Some time between the years 2014 and 2016, I endeavored to read the full texts of Pope St. John Paul II’s Love and Responsibility (he was still Karol Wojtyla at the time of writing) and The Theology of the Body. It was the culmination of fifteen years as a devout Catholic – a development that had been effected in late adolescence by the appeal of the Church’s modern proclamation of the sacrament of marriage and the mortal happiness it would hopefully afford me. There was nothing more ecstatic or fulfilling to me than John Paul’s vision. Like many earnest young Catholics of the time, I had an exaggerated notion that the marital bond formed the cornerstone of all human reality; that its spiritual renewal was the hinge on which all fraternal peace among men rested.
Amoris Laetitia felt like a big thud. My silly arrogance found its simple and practical language uninspiring. I shared in the rigorist suspicion of its veiled moral lukewarmness. There was nothing comely in him to make us look at him, nor appearance that would attract us to him. . . Quite thankfully, ideological attachment and a drive for herdlike sociological belonging were not impediments to my accepting Pope Francis. In the years leading up to his 2013 election, I had already begun to happily drift away from the reasoned political conservatism that I had spontaneously adopted upon becoming devout. Still, for a variety of reasons, I just couldn’t get into Francis’s new tone. While I accepted Amoris‘s basic doctrinal continuity from the outset, its essential orthodoxy, I entirely missed the gracious and truly pastoral nuances in his treatment of diverse divorce-and-remarriage situations (paragraphs 298 and 300) and his acknowledgement that there exist mature and morally responsible people of genuinely good will who are unwittingly bound in irregular situations. Francis’s thoughtful, Jesuit discernment emerges fully in Amoris’s critical eighth chapter.
I did not appreciate nor even realize that the Holy Spirit had chosen a pontiff who had spent the entire twenty-plus years leading up to his election ostracized by his own order – his spiritual family, the members of the very matrix through which his vocation would be realized – precisely because he was a moderate, doctrinally orthodox son of the Church. Francis was a man who had suffered deeply and heroically, under severe ideological extremes, and had come out like purified gold. He was a man who could be trusted to steer a faithful narrow way affording mercy to all.
I continue to adore John Paul’s dramatic poetic brilliance. He set the communion of man and woman against a backdrop of incomparable luminosity. His elucidation of the sacramentality of marriage remains a much-needed gift to the life of the Church — one that came at exactly the right time. The Church, as the Daughter Zion of history, continues to grow and develop toward full realization until the end of time and the consummation of the wedding feast of the Lamb. In this light, and building upon his predecessors, Francis shows us a still more excellent way. Francis’s universal vision of mercy, while expressed in humbler language, perfects John Paul’s unforgettably beauteous vision of nuptial love.[ii] Each of these great men made a contribution that is inextricably bound up in that of the other.
Amoris‘s eighth chapter addresses the complexity of irregular situations of divorce and remarriage by drawing upon broader references to the Church’s traditional wisdom regarding the discernment of mitigating factors (we will return to the latter shortly). Francis takes the reader into a deeper contemplation of mercy through the Church’s maternal solicitude for the universal condition of human weakness. For those who, like myself, have struggled to apprehend Amoris‘s profundity (perhaps Francis’s profundity), it may be helpful to re-read the eighth chapter slowly with the above in mind — in a “lectio divina” sort of way — to allow the Spirit to illumine what was previously obscure.
In revisiting Amoris occasionally over the past eight, long years following my initial reading, the heart of the Redeemer gradually broke through. I am only now fully realizing that Pope Francis’s great gift to the Church is the gift of mercy. The Holy Father of beloved memory definitively ushered in the New Age of Mercy. How late have I loved him!
Many Catholics who consider themselves devout, especially in the United States, believe that the way to transform society is to convert it to a “marriage culture” that is increasingly narrowly envisaged. But the entire tenor of Francis’s pontificate suggests otherwise. The efficacious path to true spiritual renewal is indeed communal, but it is not anthropocentric. It comes through the outpouring of Divine Mercy from one man unto another. From there, all the indispensable rest will follow (Matthew 6:33).
John Paul II and Faustina Kowalska identified mercy as God’s greatest attribute and Thomas Aquinas viewed it as the highest human virtue shared among men. Aquinas defines mercy as the relief of another’s privation out of one’s own superior abundance and so, it is the virtue that most perfectly mirrors God’s own self-donating action toward sinful humanity. Mercy’s supremacy originates, like everything in the Christian life, in the mystery of the hypostatic union — that is, the union of divine and human nature in Christ. When the Word decisively inundated an infinitely inferior, limited human nature with His own omnipotent Divine Person, thereby joining Himself indelibly to all mankind in the womb of the Virgin, He accomplished the ultimate act of mercy. This is how we are to love — by loving, with the strength of God’s grace, another’s frailty in all its dimensions. St. John tells us that the only way to remain in God, to attain the plenitude of His love, is to love one another. But how? Miserando atque eligendo . . . with the eyes of mercy. But what does that even mean? Where do we get this elusive water, this hidden manna? In all his humble simplicity and poverty, Francis shows us, with his words and his life, that it means to judge through the lens of mitigating factors, to see without prejudice.[iii] It is nothing less than to behold in hope the whole and eternal man when only a disrupted, injurious fraction presents.
The natural human reflex is to judge objective evil objectively. Slamming on one’s brakes to prevent hitting a law-observing pedestrian within ten inches of his life will naturally elicit rage. Not because the driver intended it, but because the damage inflicted would have been so immense. But when the most evil and intolerable act of history, the torture and crucifixion of the Son of God, was committed Our Lord offered a radically different response from the very bondage of His unspeakable pain: Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do. Of course they do! There’s blood everywhere! They can literally see and hear and touch and smell and taste in the sweat on their faces the insidious violence and agony they have wrought. “No, they don’t know,” He insists. Better not to argue with the Redeemer nailed to the cross.
That our Lord authoritatively declared that His own brutal executioners acted without full knowledge, thereby calling Divine Mercy upon their souls, imbues the members of that same Crucified Mystical Body with the power to judge every encounter with the mercy of Jesus’ own heart – resolutely mindful of the presence of mitigating factors. Gradually, as divinization (theosis) is a developmental and interpersonal pilgrimage. But it is essential to know the goal and the way, and Francis points out the surest, easiest, shortest, and most perfect means in the company of the Virgin at the foot of our own cross.
Is this not how each of us desires to be judged by others, and ultimately God – with due consideration of our moral and carnal weakness and the acknowledgement of good faith wherever possible? A requirement of receiving merciful judgement, our Lord emphasizes on multiple occasions, is to judge mercifully. It is the redemptive pattern of all human behavior, including within the primordial mystery of man and woman that I had once adulated.
None of the above nullifies justice, prudence, realism, truth, moral norms, or the need for charitable fraternal correction. Mercy, which in a sense is the greatest value attainable for man, perfects all of these and crowns them with a stable orientation. As God’s highest attribute and the central action of the Incarnation, mercy — which Francis loved to call God’s very name — is the source and the end of all doctrinal orthodoxy and communion among men.
[i] The undue judgement of the Catholic ultra-devout against Francis (my own highlighted here) evokes the similar opposition with which Oscar Romero’s initial posthumous decades were marked.
[ii] While John Paul’s life and thought were vast, his pontificate’s timely emphasis on human dignity, the gospel of life, and the sanctity of the family found an enduring and momentous expression in his Wednesday audiences which comprise what would come to be known as The Theology of the Body.
[iii] A lexical adaptation in my mind of George Michael’s Listen Without Prejudice
Image: “thierry Ehrmann le 112 ème est Jorge Ma” (CC BY 2.0) by Abode of Chaos
Amelia-Bianca Estrada is a native and resident of greater Los Angeles. In 2003, she received her bachelor of arts degree in history from Stanford University.
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