Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
My Very Dear Sons,
Today begins, in the Roman Catholic Church, an Extraordinary Jubilee dedicated to Divine Mercy. This is no trifling event. There is nothing the world so needs at present, there is nothing each one of us so needs so urgently, as this mercy that God would give us. As the Holy Father explained in his Bull of Indiction:
We need constantly to contemplate the mystery of mercy. It is a wellspring of joy, serenity, and peace. Our salvation depends on it. Mercy: the word reveals the very mystery of the Most Holy Trinity. Mercy: the ultimate and supreme act by which God comes to meet us. Mercy: the fundamental law that dwells in the heart of every person who looks sincerely into the eyes of his brothers and sisters on the path of life. Mercy: the bridge that connects God and man, opening our hearts to the hope of being loved forever despite our sinfulness.
Why did the Sovereign Pontiff choose this feast of the Immaculate Conception as the starting point for the Jubilee? Only he knows for certain, but there is clearly a connection between the mystery of Mercy and the mystery of Mary in her Immaculate Conception. In this woman we see, you might say, God’s Mercy given in anticipation, God’s Mercy forestalling the mystery of evil that threatened the existence of this unique human being, misericordia praeveniens. The role this virgin from Nazareth was destined to play had such momentous implications, that God deigned to grant her mercy even before she was conceived in the womb of her mother, Saint Anne. The Catholic poet Paul Claudel writes of the unique importance of woman—especially this one woman—with respect to the salvation of the world:
The promise was not given to man but to woman. It is to her that petition must be made; it is in her womb that the seed of redemption germinates. As she was the instrument of the fall–felix culpa!–she is the proprietress of salvation. It is her duty to justify to God that creation which, through her, was severed from him. Generation follows generation, and at last on our disinherited soil there springs forth amid the thorns the precious lily of the Immaculate Conception. When man falls, it is to her (and she was not absent when he was pulled from the mire) that God turns to remake man in his image. It is to her that he chooses to surrender himself as spiritual prisoner of his own clay.
The Collect of the feast powerfully captures the way God was able to give Mary mercy, even before her Son had merited this grace for her on the Cross:
O God, Who by the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin didst make her a worthy habitation for Thy Son and didst by His foreseen death preserve her from all stain of sin…
There have been theologians who, while accepting without condition the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, doubted nonetheless the argument implied in the Collect of the feast. How could God make use of the merits of His Son retroactively in order to preserve Mary from the contact with original sin which ought to have been her lot as with all the daughters of Eve? “Does that really mean anything?” they have asked. But we human beings have a bad tendency to bring God’s infinite wisdom down into the limited scope of our mortal thoughts. God dominates time. He sees it all at once, like a man contemplating a parade from a hilltop contemplates it all at once totum simul. He does these seemingly impossible things because He is God. His mercy knows no shoreline or frontiers. Yes, the Immaculate Conception as merited on the Cross means something: it means that God’s love is forever and that it foresaw the whole drama of History from eternity.
So God’s mercy came to Our Lady (so to speak), before she was even conceived and in the very event of her conception. This is a miracle and a source of wonder. But if God could do it for her, why did He not treat the entire world in the same manner, making all creation immaculate? Or course, He did make Creation immaculate in the beginning, but why could He have not made confirmed the world in grace (as with Mary), without stain, from the beginning?
Well, these are considerations beyond our ability clearly to understand, as these are God’s high designs. It is nevertheless possible to offer a few reasons. If all creation had been confirmed immaculate from the beginning, with no possibility of sin, then God’s mercy would never have been necessary. There would have been no need for the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity to descend among us, save, perhaps, in order to make a more splendid order in the world. Things would have been entirely different. No heroic sacrifice on Calvary, no ultimate expression of God’s love poured out in the Most Sorrowful Passion of Our Lord. In this case, we would not have had the Blessed Virgin Mary as she is, as all women would have been immaculate and, in a totally sinless world, the need for the Mother of God to remain miraculously a virgin would not have had much significance. What beauty we would have lost!
In fact, God had a better and greater idea. He allowed our liberty to make ultimate choices, even at the terrible risk of sin. God took that chance, but had the incomparable remedy that would salvage the shipwreck of human and angelic sin and save the human race as a whole (i.e. all the elect) from eternal damnation. In a word, He allowed evil to come into the world in order thus to bring forth an even greater good than that of preventing all evil in the first place. What more can we say? It is all beyond our ken, something to mediate upon during our entire lives.
We can truly rejoice in God’s Mercy and in the ineffable gift to the world of the Immaculate Conception. In a time when all things in our human society seem to militate against chastity and purity, the blessed image of the New Eve, younger than sin, of the Woman who crushes the head of the ancient Serpent takes on new meaning. Against the somber background of our new Dark Age (which might well be called the “Age of Impurity”), Mary’s perfect purity shines out all the more. Also, if the Immaculate Conception is just the first act of God’s great deeds of Mercy, its anticipation, the setting of the scene, then how great are the expressions of Mercy to come! Perhaps the dogmatic definition of the Immaculate Conception by Blessed Pope Pius IX was kept until the threshold of modern times, in order to give us special strength in our battles against the Antichrist of Modernism and its horrid offspring. O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee. Amen. Alleluia.
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Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
My Very Dear Sons,
Today begins, in the Roman Catholic Church, an Extraordinary Jubilee dedicated to Divine Mercy. This is no trifling event. There is nothing the world so needs at present, there is nothing each one of us so needs so urgently, as this mercy that God would give us. As the Holy Father explained in his Bull of Indiction:
We need constantly to contemplate the mystery of mercy. It is a wellspring of joy, serenity, and peace. Our salvation depends on it. Mercy: the word reveals the very mystery of the Most Holy Trinity. Mercy: the ultimate and supreme act by which God comes to meet us. Mercy: the fundamental law that dwells in the heart of every person who looks sincerely into the eyes of his brothers and sisters on the path of life. Mercy: the bridge that connects God and man, opening our hearts to the hope of being loved forever despite our sinfulness.
Why did the Sovereign Pontiff choose this feast of the Immaculate Conception as the starting point for the Jubilee? Only he knows for certain, but there is clearly a connection between the mystery of Mercy and the mystery of Mary in her Immaculate Conception. In this woman we see, you might say, God’s Mercy given in anticipation, God’s Mercy forestalling the mystery of evil that threatened the existence of this unique human being, misericordia praeveniens. The role this virgin from Nazareth was destined to play had such momentous implications, that God deigned to grant her mercy even before she was conceived in the womb of her mother, Saint Anne. The Catholic poet Paul Claudel writes of the unique importance of woman—especially this one woman—with respect to the salvation of the world:
The promise was not given to man but to woman. It is to her that petition must be made; it is in her womb that the seed of redemption germinates. As she was the instrument of the fall–felix culpa!–she is the proprietress of salvation. It is her duty to justify to God that creation which, through her, was severed from him. Generation follows generation, and at last on our disinherited soil there springs forth amid the thorns the precious lily of the Immaculate Conception. When man falls, it is to her (and she was not absent when he was pulled from the mire) that God turns to remake man in his image. It is to her that he chooses to surrender himself as spiritual prisoner of his own clay.
The Collect of the feast powerfully captures the way God was able to give Mary mercy, even before her Son had merited this grace for her on the Cross:
O God, Who by the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin didst make her a worthy habitation for Thy Son and didst by His foreseen death preserve her from all stain of sin…
There have been theologians who, while accepting without condition the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, doubted nonetheless the argument implied in the Collect of the feast. How could God make use of the merits of His Son retroactively in order to preserve Mary from the contact with original sin which ought to have been her lot as with all the daughters of Eve? “Does that really mean anything?” they have asked. But we human beings have a bad tendency to bring God’s infinite wisdom down into the limited scope of our mortal thoughts. God dominates time. He sees it all at once, like a man contemplating a parade from a hilltop contemplates it all at once totum simul. He does these seemingly impossible things because He is God. His mercy knows no shoreline or frontiers. Yes, the Immaculate Conception as merited on the Cross means something: it means that God’s love is forever and that it foresaw the whole drama of History from eternity.
So God’s mercy came to Our Lady (so to speak), before she was even conceived and in the very event of her conception. This is a miracle and a source of wonder. But if God could do it for her, why did He not treat the entire world in the same manner, making all creation immaculate? Or course, He did make Creation immaculate in the beginning, but why could He have not made confirmed the world in grace (as with Mary), without stain, from the beginning?
Well, these are considerations beyond our ability clearly to understand, as these are God’s high designs. It is nevertheless possible to offer a few reasons. If all creation had been confirmed immaculate from the beginning, with no possibility of sin, then God’s mercy would never have been necessary. There would have been no need for the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity to descend among us, save, perhaps, in order to make a more splendid order in the world. Things would have been entirely different. No heroic sacrifice on Calvary, no ultimate expression of God’s love poured out in the Most Sorrowful Passion of Our Lord. In this case, we would not have had the Blessed Virgin Mary as she is, as all women would have been immaculate and, in a totally sinless world, the need for the Mother of God to remain miraculously a virgin would not have had much significance. What beauty we would have lost!
In fact, God had a better and greater idea. He allowed our liberty to make ultimate choices, even at the terrible risk of sin. God took that chance, but had the incomparable remedy that would salvage the shipwreck of human and angelic sin and save the human race as a whole (i.e. all the elect) from eternal damnation. In a word, He allowed evil to come into the world in order thus to bring forth an even greater good than that of preventing all evil in the first place. What more can we say? It is all beyond our ken, something to mediate upon during our entire lives.
We can truly rejoice in God’s Mercy and in the ineffable gift to the world of the Immaculate Conception. In a time when all things in our human society seem to militate against chastity and purity, the blessed image of the New Eve, younger than sin, of the Woman who crushes the head of the ancient Serpent takes on new meaning. Against the somber background of our new Dark Age (which might well be called the “Age of Impurity”), Mary’s perfect purity shines out all the more. Also, if the Immaculate Conception is just the first act of God’s great deeds of Mercy, its anticipation, the setting of the scene, then how great are the expressions of Mercy to come! Perhaps the dogmatic definition of the Immaculate Conception by Blessed Pope Pius IX was kept until the threshold of modern times, in order to give us special strength in our battles against the Antichrist of Modernism and its horrid offspring. O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee. Amen. Alleluia.
