Paternal Love Pope Francis' Wednesday Catechesis, March 2, 2016


By: Jennifer E. Miller, S.T.D., Professor of Moral Theology

NDS Blog Feature
This is a continuing feature on the NDS Blog. Dr. Jennifer E. Miller translates and offers commentary on the Pope’s General Audience every Wednesday.

This catechesis continues the catecheses on the Jubilee Year of Mercy which began on December 8, 2015. These catecheses are intended to help the faithful in living and witnessing well to the mercy of our Lord during this Extraordinary Jubilee.

Dr. Miller’s comments can be found in the blue boxes as you read her translation.

9.  Mercy and Correction

Dear brothers and sisters, good morning.

Speaking of divine mercy, we have many times invoked the figure of the father of a family who loves his children, helps them, takes care of them, forgives them. And as father, he educates them and corrects them when they err, supporting their growth in the good.

It is thus that God is presented in the first chapter of the prophet Isaiah, in which the Lord, as an affectionate but also attentive and severe father, addresses himself to Israel, accusing it of infidelity and corruption, in order to bring Israel once more onto the way of justice. Our text begins thus:

“Hear, O heavens, and listen, O earth,
for the Lord speaks:
Sons have I raised and reared,
but they have rebelled against me!
An ox knows its owner,
and an ass, its master’s manger;
But Israel does not know,
my people has not understood.” (1:2-3).

God, through the prophet, speaks to his people with the bitterness of a disappointed father: he raised his children, and now they have rebelled against Him. Even animals are faithful to their owner and recognize the hand that feeds them; the people instead no longer recognize God, they refuse to understand. Although wounded, God allows love to speak, and he appeals to the conscience of these degenerate children in order that they may mend their ways and allow themselves once more to be loved. This is what God does! He comes to meet us so that we may allow ourselves to be loved by Him, by our God.

The importance of paternal correction recalls Pope Francis’ second catechesis on “Fathers” in 2015, well-known for his comment regarding spanking without humiliation: “A good father knows how to wait and knows how to forgive from the depths of his heart. Certainly, he also knows how to correct with firmness: he is not a weak father, submissive and sentimental. The father who knows how to correct without humiliating is the one who knows how to protect without sparing himself.”
The father-son relationship, to which the prophets often refer to speak of the relationship of covenant between God and his people, is distorted, loses its nature. The educative mission of the parents aims at helping them to grow in liberty, to make them responsible, capable of accomplishing works of good for themselves and for others. Instead, because of sin, liberty becomes a pretense for autonomy, a pretense for pride, and pride leads to opposition and the illusion of self-sufficiency.

Here is why God calls his people back: “You have taken the wrong road”. Affectionately and bitterly he says “my” people. God never disowns us; we are his people, the most evil of men, the most evil of women, the most evil of peoples are his children. And this is God: he never, never disowns us! He always says: “Son, come”. And this is the love of our Father, this the mercy of God. Having a father like this gives us hope, gives us confidence. This belonging must be lived in confidence and in obedience, with the awareness that everything is gift that comes from the love of the Father. And instead, here is vanity, foolishness, and idolatry.

Therefore now the prophet directly addresses this people with severe words to help them to understand the gravity of their fault:

“Woe, sinful nation, […] corrupt children!
They have forsaken the Lord,
spurned the Holy One of Israel,
they have turned around” (v. 4).

The consequence of sin is a state of suffering, of which even the country suffers the consequences. It is devastated and made into a desert, to the point that Zion – that is Jerusalem – becomes uninhabitable. Where there is the refusal of God, of his paternity, life is no longer possible, existence loses its roots, everything appears perverted and annihilated. Nevertheless, even this sorrowful moment is in view of salvation. The test is given so that the people may experience the bitterness of he who abandons God, and thus confront themselves with the desolating void of a choice of death. The suffering, an unavoidable consequence of a self-destructive decision, must make the sinner reflect in order to open himself to conversion and to forgiveness.

And this is the journey of divine mercy: God does not treat us according to our wrongs (cfr. Ps. 103:10). Punishment becomes the instrument to provoke reflection. We thus understand that God forgives his people, gives grace, and does not destroy everything, but always leaves open the door to hope. Salvation implies the decision to listen and to allow oneself to be converted, but it remains always a gratuitous gift. The Lord, therefore, in his mercy, indicates a street which is not that of ritual sacrifices, but rather of justice. Worship is criticized not because it is useless in itself, but because, instead of expressing conversion, it presumes to substitute conversion; and thus becomes the search for one’s own justice, creating the deceptive conviction that it is the sacrifices which save, not the divine mercy which pardons sin. To understand this well: when one is sick, he goes to the doctor; when one feels himself to be a sinner, he goes to the Lord. But if instead of going to the doctor, he goes to a witch, this does not heal. Many times we do not go to the Lord, but we prefer to follow wrong paths, seeking outside of Him a justification, a justice, a peace.

While recognizing business as a “noble vocation” called to serve the common good (Laudato Si, 129), Pope Francis insists that this includes respecting the dignity of workers and their necessity of providing for their families with a just wage. See “IN DEPTH” below for more on this.
God, the prophet Isaiah says, does not enjoy the blood of bulls and of lambs (v. 11), above all if this offering is made with hands dirty with the blood of one’s brothers (v. 15). But I think that some benefactors of the Church come with the offering – “Take this offering for the Church” – it is the fruit of the blood of many people exploited, maltreated, enslaved with work badly paid! I will say this to these people: “Please, take back your check, burn it”. The people of God, that is the Church, does not need dirty money, it needs hearts open to the mercy of God. It is necessary to come close to God with purified hands, avoiding evil and practicing the good and justice. How beautiful the way the prophet finishes:

 

 

“Cease doing evil;
learn to do good.
Seek justice,
Succor the oppressed,
give justice to the orphan,
defend the cause of the widow” (vv. 16-17).

Think of the many refugees who land in Europe and do not know where to go. Then, says the Lord, your sins, even if they are scarlet, will become white like the snow, and bleached white like wool, and the people will be able to eat of the goods of the earth and to live in peace (v. 19).

This is the miracle of the forgiveness that God, the forgiveness that God as Father, wants to give to his people. The mercy of God is offered to all, and these words of the prophet are valid also today for all of us, called to live as sons of God.

IN DEPTH: What is a just wage? How can this be decided? By emphasizing the fact that all economic decisions are decisions made by human persons, and thus to be guided by love of God and neighbor, the Church points out that wages cannot be arbitrarily determined. Rather, there must be certain criteria which allow a businessman to determine a wage which reflects justice for all concerned in the particular situation. These criteria are summed up by Gaudium et Spes, 67: “Remuneration for labour is to be such that man may be furnished the means to cultivate worthily his own material, social, cultural, and spiritual life and that of his dependents, in view of the function and productiveness of each one, the conditions of the factory or workshop, and the common good”. A businessman who seeks to formulate wages for employees in this way is living out his noble vocation.

About the Author: Jennifer E. Miller, S.T.D., Professor of Moral Theology


Cajun by birth, Dr. Jennifer E. Miller comes from the Lafayette area. She earned her BA in theology from the Franciscan University of Steubenville in 2002, after which she worked for two years in youth ministry in the Ville Platte area of southern Louisiana.

Travelling to Rome to complete her studies, she earned an STB at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in 2007 and an STL in moral theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in 2009. After a year of postgraduate studies at the John Paul II Pontifical Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, Dr. Miller began work on a doctorate in Catholic Social Doctrine at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross. During this time, she also worked as assistant to Msgr. Martin Schlag, consultor to the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, and as the Directress of Studies at the Markets, Culture and Ethics Research Centre, an interdisciplinary research center between philosophy, theology, and economics that seeks to encourage and promote the virtuous culture necessary for an ethical economic system. Her STD was completed in 2013, with a thesis critiquing and reformulating Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach in light of the principle of subsidiarity and the family.

Dr. Miller has previously taught moral theology at the Aquinas Institute in Lafayette, Louisiana and was involved in teaching at Christendom College’s Rome Campus and at the Institute of Higher Religious Studies at the Apollinare (ISSRA), located at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross. She has taught and published both in English and in Italian. Dr. Miller believes that the moral life is best lived when it is understood as the call to holiness, to the beauty of the virtuous life in Christ directed towards beatitude, rather than as a system of exterior rules and obligations; she seeks to impart this understanding and this way of living the moral life to her students.

Jennifer E. Miller, S.T.D.
Office Location
St. Joseph Hall – Room 109

Contact
Email: jmiller@nds.edu


Disclaimer

All opinions published by the authors on this blog are solely those of the authors. Although the goal is that they should, they do not necessarily express the views and opinions of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, Notre Dame Seminary, the Church, or their respective dioceses and bishops.

Notre Dame Seminary and the Archdiocese of New Orleans are not responsible for the comments of commenters, although every effort will be made to remove offensive comments.

If you should find an error or offensive content, please email the NDS Blog editorial team.