One of the greatest effects of the Paschal Mystery of Jesus’s Death and Resurrection is our liberation from sin, making possible new life already here as we anticipate the fullness of that new life in Heaven.  This liberation from sin was given to us despite humanity’s infidelity over and over again throughout history.  Fittingly, the invocation from the Litany of the Sacred Heart that I have chosen for this Divine Mercy Sunday on which we celebrate this gift of liberation from sin is the following:

Heart of Jesus, patient and rich in mercy, have mercy on us

As we hear in the Gospel for today’s Mass, Jesus gave to His Apostles the ability to be instruments of this mercy when, after breathing on them, He says: “Receive the holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” (Jn 20:22b-23) We know all too well the sad reality that, after we have been liberated from sin through the Sacrament of Baptism, we still fall into sin.  Over and over again, we stumble, but the Lord shows His patience toward us by inviting us to bring those sins to Him through His priests in the Sacrament of Reconciliation and to have that liberation renewed.  There are no limits to this mercy.  It is not as though we have a finite number of times that we can go to confession, or that there are only a certain number of times that we can confess the same sins before that mercy runs out.  Quite the contrary!  Jesus’s Sacred Heart is rich in mercy toward of all His children.  All that He asks is that we ask for it, and He will surely give it to us.

Thanks be to God, this message of Divine Mercy has been very popular over the past few decades, especially since Pope St. John Paul II canonized St. Faustina Kowalska, the Apostle of Divine Mercy, in the Jubilee Year of 2000.  So many of Jesus’s messages given to her highlight just how profound this gift of mercy is.  One passage in particular from her Diary is one I love to meditate on:

Let the greatest sinners place their trust in My mercy. They have the right before others to trust in the abyss of My mercy. My daughter, write about My mercy towards tormented souls. Souls that make an appeal to My mercy delight Me. To such souls I grant even more graces than they ask. I cannot punish even the greatest sinner if he makes an appeal to My compassion, but on the contrary, I justify him in My unfathomable and inscrutable mercy. (Diary, 1146)

It is hard to for us to grasp how our appealing for His mercy as we acknowledge our sins brings delight to Him.  After all, every sin we commit is an offense against Him and it can be very embarrassing to have to bring those sins to confession.  On the other hand, our appealing to Him for His mercy in the Sacrament of Reconciliation is an affirmation and an act of thanksgiving for the gift of His sacrifice on the Cross, that it was not in vain.  He willingly died for us, so that when we find ourselves separated from Him by sin, we have an outlet to be restored to that new life His Resurrection won for us.  This indeed is the Good News of the Resurrection that we continue to celebrate with Easter!

If you ever visit the city of Rome, and the Lateran Basilica in particular, you may notice an interesting statue a good distance from the front doors of that church. This statue is rather large and depicts a man with his arms thrust out in front of him as if he is pushing something upwards forcefully. Yet, he’s not holding on to anything… at least not anything you can see right away. 

In order to see what this statue is “holding up,” you actually need to stand behind him and look in the same direction. From that angle, you would see that his hands seem to be not simply reaching out into the air haphazardly but instead are actually holding on to the Lateran basilica itself, through an optical illusion of perspective. 

This statue, (as you would have guessed by now if you know the story), depicts St. Francis of Assisi.

Now, literally holding up the Lateran Basilica is not something St. Francis ever really did, but it is an image from a dream that the Pope Innocent III had before St. Francis ever came to see him to request permission to found a community based on the Gospel rule of life. We see this scene in Chapter three of the Life of St. Francis by St. Bonaventure. 

Francis has written his rule and desires papal approval, so he and his brothers (there are seven of them now) go to visit Rome. In a very fitting turn of events, Francis first goes to see the pope but is turned away. Pope Innocent III later has a vision from God that this man who seems so poor and insignificant would eventually blossom into something beautiful. The pope grants him an audience the next day.

After speaking with him, the Pope is impressed by how faithfully Francis and his brothers want to follow the Gospel. While their rule seemed somewhat harsh, it really is just a radical and simple way to live the Gospel. As one of the bishops attending the pope stated, “If we refuse the request of this poor man as novel or too difficult, when all he asks is to be allowed to lead the Gospel life, we must be on our guard lest we commit an offense against Christ’s Gospel” (Quoted from The Life of St. Francis, Translated by Ewert Cousin, Ch. 3.9).  

After this audience in which the pope granted Francis permission to follow his rule of life as a community and to preach the Gospel, the Pope realized that this man was the one who would fulfill a prophecy the Pope had received in a vision previously. The Pope “had seen in a dream, as he recounted, that a little poor man, insignificant and despised, was holding up on his back the Lateran basilica which was about to collapse” (ibid. 3.10). The Lateran basilica, though not as large as St. Peter’s basilica nowadays, has always been the most primary church in Rome and symbolizes the whole Church. St. Francis would bring the church renewal and new life.

This vision and the whole scenario of the foundation of the rule of St. Francis and its effect on the Church reminds me of the line in the Magnificat, “He has cast down the mighty and lifted up the lowly.” Truly, in St. Francis, the Lord has lifted up his lowly servant to bring down those whom the world considered great. He didn’t bring them down violently, but by his simplicity and poverty, he became great and renewed for the entire Church the vision of what true greatness is. As our Lord himself emphasized, “Whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant.”

May the prayers of St. Francis strengthen us in humility and generosity!