Love's Second Name

Last Easter the six-year-old son of one of our friends asked him, “Why did Jesus die on the cross, Daddy? Couldn't he save himself?” Eduardo answered that, yes, he could have, but he wanted to sacrifice himself so that we would be forgiven all our sins. Ruben pondered this a minute, then exclaimed, “Wow, Daddy, Jesus was brave! He was like a soldier who dives on top of a grenade to save his buddies!”

Neither mystics nor theologians ever plumb the depths of this mystery of mercy. Like Ruben, they come by some of their best insights through analogy. Sometimes, though, one of those insights, with help from on high, strikes humankind’s inner eye and causes us all to see the paschal mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection in a new way. St. Faustina Kowalska’s visions and messages revealing Christ once again as Divine Mercy are one of those helps.


See pamphlet here.

Too often “divine mercy” is reduced to popular practice: Divine Mercy Sunday—April 15 this year. (Wouldn’t that be a switch for tax day?) with the corresponding novena and chaplet. How many of us have read John Paul II’s letter on The Mercy of God? How many of us think each day of ways we can pour out on others the mercy we ourselves have received? How often is a lack of mercy and justice the subject of personal confession, either at the end of the day, or in a family setting, or in a celebration of the sacrament of Penance? Is there ever anyone or any group of people from whom we withhold compassionate understanding or forgiveness? How can we be blessed into becoming merciful people who are then capable of once again obtaining mercy? (Mt. 5:7) In her blog this week, NCR columnist Isabella R. Moyer invites us to ask ourselves if we are persons and a people of mercy.

Numbers 7 and 8 of The Mercy of God (Dives in misericordia) touch especially on the aspects of mercy that rise to the top of the churn at this time of year: mercy revealed in the cross and resurrection. In connecting it with Christian faith and charity, John Paul II calls mercy “love’s second name.” He boldly asserts that “believing in the crucified Son means…believing that “love is more powerful than any kind of evil….[It] means believing in mercy…an indispensible dimension of love….”

Love’s second name may be mercy, but Christian mercy, also has a name: Jesus, Way, Truth, and Life.

Let’s start with Way. “No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn. 14:6). What does that mean? Jesus, the God-Man, is the way to rebuilding our right relationship with God. How do we enter into this relationship? By wishing it? By believing that it happens? Paul would answer: “Don’t you know that those of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore, we were buried with him through our baptism into his death so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the Father’s glory we too might be able to lead a new life” (Rom. 6:3). We walk in Christ, who is our Way to the Father in the Holy Spirit. Thus, grace—God living in us, a gift won for us on the cross and from the empty tomb—is our justification through God’s mercy.


Prodigal Son tile. Church of Santa Maria dei Popoli, Rome.

Truth. In the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament), this is identified with God, who is always faithful to the covenant he made with his People. More: In his fidelity, he is actually being faithful to himself: God does not go back on his word. Again Paul: “God’s gift and his call are irrevocable” (Rom. 11:29). Paul casts this in terms of our disobedience and God’s mercy to Jew and Gentile alike. In this he echoes what Israel understood in Hebrew: hesed, “faithful mercy.” Jesus, “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature” (Heb. 1:3), is the incarnation of this hesed, this Truth, this mercy.

Life. God gives and nurtures life, just like a mother (Is. 49:15), sheltering and forgiving us and tenderly showing us compassion: rahamim, as the ancients would have called it. This life giving mercy springs from God’s heart and fiercely protects us, even to death, from what destroys his life in us. Sound like Anyone we know? Peter confessed to Jesus, “You have the words of eternal life” (Jn. 6:68).

The heart is what gives life, and in biblical language, the inner heart is the center of a person’s being, where decisions are made for or against God and neighbor, for life or death. Sanctified, blessed, made holy by grace, the heart makes us dear to God. The sacraments are reservoirs of this grace for the heart; prayer in faith gives us what we need to tap into it.

I spent Holy Week reading a portion of a book I’ve been meditating on for months—The Promise,* by the Church’s first Jewish cardinal, Jean-Marie Lustiger of Paris. Like St. Paul, he makes it clear that mercy is made available to us all, Jews and Gentiles, but that we have to be able to accept it. The only way we can do that is by facing our sin. Where do we do that? In the same place where we are forgiven—at the cross. “God has consigned all to disobedience so that he may show mercy to all” (Rom. 11: 32). Lustiger writes:

“Sin is a kind of war, a case of man setting himself up against God. The innocence and righteousness of the Son—Word made flesh, Son of God made man—bring to light the homicidal tendency which dwells in the heart of every man….

“In Christ’s wounds, man can see himself as he is: not in another sinner, but in the Innocent One whom he disfigures. Adam, Man, can contemplate himself in Christ, for in the wounds he inflicts on the Innocent, the Righteous One, he sees his own portrait. In the derision he heaps upon Jesus, he sees his own cruelty. In the apostles’ betrayal, he sees his own cowardice. In Jesus abandoned, he sees his own abandonment of God.

“Paul will say: ‘For our sake he made him to be sin’ (2 Corinthians 5:21)….Only the holiness of the obedient Son reveals the refusal that dwells in every man’s heart; and if he permits sin to be thus revealed, it is in order to make universal forgiveness possible.


Renewal of baptismal promises, Easter liturgy

“…All [human beings] see their own sin revealed, so that all can be forgiven by God and all can receive mercy.”

John Paul points out that justice, or restoration of our relationship with God, is not an evening of the score, but a complete overhaul of the human tendencies that Cardinal Lustiger writes about. Because this justice “springs completely from love,” it recreates us. This is why, in his homily for Holy Saturday, Pope Benedict could describe the Easter sacrament of baptism and our profession of faith in the Risen One, through which this re-creation happens, as a “bridge” connecting us with the light of Jesus, who is “God’s new day.” Jesus, his paschal mystery, and his gift of baptism are the sequel to the creation story we read about in Genesis at the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday night. If you and I still sin, if sin still plagues our societies, it’s not because grace has failed, but because grace in us and in our world is still writing the end of that sequel.

This justice is effected, brought about, by mercy. You can probably guess what I’m going to say next. By going this route of justice-through-mercy, God has given us a template for social justice, as well. Briefly, John Paul says that contrary to prevailing opinion, mercy is not unilateral. Did you ever teach someone, or do good to someone, maybe participating in a project for a non-profit organization? At the end of the day, did you ever wonder who benefitted more from the experience—the people you set out to help, or you? Jesus experiences the same thing. He considers our acts of mercy, personal or societal, as done to himself (Mt. 25:31ff.). If we can get past the notion that real mercy somehow tips the balance in favor of the one who “receives” it to the detriment of the one who “gives” it, our world might have a shot at restorative justice after all. (See “Weekly PauLine” in the right sidebar.)

If we’ve never made this our prayer before, then now, with the world as it is, would be as good a time as any to start. We can begin by acknowledging to our good God that we don’t know how to pray for ourselves or our world as we should (cf. Rom. 8:26). We can even admit to him, if not to anyone else, that we’re not all too sure that mercy can lead us to justice. But we don’t want to stop there. Whether we decide to pray with the chaplet to Divine Mercy, or from our hearts to pray in some other way, we can ask God to enlighten and guide us and turn our hearts toward his vision for us, since “nothing is impossible with God” (Lk. 1:36).

* Jean-Marie Lustiger, The Promise (Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2007), p. 86.

The Media Redeemed

It’s a statement of the obvious that we’re now on the threshold of remembering, in a life giving way, the sacrificial moment and mystery that redeemed the world. Liturgically, Holy Thursday to Easter Sunday is one uninterrupted moment. It grace-fully reminds us that, though won for us centuries ago, salvation redeems every ecstatic or tragic moment of our lives until we give each one back to God at the end, ready for it to burst open in the full flowering of that salvation.

Literature and drama also speak of redemption. Think of any great book, movie, poem, or play. Through a chain of events and choices, their flawed heroes even half-heartedly live the story of personal—and universal—redemption. In a talk at the City of Angels Film Festival in L.A. five years ago, screenwriter, producer, and director Randall Wallace (“Braveheart,” “The Rookie”) applied this literary device to the sphere of revelation when he said, “God redefines our identity; that’s what redemption is.” God doesn’t turn a blind eye to sin, sweep it under the carpet, or cover it over, but buys back, recreates, starts over.

Not just spiritually either. Everything human, including social structures and culture, is redeemed too. That’s why in the Pauline Family our hope for media is irrepressible. How that redemption is played out is the great drama of life.

On March 11, the Pauline Family in New York held a Lenten retreat for friends and acquaintances that was also meant to reintroduce them to this hope as we Paulines envision it. (See blog post of March 14.) Brother Aloysius Milella, SSP, gave the following talk, linking sanctity and media in the way the Church witnesses to the Gospel:

“One of the constants in the talks, audiences and writings of our Holy Father, Pope Benedict, is his oft repeated recommendation that as believers and Christians, we develop a relationship with Jesus, a communion with him, one-on-one in prayer. We know and learn about him in reading the Gospels and Scripture, but there is no substitute for relating to him as the companion of our journeying through the space we give him in prayer. Throughout his long and extraordinarily active life, our founder, Father James Alberione, was a singular example of this.

“I begin sharing this quotation:
‘What have we to gain from meeting the saints?  Two things: relief from monotony, and contact with vitality. Relief from monotony: people in their essential personalities can be very different, but sin blots out the distinctions and reduces the diversity. Sin drains out the color of the person (which is his or her own and inimitable) and replaces it with the color of sin which is common property.
All sinners look less like themselves and more like one another. Saints instead, are intensely themselves. Second: contact with vitality. Sin, being a following of the line of least resistance inevitably lessens vitality. It takes no more vitality to go with the stream of inclination than with any other stream. But to go against, as the saint does, demands immense vitality. If by chance you think saints are saints because they lack the energy for wrongdoing...try to know some of them and the incredible energetic accomplishments of human caring they achieved in Jesus’ name in their lifetimes.’

“That is an excerpt from the introductory remarks of Frank Sheed in Saints Are Not Sad, his classic collection of forty essays about the saints, published this year by Ignatius Press.

“Over the centuries in the history of our faith, we have  come to learn so much about God and of his Son come to live among us—perhaps not as much through theological studies as through the remarkable ways the saints incorporated the life and teachings of Jesus into their deeper selves.  This would often translate into an array of marvelous applications of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy for the benefit and service of the Lord’s people whenever and wherever. Apart from unique nudges of grace, their charisms nearly always grew out of intuitions and inspirations matured through a perceptive grasp of the Scriptures. It happened more often than not that their lives appeared as something akin to new, walking translations of the Word of God.

“All of this is by way of introducing some reflection on the founder of the Pauline Family, Father James Alberione—Blessed James Alberione.*  His Family is made up of five religious congregations:
   SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL
   DAUGHTERS OF ST. PAUL
   SISTER DISCIPLES OF THE DIVINE MASTER
   SISTERS OF JESUS THE GOOD SHEPHERD (PASTORELLE SISTERS)
   SISTERS OF MARY, QUEEN OF APOSTLES (APOSTOLINE SISTERS)
and four secular institutes:
   JESUS THE PRIEST (diocesan priests)
   ST. GABRIEL THE ARCHANGEL, or GABRIELITES (single men)
   MARY MOST HOLY OF THE ANNUNCIATION or ANNUNCIATIONISTS (single women)
   THE HOLY FAMILY (married couples),
plus the PAULINE COOPERATORS (lay associates and sharers in Pauline spirituality and mission).  

“As mentioned, every one of the saints shadows a linkage with Scripture, for example, Francis of Assisi with ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ Faustina with Jesus’ ministry of mercy in the Gospels, etc. If we were asked to locate Father Alberione in a particular area of the Scriptures, asking which part he fits into, it would likely be in the Acts of the Apostles, especially in its second half, which recounts everything about St. Paul. Paul was his huge hero. His relentless apostolic outreach and total dedication, in tandem with ‘the whole Christ that ever grew within him’ grabbed profoundly at the founder’s soul. 

“The Christ who never stayed static would influence Fr. Alberione all his life long. The same for Paul’s sense of romanità—thinking always in the broader scope of the ‘empire’ rather than in confined geographical zones.

“Until St. Paul’s entry on the apostolic scene, the preaching of the Gospel was in great part carried out in the area of Jerusalem. There was valid reason for this. But it is St. Paul who, under the impetus of the Spirit, launched the nascent Church into its missionary dimension, opening the saving message of the Gospel to the peoples of the then-known world. For him, the Gospel had to be brought to every culture and find its home in it. The Gentiles, the outsiders, those with no standing, no citizenship, were to know of it, especially those without any identity of faith, like the Athenians whom Paul evangelized (Acts 17:16ff.).

“Father Alberione’s commitment and passion for transmitting the Gospel throughout our contemporary world in a linguistic variety of cultures, stands out in faithful imitation of the great Apostle, and as one of the admirable achievements of his religious Family. It was for this reason that Pope Paul VI publicly commended him for giving ‘the Church new ways and instruments for expressing itself.’ For this reason also, in his homily during the Mass of Father Alberione’s beatification, John Paul II authoritatively referred to him as the ‘First Apostle of the New Evangelization.’

“From the very beginning, at its earliest stage, Father Alberione placed a fundamental emphasis on living and interiorly integrating the Gospel on all who aspired to join the Pauline Family’s consecration to the Gospel. This would effectively complement the substance and urgency of its enterprising media use. ‘There is no apostolate without an apostle,’ was an early axiom of his.    

“Now as all of us are aware, our world has not felt the full, exhilarating impact of the Gospel’s Good News. When it hopefully does, it will be transformed. For the present, it goes about dazed and somewhat confused by its own hunger for the something it cannot define: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, Love. And the secular media, as we know it, is largely its blatant platform. 


 In her Eucharistic, liturgical, and priestly service,
Sr. Ann, a Sister Disciple, works and prays
for the redemption of the media.

 “Along with a concern for the times we live in, and the way to best confront the world’s groping and widespread hurting, the Pauline Family—with our mission of principally serving through the media and reaching out in faith, hope, and healing—is to pray and encourage the media’s broader redemption. In our Family tradition, this has always been a special dimension of the spirituality attached to the Sister Disciples of the Divine Master as well as to the Brothers of the Society of St. Paul.

“To effect this redemption, that is, to realize the potential and right use of today’s ingenious media forms, Father Alberione ever insisted that we join prayers to the sacrifices and self-spending inherent in living our vocational charism. There is an enormous responsibility and enormous urgency in making of the information instruments in this digital age a service in truth to humanity.

“Some years ago during a community retreat, I remember a veteran confrere observe that like St. Paul, the Founder had also known a Damascus-type experience (Acts 9:1-22). The observation drew halting ‘how’s that?’ skepticism. But as he began to elaborate and place it in perspective, what seemed altogether obscure proved insightful. He situated the Alberionian ‘Damascus’ within the well known lengthy Eucharistic adoration that a young James Alberione was effecting in the Cathedral of Alba during the critical night separating the nineteenth century from the twentieth. As his nocturnal adoration went on, surges of light and purpose impelled and stirred him profoundly. Beyond himself, the young seminarian’s response became an overriding commitment ‘to do something for the men and women who would people the new century.’ Not unlike the piercing beam that so transformed Paul, this nighttime illumination in the presence of the living Eucharistic Christ would—as  he verified time and again—impact all of Fr. Alberione’s remarkable and prolifically graced Pauline life.”

* Today would have been Fr. Alberione's 128th birthday.
Photo credits: Sr. Roberta Christine Hummel, FSP, Br. Xavier Lee, SSP, Sr. Margaret J. Obrovac, FSP. Alberione: file photo.

How To Live Lent and Easter With Kids...and Love It

Read to Your Bunny
All of us love our children more than anything in the world. In their first years we feed them so they grow. We bring them to the doctor so they are healthy. We strap them in car seats so they are safe.
But the most important thing in the first years of life is the growth of the mind and spirit. This is when a child learns to love and trust, to speak and listen.
After a child turns two years old, these things are very difficult to learn or teach ever again. Trusting, singing, laughing, and language are the most important things in a young child’s life.
And so they must come first for mothers and fathers, too, because we can never have those years over again.
Every day, make a quiet, restful place for twenty minutes. Put your child in your lap and read a book aloud. In the pages of the book you will find a tiny vacation of privacy and intense love. It costs nothing but twenty minutes and a library card.
Reading to your little one is just like putting gold coins in the bank. It will pay you back tenfold. Your daughter will learn, and imagine, and be strong in herself. Your son will thrive, and give your love back forever.
Rosemary Wells

I first came across this lovely piece of advice about ten years ago, then posted it in the children’s corner of our Pauline Books & Media Center in San Francisco. Here and there I noticed people stop to take it in. Apparently Rosemary’s nudge to get a library card didn’t deter them from buying a book. After all, it’s hard to find our array of titles on faith and Christian values in your typical public library. Whether you buy or borrow, what she says about the indispensable role of parents (and grandparents!) in a child’s early learning can’t be emphasized enough, especially when a book about God’s love for us is included in the cuddling.

That story is easy to tell at Christmas. But during Lent? How do you get past the horror of the Crucifixion? Granted, boys and even some girls are not as squeamish as moms are about this, but the younger the child, the less graphic the story needs to be. Sometimes that will depend on what images they’ve already been exposed to in their churches and homes or what movies they’ve seen, or what they’ve encountered through their older siblings. In any case, you’ll want to reassure them that “Nobody does that anymore,” so that they feel safe.

How do you explain the tragedy of sin to a little person, who has no concept of it yet? Before reading, you may find it helpful to demonstrate the separation of sin to pre-schoolers by coaxing them to try and jump to you from an unreachable distance. Since only the cross can span that distance, the book you’re about to read to them will tell them how Jesus used the cross to do just that. Otherwise, you can let the story say whatever it does without the prep work.

1. Keep it simple. For infants and toddlers, once you find an appropriate book, it will be enough to hold it together and look at the pictures, reading a few words here and there to tell the basic story. Pre-schoolers will be able to understand more and will eventually want to “read” you the story in their own words. One of the best books I’ve ever seen for this purpose is PBM’s own The Road to Easter Day (picture at left). Pain in the illustrations is muted, and joyful colors are vibrant. Every page introduces the next part of the narrative, from Palm Sunday to Jesus’ appearance on the way to Emmaus, as another step “along the road, along the road, the road to Easter day,” conveying the sense that any sadness, while real, is not the end of the story. The Easter Swallows, with its talking animals and birds, creates a safer distance from the tragedy for those primary-age children who may be especially impressed by whatever graphic details they already know of Jesus’ passion.

2. Combine the story with an easy activity or craft. For older kids, The Stations of the Cross Coloring and Activity Book or My First Easter Sticker Book does the trick. The sticker book also simply and happily announces that, “Because Jesus loves us and died for our sins, heaven is open to all of us!” A children’s Bible book, such as My Storytime Bible, with its two-page spread of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, can contextualize that further, if needed.

One of the best activity books around, though, is The Lent-Easter Book—182 pages of stories, games, puzzles, recipes, and crafts that assist parents or teachers in passing on the season’s Catholic traditions…and the faith they express. This spiral-bound treasury also suggests ideas on holding conversations with five- to nine-year-olds and with ten- to fourteen-year-olds.

3. Allow books to teach our little ones to pray and live justly. Even though the cross, backlit by the resurrection, casts its shadow across all of Lent, this liturgical season isn’t just about the cross. Or better, during this reflective time, even children can find in the cross their own reasons for growing in prayer, virtue, and awareness of others’ needs. Books can help them do that.

Primary-age kids are keenly sensitive to the pain of Jesus, especially when they understand how he suffered to forgive and heal them and the whole world of their sins and the sins of others. With its simple, colorful pictures, I Pray the Stations of the Cross stirs their empathy for Jesus’ redemptive suffering and connects that empathy with compassion for others: “Jesus, Mary wanted to be near you, even though it made her sad to see you suffer. Please help me to comfort those in my family who are suffering” (Fourth Station). The Stations of the Cross in My Pocket is a pocket-size version of almost exactly the same text, with a more ornate art style.

Children’s Way of the Cross cleverly adapts for older kids St. Ignatius’s approach to Gospel meditation. It first leads them to imagine themselves right there with Jesus, then to listen to him by means of a passage from the International Children’s Bible, then finally to respond to his love with a sentence from a Psalm. Expressive pen and water color renderings bring the “via crucis” to life.

Of course, Lenten prayer would not be complete without the celebration of the sacraments. The Sacrament of Reconciliation in My Pocket is a pocket-size guide to celebrating the rite and includes an explanation of Reconciliation, a simple examen of conscience on the Ten Commandments, prayers, and a short glossary.

4. With school-age kids, especially with those who are aware that someone has died, any discussion of Jesus’ death can lead to questions about death in general: What happened to them? What will happen to me? What a great opportunity to share hugs and the central message of our faith! Because he rose again, Jesus’ death is a door, not a wall. His death changed death for us all. Because the Son of God, who is human like us, now physically lives by the power of the Holy Spirit, then we, his brothers and sisters who share in that same Spirit, will live forever, too (cf. Romans 8:11). A related kids’ title would be I Will Remember You: A Catholic Guide Through Grief.

If you would like more resources, updated almost daily, go to www.paulinekidsblog.com. You'll find descriptions of PBM titles for kids, book guides, interviews with authors and illustrators, plus spiritual gems for parents and educators. Take a peek, too, behind the scenes at what goes into our kids' books.

For ways to share your finds with other families, look into J-Club, the only Catholic book fair for schools and religious education programs, that couples as a fundraiser.

Looking for something different? For centuries, many Christians trying to exonerate themselves from responsibility for Jesus’ death have pinned it on the Jews. Even after the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, the attitude dies hard. We recognize that “the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today” (n. 4). So PBM offers My Jewish Friend, a fictional account of two boys, one Catholic and the other Jewish, who explain their beliefs and rituals to each other, and so grow in their faith and in mutual respect.The narrative is vividly illustrated and masterfully interwoven with information about both Catholicism and Judaism.

Kids aren’t the only ones who try to figure out whose fault it is when something goes wrong. Yet, they’re less equipped than adults are to accept the unfairness of life without assigning blame. So how do you answer the blame question regarding Jesus’ death? If we can’t point fingers at the Romans or the Jews, what about at ourselves? While it’s true that had we not sinned, Jesus would not have died to forgive us. Even so, we could have sinned from our first breath until our last, and still we would not have caused Christ’s death. Love did that. His love. Christ “loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). All the books we’ve talked about here say that very thing in one way or another. There could be no greater story to read to your little Easter bunny.

Consultant for this week's blog post: Jamie Stuart Wolfe, assistant children's editor, Pauline Books & Media