The Jubilee Year of Mercy has been an exciting one. But today will be its highlight. My Saint Benedict Press colleagues and I are attending Pope Francis' general audience, days before Holy Week in St. Peter's Square.
A month before I'd sent the Holy Father's secretary "Doors of Mercy," a video series our team produced for the jubilee year. We'll be in Rome soon, I wrote. It would be an honor to present "Doors of Mercy" to the Holy Father. Now it seems I will.
We arrive in St. Peter's Square and make our way through the first checkpoint. Then another. Then another still. Swiss guards, resplendent in their livery, examine our tickets and send us higher. Papal ushers, or sediari, then lead us to our seats. Mine is better than I'd dared hope. When the Holy Father arrives I will be less than 30 feet to his left, with no one in between.
I turn my head to look out at St. Peter's Square and beyond. For a brief moment on this Wednesday in March, I am seeing the world as the pope sees it.
Crowds in St. Peter's Square await the pope's arrival. They are happy and boisterous. Some young people bang drums.
Days earlier I had walked St. Peter's Square, and its massive scale was imposing and daunting. But now I see what its size is for: To hold tens of thousands of joyful pilgrims. From here the massive colonnades of the Square seem warm and human. They are the arms of a mother, gathering her children, keeping them safe.
My view includes more than St. Peter's Square. I see outside it, too, past the security gates, into the Borgo district, down the broad Via della Conciliazione to the Tiber River and beyond. Outside the gates are more pilgrims. They are the late arrivals, the ticketless, the luckless. They crowd outside, still wanting to be close. Among them are the poor. Some beg, some slouch despondently, some peddle trinkets and selfie sticks. It is impossible to go far without an appeal for help.
Beyond the pilgrims and the poor is Rome and its suburbs, about four million people. For them the general audience is not a highlight, but a weekly event. They carry on with their routines, not experiencing the excitement in the square, perhaps indifferent to it. But there they are, visible from the landing where the pope will make his address. The pope will be speaking to them, too.
My view includes one other group: security. Inside the Square the Swiss Guard and sediari keep order. Outside security is more intimidating. It includes not only police and carabinieri, but also soldiers carrying machine guns.
The soldiers' presence is a reaction to the terrorist attacks in Paris and threats against the pope. They remind me there is indeed a cost of discipleship. The stakes are high, and real.
The pope arrives, and the crowd's excitement knows no bounds. He gives a short teaching in Italian from the Book of Jeremiah. It is about the consolation God provides in times of affliction and exile, and our responsibility to "open hearts and open doors" to exiles today. But I don't understand Italian. So I soak in the moment, relish being here with the pope.
As I look over the square and the city beyond, I am not thinking of Jeremiah. I am thinking of Our Lord and His words to another city: How many times I yearned to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her young under her wings.
This passage is known as the Lament over Jerusalem. It voices the Lord's desire to protect Jerusalem at a moment of judgment, and danger – a danger realized with the razing of the city by the Emperor Titus in 70 A.D.
Francis is the vicar of Our Lord. He must feel this yearning, the Lord's yearning, too.
This, I think, is the key to understanding the Holy Year. This is the key to Francis' papacy. He yearns to gather the faithful and the fumbling, the poor and the worldly, the ticketed and unticketed, the zealous and indifferent and lukewarm. He wants them all. He wants them in the maternal arms. He wants them under His wings. He wants to open wide the Door of Mercy. And he wants all to go through it, before the judgment comes.
The Holy Father's address ends, and my reverie with it. He blesses us, then plunges into the crowd. For half an hour he wades through it, greeting pilgrims, speaking words of encouragement. Will he make his way to me?
He does. I have time to take his hand and kiss the Fisherman's ring before he moves on.
But then the Holy Father stops. He turns back to me.
I hand our "Doors of Mercy" program to one of the sediari and kiss his ring again. "Thank you for the Jubilee Year, Holy Father," I say.
He smiles, and what strikes me are his eyes, clear, brown, youthful. They radiate warmth and intelligence, qualities not often combined in such high degree.
"Pray for me," he says in English. "Don't forget!"
I will pray for you, Holy Father. I won't forget.
Rick Rotondi is an executive with Saint Benedict Press, publisher of "Doors of Mercy," a book and video program for the Jubilee Year of Mercy. It is available online at www.tanbooks.com.
What we think is the right road
I don't know and, frankly, I don't care if God exists. I leave that to poets, priests and preachers. Anyway, it's not as though I see God and talk with Him every day. It's not as if He gives me a raise at work or sorts things out for me when I have a tough time with my friends and family. If God exists – and you can't prove it by me – then He is utterly irrelevant to me. I don't get my joy from God, and I don't have to obey some ancient stuff about doing His "will," whatever that is. I have more important things to worry about.
But it's the wrong road
There is no such word as "deusapathy" – meaning indifference about and lack of concern over the question about God's existence and meaning for us – but there should be. Persuading people that God exists means far more than citing Psalm 14 (or 53) that the fool says in his heart that there is no God. Modern atheism and agnosticism now increasingly concede the existence of God, but refuse to accept God's sentience. That is, they accept a kind of unconscious and uncaring God – a god (deliberate lower case) whom they see as, well, "the Force."
This "modern god" sits in the heavens utterly unconcerned about the fate of human beings. Because that god doesn't care about us, why should we care about him? This is the old notion of Deism on steroids, for these people accept reason up to a point, but deny the revelation. They accept the scientific but deny the miraculous. They accept the natural but deny the supernatural. They accept the historical but deny the providential.
Deists thought of God as a clockmaker. He wound things up and then let them run, without governing or intervening. Heresies have a way of cropping up again and again, and deusapathy is just another iteration of Deism, which was popular in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Cardinal Robert Sarah writes, "Contrary to what we may think, the greatest difficulty of men is not in believing what the Church teaches at the moral level; the most difficult thing for the postmodern world is to believe in God." He continues, "Western societies are organized and live as though God did not exist. Christians themselves, on many occasions, have settled down to a silent apostasy."
Cardinal Sarah teaches that "we no longer know who man is once he detaches himself from his Creator." In separating himself from God or in expressing disdain for the divine, he says, "Man intends to recreate himself; he rejects the laws of his nature, which become contingent. Man's rupture with God obscures his way of looking at creation. Blinded by his technological successes, his worldview disfigures the world..., and man is the one who must give them meaning."
In fact, we are not architects who design the world and its meaning. We are, rather, archeologists who discover meaning (see, for example, Judith 8:12-14; Job 38:4-7). There will always be a war in own souls, for we either become God's or we seek to become gods. When, in the corruption and moral stupor of deusapathy, we no longer care about God, about doing His will and about living according to His teaching (defined in and by the Church), then we are effectively seeking to make God conform to our wills and our ways, to make Him in our image.
Remember how God calls Samuel, who wakes and says, "Speak; your servant is listening" (1 Sam 3:10). We have superciliously replaced that passage by telling God: "Listen; your master is speaking." And so the psalmist tells us of God's judgment: "My people would not listen to me: Israel would not obey me. So I let them go their stubborn ways and do whatever they wanted" (81:11-12 GNB).
Again, there is nothing new under the sun. The core of modern political ideology is the ghost of the centuries-old heresy known as Pelagianism, which denied original sin and taught that human beings can achieve salvation through our own sustained efforts. That is a lie (cf. John 8:44). It is certainly true, though, as Our Lord teaches, that "without me you can do nothing" (John 15:5). A corollary is that, without God, we can (and will) do anything. As the Russian writer Dostoevsky put it, "If God does not exist, then everything is permitted."
Catholic philosophy has long held that we can demonstrate God's existence through natural reasoning. Properly taught, political science teaches its students that, without God, there are no moral and practical standards to guide, guard and govern us. Without cathedrals to worship God, we build gulags and concentration camps and abortion facilities to butcher humans.
Cardinal Sarah writes that "the most profound misery is the lack of God." We are – it is stunning to realize this – stronger than God: if we tell Him to depart from our lives, He obeys! That is precisely what deusapathy and sin are: telling God that we do not care about Him and that we will believe and behave according to our own wishes, constructing our personal Tower of Babel. Is it historically demonstrable that the wages of sin is death (Rom 6:23)? Yes, it is. In God's will is our peace – a key reason never to be apathetic about the One who is Love.
Deacon James H. Toner serves at Our Lady of Grace Church in Greensboro.