The Name of God Is Mercy Read Free Page A

Evangelist. I was seventeen years old. On confessing to him, I felt welcomed by the mercy of God. Ibarra was originally from Corrientes but was in Buenos Aires to receive treatment for leukemia. He died the following year. I still remember how when I got home, after his funeral and burial, I felt as though I had been abandoned. And I cried a lot that night, really a lot, and hid in my room. Why? Because I had lost a person who helped me feel the mercy of God, a person who helped me understand the expression
miserando atque eligendo
, an expression I didn’t know at the time but which I would eventually choose as my episcopal motto. I learned about it later, from the homilies of the English monk the Venerable Bede. When describing the calling of Matthew, he writes: “Jesus saw the tax collector, and by having mercychose him as an Apostle, saying to him, ‘Follow me.’ ” This is the translation commonly given for the words of Saint Bede. I like to translate
miserando
with a gerund that doesn’t exist:
mercifying
. So, “mercifying and choosing” describes the vision of Jesus, who gives the gift of mercy and chooses, and takes unto himself.
    W HEN you think of merciful priests whom you have met or who have inspired you, who comes to mind?
             
    There are many. I just mentioned Father Duarte. I can also mention Enrico Pozzoli, the Salesian, who baptized me and who married my parents. He was the confessor, the merciful confessor: everyone went to him, and he went to all the Salesian houses. I met many such confessors. I recall another great confessor who was younger than I, a Capuchin priest with a ministry in Buenos Aires. One day he came to see me and he wanted to talk. He said, “I need your help. I always have so many people at the confessional, people of all walks of life, some humble and some less humble, but many priests too….I forgive a lot and sometimes I have doubts, I wonder if I have forgiventoo much.” We talked about mercy and I asked him what he did when he had those doubts. This is what he said: “I go to our chapel and stand in front of the tabernacle and say to Jesus: ‘Lord, forgive me if I have forgiven too much. But you’re the one who gave me the bad example!’ ” I will never forget that. When a priest experiences giving mercy to himself like that, he can give it to others. I once read a homily by then cardinal Albino Luciani [later Pope John Paul I] about Father Leopold Mandić, who had just been beatified by Pope Paul VI. He described something that was very similar to what I just told you. He said: “You know, we are all sinners,” Luciani said on that occasion. “Father Leopold knew that very well. We must take this sad reality of ours into account: no one can avoid sin, small or great, for very long. ‘But,’ as Saint Francis de Sales said, ‘if you have a little donkey and along the road it falls onto the cobblestones, what should you do? You certainly don’t go there with a stick to beat it, poor little thing, it’s already unfortunate enough. You must take it by the halter and say: ‘Up, let’s take to the road again….Now we will get back on the road, and we will pay more attention nexttime.’ This is the system, and Father Leopold applied this system in full. A priest, a friend of mine, who went to confess to him, said: ‘Father, you are too generous. I am glad to have gone to confession to you, but it seems to me that you are too generous.’ And Father Leopold said: ‘But who has been generous, my son? It was the Lord who was generous; I wasn’t the one who died for our sins, it was the Lord who died for our sins. How could he have been more generous with the thief, with others, than this!’ ” This was the homily of then Cardinal Luciani on Leopold Mandić, who was later proclaimed a saint by John Paul II.
    Another important figure for me is Father José Ramón Aristi, a Sacramentine, whom I mentioned before when I met the parish priests of