Feast of the Immaculate Conception
December 8, 2015
Beginning of the Jubilee Year of Mercy
 
     It’s certainly no accident that Pope Francis decided that the Great Jubilee Year of Mercy should begin on this day. This is the day exactly fifty years ago, when the Second Vatican Council came to its glorious conclusion, proclaiming to the world a Church with open doors and open windows, open arms, an open heart, and an open mind; a Church engaged with the world, not at war with it; a Church of dialogue and discovery; a bridge-building Church, not a wall-building Church; a Church, in the words of Pope John XXIII, eager to apply “the medicine of mercy instead of severity;” a Church that Pope Francis, five decades later, aptly and colorfully called “a field hospital.”  In a word, a Church whose very name is mercy. So, yes, this Year of Mercy has not only Pope Francis, but the Second Vatican Council, for its inspiration. How fitting, then, to begin it on the 50th anniversary of the day the great Council closed. (A little aside: I happened to be there in St. Peter’s Square that day.  I was a young seminarian a year away from my ordination.  It’s a day that will always live in my memory!).

     But there is another reason why this day is the right day for beginning the Year of Mercy, because this is the feast of the one we call the Mother of Mercy. Mary, full of grace from the moment of her conception; Mary, the one who “found favor with God” as we just heard in the gospel; Mary, whose generous “Yes” to God was the exact reversal of the “No” once spoken by Adam and Eve; Mary, one like us, one of us - living proof that “nothing is impossible for God;” Mary, who in her great hymn of praise, sang of the God who “shows mercy from age to age in every generation;” Mary the one to whom, in this valley of tears, we sinners and often lonely pilgrims turn to as our mother, the Mother of Mercy. Without a doubt, this feast that honors the wonders of God’s grace and mercy in Mary is the right day for us to set out on this Jubilee Year, this Year of Mercy!

     My friends in Christ, Jesus is the face of God’s mercy. In his face we see the face of God and in his heart we experience the love of God. But if Jesus is the face of God and the heart of God’s mercy, Mary is living proof of that mercy, living proof that the mercy of God is not some holy abstraction but every bit as real as she is – every bit as real as a mother’s love.

     But the mercy that we will celebrate and explore and experience during this Year of Jubilee is not only God’s gift to Mary and God’s gift to us, it is also the gift we are to give to others.  As Pope Francis put it in his proclamation about this year, “We are called to show mercy because mercy has first been shown to us. We are,” he said, “to open our eyes to the misery of the world, to the wounds of our brothers and sisters denied their dignity, denied their God-given rights and, too often, denied life itself.”  Now there’s an agenda for us!  An agenda for every year, not just this one year.  But how good to highlight it, explore it, and celebrate it for an entire year!

     This year of Mercy is the perfect opportunity for us who, like Mary, are living proof of God’s mercy because of the mercy we have received – this year is the perfect opportunity for us to become messengers of mercy: in our families, our workplaces, our neighborhoods, in all the places where we live our lives.  And it’s the perfect opportunity for us to become not only messengers of mercy but ministers of mercy both as individuals and as a parish, as we look for ways to show Christ’s loving face to each other and, most especially, to the stranger in our midst, to the newcomer in the pew next to us, to the poor person, the marginalized and the discriminated-against person, the homeless person, the person in prison, the immigrant, the refugee. You get the idea. The Year of Mercy is the time for us to open our hearts, not to close our hearts – or our borders, for that matter. Just the opposite, in fact!

     My friends, could this be the year when our consciences, uneasy because of how secure and well-off we are, move us beyond mere concern into action?  Merciful action?  Action for justice?

     A few weeks ago, Pope Francis spent time with a group of young kids, as he loves to do, and one of the kids asked him what he liked most about being Pope. “The thing I like the most,” he told the boy, “is being a priest, a pastor. I like to be Pope with the style of a priest…I don’t care too much about the big formal events, the protocol, and so on.”

     And that got me thinking. I get to be a priest, a pastor, every day. I don’t have to worry about all the falderal and protocol Pope Francis does. But do I take advantage of all the opportunities I have to be a pastor with “the smell of the sheep,” to use the Pope’s colorful image?  And I have to answer, no, not really. So I definitely need this year of mercy!

     But let me return to the Pope’s visit with those kids. In his typically down-to-earth fashion, he spoke to them about mercy. “I love to go to prison,” he told the kids – “not to stay there,” he quipped, “but I love to speak with the prisoners because every time I do, I ask myself ‘why them and not me?’ And that’s when I feel God’s mercy, and that’s when I know I must show God’s mercy.”

     My friends, that sums it up beautifully for me. It’s all about mercy: the mercy we have received, the mercy we must show.

     Today, as we set out together on this Year of Mercy, this Pilgrimage of Mercy – my prayer is that the mercy that made Mary, God’s mother and ours, the Mother of Mercy, the mercy that God shows each of us so generously in Jesus, the mercy that overflows so abundantly in the Eucharist, will overflow in us, opening our hearts and our eyes to a whole world out there that can only be saved by mercy and that may only find that mercy in us!

     Father Michael G. Ryan

Father Ryan as a young seminarian in Rome
at the conclusion of the Council, December 8, 1965