In Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited – that great Catholic novel on life, death, the fall from grace and the possibility of redemption – Julia Flyte says these words: “I’ve always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can’t shut myself out from His mercy... Or it may be a private bargain between me and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, He won’t quite despair of me in the end.”
Julia, a good Catholic girl from a well-known Catholic family, was in a loveless marriage (in a Protestant church) with Rex Mottram, because he was divorced. People told her that by doing so she rejected her faith in pursuit of happiness which, unfortunately, was not forthcoming.
Julia leaves Mottram for Charles Ryder, and wants to marry him, but he is married to someone else. Something is holding her back. Although her lifestyle looks like a denial of her faith, in her heart there definitively is no such denial. But unfortunately, she seems to believe God will not forget her and that asking for mercy is a lost cause. I stop here so as not to spoil the ending for you.
I am alternating Waugh with Pope Francis’ The Name of God is Mercy. In his answers to the 40 questions (a question and answer to meditate on every day of Lent) put to him by Italian journalist Andrea Tornielli, Pope Francis shows God does not let go of us easily for he has invested heavily in each one of us.
Like Fr Brown, the character in G. K. Chesterton’s stories, God has us on a hook so that even if we go to the farthest corner of the earth, he can bring us back with “a twitch upon the thread” if we let him.
“God never tires of forgiving,” Francis says, while quickly adding that “it is we who get tired of asking Him for forgiveness”.
Quite naturally, Pope Francis is not the first Pope to speak of God’s mercy. Pope John Paul II had written a most beautiful encyclical letter called Rich in Mercy and designated the Sunday after Easter as Divine Mercy Sunday.
Pope Benedict mentioned God’s mercy in his first address on becoming Pope and peppered his pontificate with references to God’s mercy as one of God’s attributes. In one of his homilies in 2008 he said: “Mercy… is the name of God Himself, the face with which He reveals Himself in the Old Testament and fully in Jesus Christ, the incarnation of creative and redemptive love.”
Pope Francis continued in the footsteps of his predecessors but took this talk about mercy a notch or two higher. It is the leitmotiv and rallying call of his pontificate so far. He not only set in motion a Year of Mercy but he also said this was the era of mercy – “the Church is showing her maternal side, her motherly face, to a humanity that is wounded”.
We don’t believe there is a chance for redemption; for a hand to raise you up; for an embrace to save you, forgive you, pick you up
The book, which has just been published, does not come up with different thoughts than those Pope Francis has already mentioned; but it crystallises these ideas and takes them forward. “Humanity needs mercy and compassion,” he says.
It is like balm on the existential wounds Julia and the rest of us sinners suffer as a result of our daily strivings and struggles to be good. Pope Francis compares this struggle to “the darkness, the night in which so many of our brothers live”.
While Pius XII, more than half a century ago, said the tragedy of our age was that it had lost its sense of sin and awareness of sin, Pope Francis says: “Today we add further to that tragedy by considering our illness, our sins, to be incurable, things that cannot be healed or forgiven.” He adds that “we lack the actual concrete experience of mercy”.
“The fragility of our era is this, too: we don’t believe that there is a chance for redemption; for a hand to raise you up; for an embrace to save you, forgive you, pick you up, flood you with infinite, patient, indulgent love; to put you back on your feet,” he says.
The Pope speaks a lot about confession as “neither a whitewash, nor a form of torture”, based on listening rather than interrogation; recognising oneself as a sinner and the Church’s condemnation of sin and embracing the sinner.
Pope Francis also refers to Bruce Marshall’s novel To Every Man a Penny. In this novel a priest wants to offer absolution to a soldier sentenced to death. The soldier says he is not repentant for his sins. I enjoyed them and will do them again, he said. The priest asks: “But are you sorry that you are not sorry?” When the soldier replies yes, the priest offers the absolution.
During my seminary days I was taught to ask the third question to find an opening that would lead to absolution. “But are you sorry that you are not sorry, for the fact that you are not sorry?
When Tornielli asks Pope Francis whether mercy has a public value and a role in society, he answers with a resounding yes. The ever-increasing rejection of capital punishment and the awareness that ex-prisoners should be helped to regain a place in society are two of the examples he mentions as a form of mercy that makes justice more just.
During one of his homilies at Santa Marta, he had said: “Sinners yes, corrupt no.” Understandably enough, the journalist of La Stampa asked the Pope to clarify that statement.
Pope Francis described corruption as a sin that is elevated to a system; a condition more than an act. Among the actions of the corrupt person he mentions fraudulent behaviour, opportunistic shortcuts, evading taxes, precarious working contracts and demanding kickbacks.
Julia Flyte would have found great solace reading this book. And so should all of us.
joseph.borg@um.edu.mt