The Name of God Is Mercy

Copyright © 2016 by Edizione Piemme

Spa, Milano

Appendix copyright © 2016 by Libreria Editrice

Vaticana, Cittá del Vaticano

Translation copyright © 2016 by Penguin Random House LLC

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and the H
OUSE
colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

ISBN
 9780399588631

ebook
ISBN
 9780399588648

randomhousebooks.com

Frontispiece: © Contrasto

Book design by Simon M. Sullivan, adapted for eBook

Cover design: Nick Misani

Cover photograph: © Contrasto

v4.1

a

O
N
the morning of Sunday, March 17, 2013, Francis celebrated his first Mass after his election as Bishop of Rome, which took place the previous Wednesday evening. The Church of St. Anna in the Vatican, a short walk from the eponymous gateway to the smallest state in the world and the parish church for the inhabitants of Borgo Pio, was packed with worshippers. I was there with some of my friends. On this occasion, Francis delivered his second homily as Pope and spoke off the cuff: “The message of Jesus is mercy. For me, and I say this with humility, it is the Lord’s strongest message.”

The Pontiff chose to comment on the excerpt from the Gospel of John that speaks of the adulteress, the woman whom the scribes and Pharisees were about to stone as prescribed by the Law of Moses. Jesus saved her life by calling upon whoever was without
sin to cast the first stone. Everyone walked away. “Neither do I condemn you. Go, [and] from now on do not sin any more” (John 8:11).

Francis, referring to the scribes and Pharisees who had dragged the woman in front of the Nazarene to be stoned, said: “Sometimes we, too, like to reproach others, to condemn others.” The first and only step required to experience mercy, the Pope added, is to acknowledge that we are in need of mercy. “Jesus comes for us, when we recognize that we are sinners.” All that’s necessary is not to imitate the Pharisee who stood in front of the altar and thanked God for not being a sinner “like other men.” If we are like that Pharisee, if we think we are righteous, “we do not know the Lord’s heart, and we will never have the joy of feeling this mercy!” the new Bishop of Rome explained. Those who are in the habit of judging people from above, who are sure of their own righteousness, who are used to considering themselves just, good, and in the right, don’t feel the need to be embraced and forgiven. And there also are those who feel the need but think they are irredeemable because they have done too many bad things.

In this connection, Francis related a dialogue he had had with a man who, on being given this explanation of mercy, had answered: “Oh, Father, if you knew my life you wouldn’t talk to me like that! I have done some terrible things!” This was Francis’s reply: “Even better! Go to Jesus: he likes to hear about these things. He forgets, he has a special knack for forgetting. He forgets, he kisses you, he embraces you, and he says: ‘Neither do I condemn you. Go, [and] from now on do not sin any more.’ That is the only advice he gives. If things haven’t changed in a month…we go back to the Lord. The Lord never tires of forgiving: never! It is we who tire of asking him for forgiveness. We need to ask for the grace not to get tired of asking for forgiveness, because he never gets tired of forgiving.”

From that first homily, which particularly struck me, there emerged the centrality of the message of mercy, which would characterize these first few years of Francis’s papacy. They were simple and profound words. This is the face of a Church that doesn’t reproach men for their fragility and their wounds but that treats them with the medicine of mercy.

We live in a society that encourages us to discard the habit of recognizing and assuming our responsibilities: It is always others who make mistakes. It is always others who are immoral. It’s always someone else’s fault, never our own. And sometimes we even experience the return of a kind of clericalism, always intent on building borders, “regulating” the lives of people through imposed prerequisites and prohibitions that make our daily lives, already difficult, even harder. An attitude of being always ready to condemn and much less willing to accept. Ready to judge but not to bow down with compassion for mankind’s sufferings. The message of mercy—the heart of that sort of unwritten “first encyclical,” which was contained in the new Pope’s brief homily—swept all those stereotypes away.

A
LITTLE
more than a year later, on April 7, 2014, Francis returned to the same passage during morning Mass at Saint Martha’s House, confessing his attachment to this part of the Gospel. “God forgives not with a decree but with a caress.” And with mercy,
“Jesus too goes beyond the law and forgives by caressing the wounds of our sins.”

“Today’s Bible readings,” the Pope explained, “speak to us of adultery,” which together with blasphemy and idolatry was considered “a grave sin under the Law of Moses” and punishable “with the penalty of death” by stoning. In the excerpt from the eighth chapter of John, the Pope pointed out: “We meet Jesus, who was sitting there, surrounded by people, in the role of the catechist, teaching.” Then “the scribes and Pharisees came to him with a woman, perhaps with her hands tied, we might imagine. Then they brought her to the middle and accused her: here is an adulteress!” Theirs is a public accusation. The Gospel says that they asked Jesus a question: “What should we do with this woman? You talk to us of goodness, but Moses told us that we must kill her!” “They said this,” Francis observed, “to put him to the test, so that they could accuse him of something. In fact, if Jesus had said to them: ‘Go ahead with the stoning,’ they could then have said to people: ‘You say your master is so good, but look what he has done to this poor woman!’ If instead Jesus had said, ‘No, the poor
woman, we need to forgive her!’ they could have accused him of ‘not enforcing the law.’ ”

Their only objective, Francis continued, was “to test him, to lay a trap” for Jesus. “They didn’t care about the woman, they didn’t care about adultery.” On the contrary, “maybe even some were themselves adulterers.” And so Jesus, who wanted “to be alone with the woman and speak to her heart,” answered, “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” And then “they went away one by one” after hearing those words. “The Gospel, with a certain amount of irony, says that they went away, one by one, starting with the eldest: clearly they owed a lot of money to the heavenly bank!” Then came the moment “of Jesus Confessor.” He is left “alone with the woman” who was placed in the midst. Meanwhile, “Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. Some commentators say that Jesus was writing out the sins of those scribes and Pharisees” but “maybe that is just imagination.” Then “he stood up and looked at” the woman who was “full of shame and said to her: ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you? We are alone, you and I. You
are before God. With no accusations, no gossip: you and God.’ ”

The woman—Francis went on to note in his homily—did not claim to be a victim of “false accusations,” she did not defend herself by saying “I didn’t commit adultery.” No, “she acknowledged her sin” and answered Jesus by saying, “No one condemned me, Lord.” And so Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, [and] from now on do not sin any more.” Therefore, Francis concluded, “Jesus forgives. But here there is something more than forgiveness. Because as confessor, Jesus goes beyond the law.” In fact, “the law stated that she must be punished.” What’s more, Jesus “was pure and could have himself cast the first stone.” But Christ “goes futher than that. He does not say adultery is not a sin, but he does not condemn her with the law.” This is “the mystery of the mercy of Jesus.”

To “show mercy,” Jesus goes beyond “the law that demanded stoning.” And so he tells the woman to go in peace. “Mercy,” the Bishop of Rome said during that morning sermon, “is something difficult to understand: it does not erase sins.” What erases sins “is
God’s forgiveness.” But mercy is the way in which God forgives. Because “Jesus could have said: I forgive you, now go! As he said to the paralyzed man: ‘Your sins are forgiven!’ ” Here, in this situation, “Jesus goes further and advises the woman not to sin again. And here we see the merciful attitude of Jesus: he defends sinners from their enemies, he defends the sinner from a just condemnation.”

This, Francis added, “also applies to us….How many of us would deserve to be condemned! And it would be just! But he forgives.” How? “With mercy, which does not erase the sin: only God’s forgiveness erases it, while mercy goes further.” It is “like the sky: we look at the sky when it is full of stars, but when the sun comes out in the morning, with all its light, we don’t see the stars anymore. That is what God’s mercy is like: a great light of love and tenderness because God forgives not with a decree, but with a caress.” He does it “by caressing the wounds of our sin because he is involved in forgiving, he is involved in our salvation.”

In this sense, Pope Francis concluded, Jesus is a confessor. He does not humiliate the adulteress. He
does not exclaim: “What have you done, when did you do it, how did you do it, and who did you do it with!” On the contrary, he tells her, “Go and sin no more. The mercy of God is great, the mercy of Jesus is great: they forgive us by caressing us.”

T
HE
Holy Year is a consequence of this message and the centrality it has always had in Francis’s preaching. On March 13, 2015, while I was listening to the homily of the penitential liturgy at the end of which the Pope would announce the proclamation of the exceptional Holy Year, I thought how wonderful it would be to ask him a few questions that focused on the theme of mercy and forgiveness, to analyze what those words mean to him, as a man and a priest. I was unconcerned with getting a few punchy phrases that might become part of the media debate around the Synod on the Family, which often felt like a kind of match between fans of opposing teams. Without getting caught up in casuistry, I liked the idea of an interview that would reveal the heart of Francis and his vision. I wanted a text that would open doors, especially
during this Holy Year, when the Church wants to show, in a very special and even more significant way, its face of mercy.

The Pope accepted my suggestion. This book is the fruit of the conversations that began in his lodgings in Saint Martha’s House in the Vatican on a muggy afternoon last July, a few days after his return from a journey to Ecuador, Bolivia, and Paraguay. With very little advance notice, I had sent ahead a list of topics and questions I wanted to cover. I arrived with three recording devices. Francis was waiting for me sitting at a table with a Bible concordance on it and some quotations from the Church Fathers. You can read the contents of our conversations in the pages that follow.

I hope that the interviewee will not be offended if I reveal a backstage episode that I find particularly telling. We discussed the difficulties of acknowledging ourselves as sinners, and in the first draft, I wrote that Francis asserted, “The medicine is there, the healing is there—if only we take a small step toward God.” After reading the text, he called me and asked me to add “or even just the desire to take that step.” It
was a phrase that I had clumsily left out of my summary. This addition, or rather, the proper restoration of the complete text, reveals the vast heart of the shepherd who seeks to align himself with the merciful heart of God and leaves nothing untried in reaching out to sinners. He overlooks no possibility, no matter how small, in attempting to give the gift of forgiveness. God awaits us with open arms; we need only take a step toward him like the Prodigal Son. But if, weak as we are, we don’t have the strength to take that step, just the desire to take it is enough. It’s already enough of a start for grace to work and mercy to be granted in accordance with the experience of a Church that does not see itself as a customs office but as an agent that seeks out every single possible way to forgive.

A similar situation can be found in Bruce Marshall’s novel
To Every Man a Penny
. The protagonist of the novel, Gaston, a young priest, needs to hear the confession of a young German soldier whom the French partisans are about to sentence to death. The soldier confesses his passion for women and the numerous amorous adventures he has had. The priest explains
that he must repent to obtain forgiveness and absolution. The soldier answers, “How can I repent? It was something I enjoyed, and if I had the chance I would do it again, even now. How can I repent?” Father Gaston, who wants to absolve the man who has been marked by destiny and who is about to die, has a stroke of inspiration and asks, “But are you sorry that you are not sorry?” The young man answers impulsively, “Yes, I am sorry that I am not sorry.” In other words, he is sorry for not repenting. That sorrow is the opening that allows the merciful priest to give the man absolution.

A.T.