The Church’s Year of Mercy will begin on December 8, the feast of the Immaculate Conception. In the first line of his “Bull of Indiction of the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy” Misericordiae Vultus (The Face of Mercy) Pope Francis points out that “Jesus Christ is the face of the Father’s mercy.” As we begin on the Advent path towards the nativity of the Infant Jesus in Bethlehem we would do well to remember that the extraordinary mercy of God the Father remained largely hidden from the world until it was revealed in the face of Jesus.
Obviously the terrible attacks in Paris and Mali, and the threat of further attacks, have dominated our minds in the past few weeks. These atrocities have given rise to much debate about issues such as the degree to which ISIS can be said to be truly Islamic and whether the nihilistic West has what it takes to resist the onslaught of radical Islam. (Two very interesting articles this month examine these themes: one by Rev. Patrick Burke who examines the acts of ISIS as first and foremost a spiritual problem before being political or sociological in nature, and an article by Michael Cook for whom these events expose the existential malaise of postmodern Western culture).
There is always a danger inherent in confronting men who are so obviously dominated by evil as ISIS: the danger of attributing to them and them alone all evil, and forgetting in the process that, as the Holy Father reminds us, all of mankind is in need of mercy. In The Gulag Archipelago, his searing analysis of the demonic world of Soviet Marxism, Solzhenitsyn masterfully summed up this temptation to complacency:
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Furthermore the world is, by God’s design, a level playing pitch: we are expected to give in proportion to what we have received. And who can deny that most of those men besotted with Islamicist blood-lust appear to be individuals of very limited personal and spiritual resources. On the other hand the members of Christ’s Church have received so much, and with it the responsibility to be, in the words of Pope Francis, “to be a living sign of the Father’s love in the world.”
As Rev. Burke points out in his article, “We must pray for the conversion of heart of all those who commit such wicked acts. We must pray for the young men and women living in the West who are tempted by what Militant Islam offers.” Prayer for them is already an act of mercy and one which will nip in the bud the temptation to respond to hatred with hatred. Through seventy years of the twentieth century Catholics around the world prayed for the conversion of their greatest persecutor: the Soviet Union. And that evil empire collapsed in a truly miraculous fashion in the late 80s. Let us not underestimate the power of prayer for conversion.