Monthly Word from the Chaplain: Mother Most Powerful, Mother Most Merciful

Mother Most Powerful - Mother Most Merciful

For this month, I would like to share with you the wonderful sermon give by Canon F.X Altiere, at Saint Francis de Sales Oratory, for the Novena to the Immaculate Conception. We express our deep gratitude to Canon for that beautiful meditation!

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1st Sunday of Advent

St. Francis de Sales Oratory

Canon F.X. Altiere

False religions, like Islam or Lutheranism, are riddled with contradictions. Catholicism, on the other hand, presents to our first glance certain paradoxes. A paradox is not the same thing as a contradiction. A paradox is a statement which brings before our mind two truths whose compatibility is not immediately obvious. How, for example, is man’s freedom compatible with God’s omniscience? Now is not the place to rehearse a list of these paradoxes, which have exercised great minds for two thousand years. To me falls simply the task of invoking Our Lady under two titles gathered today in her Litany that at first glance seem divergent: Virgin Most Powerful, Virgin Most Merciful.

To the world, of course, this paradox seems insuperable. We on the other hand know that meekness is not weakness. The mind of the Church is perfectly expressed in this Collect from the Missal: “O God, who dost manifest Thine almighty power above all in showing pardon and pity: multiply upon us Thy mercy” (10th Sunday after Pentecost). There is no contradiction in God between power and mercy. To heal the breach of sin requires a greater power than to create the physical universe!

What we can say of God is true also of his Blessed Mother, albeit in a subordinate way. Without any doubt, Mary is both powerful and merciful. She is the Refuge of Sinners, because her powerful mediation obtains mercy. To understand what this means, we shall ask St. Augustine to define mercy for us. He says that mercy is “the compassion in our heart for another person’s misery, a compassion which drives us to do what we can to help him.” Mercy, therefore, starts as pity, as the feeling of compassion, which literally means to “suffer with.” But mercy is not only emotion, it is not just affective: it is also effective. And that is where power comes in. Showing mercy implies that one has the power to do something about the needs and sufferings of others. The definition of mercy also shows us that true mercy involves two aspects: charity and suffering. I like to think of mercy as the chemical reaction that results when love comes in to contact with misery. 

That Our Lady perfectly practiced the works of mercy there can be no doubt. We see her going to share her cousin Elizabeth’s joy and to help her in the days of her pregnancy. At the wedding of Cana she intervenes directly to provide drink for the thirsty. In the Upper Room, as the Apostles gathered around her before the coming of the Holy Ghost, she counselled the doubtful, by her loving presence as much as by her words. And indeed, through the history of the Church, from heaven, Our Blessed Mother has continued to perform these corporal and spiritual works of mercy. When in the thirteenth century St. Peter Nolasco wished to found a religious order dedicated to the good work of ransoming captives, he entrusted this work to Our Lady of Mercy, the Mercedarians. In her apparitions, especially through the seers at Fatima, Our Lady has performed the spiritual work of mercy that is admonishing the sinner.

There is another title of Our Lady which comes not from the Litany but directly from the sacred liturgy. That title is: Destroyer of Heresies, cunctas hæreses sola interemisti in universo mundo. In point of fact, destroying heresy is a work both of power and of mercy. Of power, because truth is more puissant than error. Of mercy, because to instruct the ignorant is one of the greatest spiritual works of mercy. It is a sad fact that one of the main errors of our time concerns precisely the corruption of mercy. People speak, for example, of “mercy killing,” which is not a paradox but an oxymoron. Even in the Church, this most beautiful virtue is being debased and corrupted. St. Paul speaks of those who “changed the truth of God into a lie; and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Roman 1:26). And so it is that this debased mercy, without any need for repentance, is being peddled like spiritual snake oil.

Under the patronage of Mary the Destroyer of All Heresies, it would be helpful, I think, for us to ponder the source of this new false mercy that is doing so much damage to souls. You will recall that mercy – true mercy – is the response of love when it comes into contact with misery. Now, if love and suffering are the two components of mercy, then we will have fake mercy if one of these two things is off kilter. In other words, if our mercy comes from false love, mercy itself will be falsified. If our mercy involves misjudging the nature of someone’s suffering, then too our mercy will be falsified. 

Christians and secularists, in fact, have opposing notions of love. We have only to contrast the Virgin Mary of the Church with the “goddess of reason” of the Revolution to see this. Since hate is the counterweight of love, we find that we are often accused of hatred by people who do not know what love really is. So, why do we as Christians love others? Love of neighbour is always subordinated to love of God. And indeed the reason we love our neighbour at all is not because he is useful to us or because we find him pleasant, but simply because he, like us, is created in the image of God. This love which is based on our common humanity made in the image of God is called charity. But what is love for the secularist? The foundation is not the image of God inscribed in our immortal soul, but rather the false idea of personal autonomy. Good is what you make it to be, it is whatever appeals to you. And the response of others to your autonomy is called affirmation. You need to support, to affirm, to validate the decisions of others. Failing to do so makes you a hater. Or, in the infamous words of the Casey Supreme Court decision in 1992: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” These words are as stupid as they are evil. So, for the Christian, love means charity; for the secularist, love means affirmation. In the new dictatorship of false mercy, failing to affirm others comes across as a form of hatred because you are denying their radical autonomy. In such a regime, spiritual works of mercy like instructing the ignorant and admonishing the sinner become impossible. How can you admonish the sinner – or for that matter even pray for his conversion – if the new doctrine of mercy means you must simply affirm him?

The next deviation of false mercy is a bit more subtle, and it is this one that has become prevalent in the Church in the last few years. Remember that mercy is the response of love when it comes into contact with misery. But there is misery … and then there is misery. We falsify mercy when we see a lesser suffering as decisive and try to abolish it, even though there are in fact worse sufferings. For example, a doctor shows false mercy when he tries to spare his patient fear of a painful operation by lying about his diagnosis, even though he will die of a treatable disease as a result. The doctor has misjudged fear as a being a worse misery than death. Or perhaps a priest worries that a bigamist will feel left out if he can’t receive holy communion: this priest practices false mercy because he thinks feeling left out is a worse misery than committing the sins of adultery and sacrilege and going to hell.

“O Mary, thou alone hast destroyed all the heresies in the world.” Our heavenly patron St. Francis de Sales had these words inscribed over the arch in the principal church of the Chablais, after his long efforts had won that region back to the Catholic faith. I am certain that we too will be able to proclaim those words with gusto, once this Dark Night of the Church has passed. Every heresy takes some aspect of the truth and inflates it like a cancer, till it crowds out the rest of the truth. So it is with the new heresy of false mercy. Mary, the Mother of Mercy, is also the Virgin most powerful. She knows the value of mercy because at the foot of the cross she watched the terrible price her Son had to pay for it. And so precisely because she is so powerful, we ask her to defeat the heresies which are leading so many souls astray. Through her intercession, may the virtue of true Christian mercy shine forth once again in all its divine splendour. Virgin most powerful, Destroyer of heresy, Mother of mercy, pray for us!