to “forgive seventy times seven”.  God keeps forgiving, even though he sees how hard it is for his grace to take root in the parched and rocky soil of our hearts.  He never stops sowing his mercy and his forgiveness.

HEARTS CREATED ANEW

Let us take a closer look at this mercy of God that is always “greater” than our consciousness of our sinfulness.  The Lord never tires of forgiving us; indeed, he renews the wineskins in which we receive that forgiveness.  He uses a new wineskin for the new wine of his mercy, not one that is patched or old.  That wineskin is mercy itself: his own mercy, which we experience and then show in helping others.  A heart that has known mercy is not old and patched, but new and re-created.  It is the heart for which David prayed: “A pure heart create for me, O God, put a steadfast spirit within me” (Ps 50:12). 

That heart, created anew, is a good vessel; it is no longer battered and leaky.  The liturgy echoes the heartfelt conviction of the Church in the beautiful prayer that follows the first reading of the Easter Vigil: “O God who wonderfully created the universe, then more wonderfully re-created it in the redemption”.  In this prayer, we affirm that the second creation is even more wondrous than the first.  Ours is a heart conscious of having been created anew thanks to the coalescence of its own poverty and God’s forgiveness; it is a “heart which has been shown mercy and shows mercy”.  It feels the balm of grace poured out upon its wounds and its sinfulness; it feels mercy assuaging its guilt, watering its aridity with love and rekindling its hope.  When, with the same grace, it then forgives other sinners and treats them with compassion, this mercy takes root in good soil, where water does not drain off but sinks in and gives life. 

The best practitioners of this mercy that rights wrongs are those who know that they themselves are forgiven and sent to help others.  We see this with addiction counsellors: those who have overcome their own addiction are usually those who can best understand, help and challenge others.  So too, the best confessors are usually themselves good penitents.  Almost all the great saints were great sinners or, like Saint Therese, knew that it was by sheer grace that they were not.

The real vessel of mercy, then, is the mercy which each of us received and which created in us a new heart.  This is the “new wineskin” to which Jesus referred (cf. Lk 5:37), the “healed sore”.

Here we enter more deeply into the mystery of the Son, Jesus, who is the Father’s mercy incarnate.  Here too we can find the definitive icon of the vessel of mercy in the wounds of the risen Lord.  Those wounds remind us that the traces of our sins, forgiven by God, never completely heal or disappear; they remain as scars.  Scars are sensitive; they do not hurt, yet they remind us of our old wounds.  God’s mercy is in those scars.  In the scars of the risen Christ, the marks of the wounds in his hands and feet but also in his pierced heart, we find the true meaning of sin and grace.  As we contemplate the wounded heart of the Lord, we see ourselves reflected in him.  His heart, and our own, are similar: both are wounded and risen.  But we know that his heart was pure love and was wounded because it willed to be so; our heart, on the other hand, was pure wound, which was healed because it allowed itself to be loved.

OUR SAINTS RECEIVED MERCY

We can benefit from contemplating others who let their hearts be re-created by mercy and by seeing the “vessel” in which they received that mercy.

Paul received mercy in the harsh and inflexible vessel of his judgement, shaped by the Law.  His harsh judgement made him a persecutor.  Mercy so changed him that he sought those who were far off, from the pagan world, and, at the same time showed great understanding and mercy to those who were as he had been.  Paul was willing to be an outcast, provided he could save his own people.  His approach can be summed up in this way: he did not judge even himself, but instead let himself be justified by a God who is greater than his conscience, appealing to Jesus as the faithful advocate from whose love nothing and no one could separate him.  Paul’s understanding of God’s unconditional mercy was radical.  His realization that God’s mercy overcomes the inner wound that subjects us to two laws, the law of the flesh and the law of the Spirit, was the fruit of a mind open to absolute truth, wounded in the very place where the Law and the Light become a trap.  The famous “thorn” that the Lord did not take away from him was the vessel in which Paul received the Lord’s mercy (cf. 2 Cor 12:7).

Peter receives mercy in his presumption of being a man of good sense. He was sensible with the sound, practical wisdom of a fisherman who knows from experience when to fish and when not to.  But he was also sensible when, in his excitement at walking on water and hauling in miraculous draughts of fish, he gets carried away with himself and realizes that he has to ask help from the only one who can save him.  Peter was healed of the deepest wound of all, that of denying his friend.  Perhaps the reproach of Paul, who confronted him with his duplicity, has to do with this; it may be that Paul felt that he had been worse “before” knowing Christ, whereas Peter had denied Christ, after knowing him…  Still, once Peter was healed of that wound, he became a merciful pastor, a solid rock on which one can always build, since it is a weak rock that has been healed, not a stumbling stone.  In the Gospel, Peter is the disciple whom the Lord most often corrects.  Jesus is constantly correcting him, even to the end: “What is that to you?  Follow me!” (Jn 21:22).  Tradition tells us that Jesus appeared once again to Peter as he was fleeing Rome.  The image of Peter being crucified head down perhaps best expresses this vessel of a hardhead who, in order to be shown mercy, abased himself even in giving the supreme witness of his love for the Lord.  Peter did not want to end his life saying, “I learned the lesson”, but rather, “Since my head is never going to get it right, I will put it on the bottom”.  What he put on top were his feet, the feet that the Lord had washed.  For Peter, those feet were the vessel in which he received the mercy of his Friend and Lord.

John was healed in his pride for wanting to requite evil with fire.  He who was a “son of thunder” (Mk 3:17) would end up writing to his “little children” and seem like a kindly grandfather who speaks only of love.

Augustine was healed in his regret for being a latecomer: “Late have I loved thee”.  He would find a creative and loving way to make up for lost time by writing his Confessions.

Francis experienced mercy at many points in his life.  Perhaps the definitive vessel, which became real wounds, was not so much kissing the leper, marrying Lady Poverty or feeling himself a brother to every creature, as the experience of having to watch over in merciful silence the Order he had founded.  Francis saw his brethren divided under the very banner of poverty.  The devil makes us quarrel among ourselves, defending even the most holy things “with an evil spirit”.

Ignatius was healed in his vanity, and if that was the vessel, we can catch a glimpse of how great must have been his yearning for vainglory, which was re-created in his strenuous efforts to seek the greater glory of God.

In his Diary of a Country Priest, Bernanos recounts the life of an ordinary priest, inspired by the life of the Curé of Ars.  There are two beautiful paragraphs describing the reflections of the priest in the final moments of his unexpected illness: “May God grant me the grace in these last weeks to continue to take care of the parish… But I shall give less thought to the future, I shall work in the present.  I feel such work is within my power.  For I only succeed in small things, and when I am tried by anxiety, I am bound to say that it is the small things that release me”.  Here we see a small vessel of mercy, one that has to do with the minuscule joys of our pastoral life, where we receive and bestow the infinite mercy of the Father in little gestures.

The other paragraph says: “It is all over now.  The strange mistrust I had of myself, of my own being, has flown, I believe for ever.  That conflict is done.  I cannot understand it any more.  I am reconciled to myself, to the poor, poor shell of me.  How easy it is to hate oneself.  True grace is to forget.  Yet if pride could die in us, the supreme grace would be to love oneself in all simplicity – as one would love any of those who themselves have suffered and loved in Christ”.  This is the vessel: “to love oneself in all simplicity, as one would love any of those who themselves have suffered and loved in Christ”.  It is an ordinary vessel, like an old jar we can borrow even from the poor.

Blessed José Gabriel del Rosario Brochero, the Argentinian priest soon to be canonized, “let his heart be shaped by the mercy of God”.  In the end, his vessel was his own leprous body.  He wanted to die on horseback, crossing a mountain stream on the way to anoint a sick person.  Among the last things he said was: “There is no ultimate glory in this life”; “I am quite happy with what God has done with me regarding my sight, and I thank him for that.  While I could serve other people, he kept my senses whole and strong.  Today, when I can no longer do so, he has taken away one of my physical senses.  In this world there is no ultimate glory, and we have our more than enough misery”.  Often our work remains unfinished, so being at peace with that is always a grace.  We are allowed to “let things go”, so that the Lord can bless and perfect them.  We shouldn’t be overly concerned.  In this way, we can be open to the pain and joy of our brothers and sisters.  Cardinal Van Thuan used to say that, in prison, the Lord taught him to distinguish between “God’s business”, to which he was devoted in his free life as priest and bishop, and God himself, to whom he was devoted during his imprisonment (Five Loaves and Two Fish, Pauline Books and Media, 2003).

MARY AS VESSEL AND SOURCE OF MERCY

            Ascending the stairway of the saints in our pursuit of vessels of mercy, we come at last to Our Lady.  She is the simple yet perfect vessel that both receives and bestows mercy.  Her free “yes” to grace is the very opposite of the sin that led to the downfall of the prodigal son.  Her mercy is very much her own, very much our own and very much that of the Church.  As she says in the Magnificat, she knows that God has looked with favour upon her humility and she recognizes that his mercy is from generation to generation.  Mary can see the working of this mercy and she feels “embraced”, together with all of Israel, by it.  She treasures in her heart the memory and promise of God’s infinite mercy for his people.  Hers is the Magnificat of a pure and overflowing heart that sees all of history and each individual person with a mother’s mercy.

            During the moments I was able to spend alone with Mary during my visit to Mexico, as I gazed at Our Lady, the Virgin of Guadalupe and I let her gaze at me, I prayed for you, dear priests, to be good pastors of souls.  In my address to the bishops, I mentioned that I have often reflected on the mystery of Mary’s gaze, its tenderness and its sweetness that give us the courage to open our hearts to God’s mercy.  I would now like to reflect with you on a few of the ways that Our Lady “gazes” especially at priests, since through us she wants to gaze at her people.

            Mary’s gaze makes us feel her maternal embrace.  She shows us that “the only power capable of winning human hearts is the tenderness of God.  What delights and attracts, humbles and overcomes, opens and unleashes is not the power of instruments or the force of the law, but rather the omnipotent weakness of divine love, which is the irresistible force of its gentleness and the irrevocable pledge of its mercy” (Address to the Mexican Bishops, 13 February 2016).  What people seek in the eyes of Mary is “a place of rest where people, still orphans and disinherited, may find a place of refuge, a home.”  And that has to do with the way she “gazes” – her eyes open up a space that is inviting, not at all like a tribunal or an office.  If at times people realize that their own gaze has become hardened, that they tend to look at people with annoyance or coldness, they can turn back to her in heartfelt humility.  For Our Lady can remove every “cataract” that prevents them from seeing Christ in people’s souls.  She can remove the myopia that fails to see the needs of others, which are the needs of the incarnate Lord, as well as the hyperopia that cannot see the details, “the small print”, where the truly important things are played out in the life of the Church and of the family.

            Another aspect of Mary’s gaze to do with weaving.  Mary gazes “by weaving”, by finding a way to bring good out of all the things that her people lay at her feet.  I told the Mexican bishops that, “in the mantle of the Mexican soul, with the thread of its mestizo features, God has woven in la Morenita the face by which he wishes to be known”.  A spiritual master teaches us that “whatever is said of Mary specially is said of the Church universally and of each soul individually” (cf. Isaac of Stella, Serm. 51: PL 194, 1863).  If we consider how God wove the face and figure of Our Lady of Guadalupe into Juan Diego’s cloak, we can prayerfully ponder how he is weaving our soul and the life of the whole Church. 

They say that it is impossible to see how the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe was “painted”; it seems to have been somehow “imprinted”.  I like to think that the miracle was not only that the image was imprinted or painted, but that the entire cloak was re-created, transformed from top to bottom.  Each thread – those threads of maguey leaf that women had learned from childhood to weave for their finest garments – was transfigured in its place, and, interwoven with all the others, revealed the face of our Lady, her presence and her surroundings.  God’s mercy does the same thing.  It doesn’t “paint” us a pretty face, or airbrush the reality of who we are.  Rather, with the very threads of our poverty and sinfulness, interwoven with the Father’s love, it so weaves us that our soul is renewed and recovers its true image, the image of Jesus.  So be priests “capable of imitating this freedom of God, who chooses the humble in order to reveal the majesty of his countenance, priests capable of imitating God’s patience by weaving the new humanity which your country awaits with the fine thread of all those whom you encounter.  Don’t give into the temptation to go elsewhere, as if the love of God were not powerful enough to bring about change” (Address to the Mexican Bishops, 13 February 2016).

            A third aspect is that of attentive care.  Mary’s gaze is one of complete attention.  She leaves everything else behind, and is concerned only with the person in front of her.  Like a mother, she is all ears for the child who has something to tell her.  “As the wonderful Guadalupe tradition teaches us, la Morenita treasures the gaze of all those who look to her; she reflects the faces of all who come to her.  There is something unique in the face of every person who comes to us looking for God.  We need to realize this, to open our hearts and to show concern for them.  Only a Church capable of attentive concern for all those who knock on her door can speak to them of God.  Unless we can see into people’s suffering and recognize their needs, we will have nothing to offer them.  The riches we possess only flow forth when we truly encounter the needs of others, and this encounter take places precisely in our heart as pastors” (ibid.).  I asked your bishops to be attentive to you, their priests, and not to leave you “exposed to loneliness and abandonment, easy prey to a worldliness that devours the heart” (ibid.).  The world is watching us closely, in order to “devour” us, to make us consumers…  All of us need attention, a gaze of genuine concern.  As I told the bishops: “Be attentive and learn to read the faces of your priests, in order to rejoice with them when they feel the joy of recounting all that they have ‘done and taught’ (Mk 6:30).  Also do not step back when they are humbled and can only weep because they ‘have denied the Lord’ (cf. Lk 22:61-62).  Offer your support, in communion with Christ, whenever one of them, discouraged, goes out with Judas into ‘the night’ (cf. Jn 13:30).  In these situations your fatherly care for your priests must never be found wanting.  Encourage communion among them; seek to bring out the best in them, and enlist them in great ventures, for the heart of an apostle was not made for small things” (ibid.).

            Lastly, Mary’s gaze is “integral”, all-embracing.  It brings everything together: our past, our present and our future.  It is not fragmented or partial: mercy can see things as a whole and grasp what is most necessary.  At Cana, Mary “empathetically” foresaw what the lack of wine in the wedding feast would mean and she asked Jesus to resolve the problem, without anyone noticing.  We can see our entire priestly life as somehow “foreseen” by Mary’s mercy; she sees beforehand the things we lack and provides for them.  If there is any “good wine” present in our lives, it is due not to our own merits but to her “anticipated mercy”.  In the Magnificat, she proclaims how the Lord “looked with favour on her loneliness” and “remembered his (covenant of) mercy”, a “mercy shown from generation to generation” to the poor and the downtrodden.  For Mary, history is mercy.

            We can conclude by praying the Salva Regina.  The words of this prayer are vibrant with the mystery of the Magnificat.  Mary is the Mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope.  Her eyes of mercy are surely the greatest vessel of mercy, for their gaze enables us to drink in that kindness and goodness for which we hunger with a yearning that a look of love alone can satisfy.  Her eyes of mercy also enable us to see God’s mercy at work in human history and to find Jesus in the faces of our brothers and sisters.  In Mary, we catch a glimpse of the promised land – the Kingdom of mercy established by our Lord – already present in this life beyond the exile into which sin leads us.  From her hand and beneath her gaze, we can joyfully proclaim the greatness of the Lord.  To Mary we can say: My soul sings of you, Lord, for you have looked with favour on the lowliness and humility of your servant.  How blessed I am, to have been forgiven.  Your mercy, Lord, that you showed to your saints and to all your faithful people, you have also shown to me.  I was lost, seeking only myself, in the arrogance of my heart, yet I found no glory.  My only glory is that your Mother has embraced me, covered me with her mantle, and drawn me to her heart.  I want to be loved as one of your little ones.  I want to feed with your bread all those who hunger for you.  Remember, Lord, your covenant of mercy with your sons, the priests of your people.  With Mary, may we be the sign and sacrament of your mercy.

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(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis’ prayer intention for June is for Human Solidarity. That the aged, marginalized, and those who have no one may find–even within the huge cities of the world–opportunities for encounter and solidarity.

The Apostleship of Prayer has produced the Pope’s Video on this prayer intention.

The full text of the Pope’s Video is below

In our cities the elderly and sick are neglected. Can we ignore it? Our cities should be characterized above all by solidarity, which entails not only giving to the needy , but also taking responsibility for one another and fostering  a culture of encounter.

Will you join me in my prayer? That the aged, marginalized, and those who have no one may find–even within the huge cities of the world–opportunities for encounter and solidarity.

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Cincinnati, Ohio, Jun 2, 2016 / 03:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- An Ohio judge sentenced a 23-year old Catholic man to 12 consecutive Baptist Sunday services after an altercation in downtown Cincinnati in January.

It was dollar beer night at the Cincinnati Cyclones vs. Fort Wayne Komets hockey game on January 23, and Jake Strotman and his buddies had had a few before heading downtown after the game (a Cyclones victory).

Strotman and his friends came across a group of Baptist street preachers, who Strotman claims were condemning him, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Already a curious and outgoing person, Strotman engaged with the preachers and “gave them my two cents worth.”

“They were telling me I was going to hell,” Strotman told Enquirer reporters. “I was asking them: 'Why do you think you can condemn people?' I didn't understand why they thought they could judge me.”

Hearing the argument, another man approached the street preachers and “started going off like a ball of fire,” Strotman said.

Amidst threats, shouting, pushing and shoving, Strotman ended up face-down on the asphalt and pushed his hand down on one of the preacher's face, Joshua Johnson, as he was getting back up. Johnson claims that in doing so, Strotman shoved Johnson’s own glasses into his face, cutting him.

Last week, Ohio Judge William Mallory, convicted Strotman of attempted assault, a misdemeanor. Mallory, who reportedly enjoys handing out creative sentences, said in the courtroom that while 90 days of jail time was an option, he was open to other ideas.

"I'm trying to get to something reasonable here. And I'll be honest with you guys, sometimes in certain places people don't want to be preached to. You agree with that right?" Mallory reportedly said to Johnson in court.

That’s when Strotman, a self-employed salesman of windows, siding and doors, proposed his own alternative sentence: serving at a church of Mallory’s choosing.

Mallory approved, and sentenced Strotman to attend 12 consecutive Sunday services at Morning Star Baptist Church. He must attend each entire 90-minute service (for a total of 18 hours) and have the weekly program signed by the minister.

He also paid $480 in court fines and a $2,800 lawyer bill.

"Three months, that's not that bad,'' Strotman told the Enquirer. "I think it's a nice example of hearing people out instead of getting angry and jumping to conclusions.”

"I'm going to listen with both my ears and keep my mouth shut,'' he said. "Then, maybe I'll try to sell them some windows."

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