From Mercy to Mission
Michiel Peeters - Friends, the Father, called Pope Francis to His house last Monday, the second day of Easter. Yesterday was his funeral. To help each other not to get stuck in the emotion for the loss, but to see how much Francis’s pontificate has been an aspect of the peace-bringing presence of the risen Lord among us—“Peace be with you,” the risen Lord tells us three times today—I will recall a few words he often repeated during his papacy.
Not as a reminder of the past but as the consciousness of a tradition in the true sense of the word: something that has been offered to us in history so that we can verify it in the present and thus benefit from it in the future.
One of the first things he said to us was his motto, which he had chosen when he became bishop and maintained as pope: Miserando atque eligendo—the Lord has looked at me with mercy and has elected me. In one of his first interviews, they asked the pope, “Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?”
He answered, “I am a sinner whom the Lord has looked upon. I am one who is looked upon by the Lord.” This was his self-awareness. Just as the apostle John, referring to himself, spoke of “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” Francis could think of himself only in these terms: a weak human being, looked upon and chosen by the Lord. Does this not also apply to each of us? Shouldn’t this truth also dominate our self-awareness?
Accordingly, the pope repeated that “truth is a relationship.” Truth is an event of correspondence between a human heart and the one for whom that heart is made.
Not for nothing, his last and likely most crucial encyclical—without which, he said, we cannot understand his social encyclicals—dealt with the heart: the heart of man and the heart of the Lord. “For it is by drinking of that … love [by living that relationship] that we become capable of forging bonds of fraternity, of recognizing the dignity of each human being, and of working together to care for our common home.”
As to our task as Christians in this world, he encouraged us to “ricordare” and “generare”: to bring the things we encounter to our hearts; and with what we thus discover, to bring forth, to be fruitful in a world that, in his words, is experiencing “not simply an epoch of changes, but an epochal change.” He urged us to “be challenged by the questions of the day” and to approach them with boldness and perseverance.
The change needed in our times, he said, is not something superficial or external, but a growth in our being human and Christian: to make this world a better place, we must become more human and more Christian. He called it the need for an anthropological conversion.
He invited us “to initiate processes and not just occupy spaces”: “God manifests himself in historical revelation, in history…. [Therefore,] we must not focus on occupying the spaces where power is exercised, but rather on starting long-run historical processes.… God manifests himself in time and is present in the processes of history. This gives priority to actions that give birth to new historical dynamics. And it requires patience, waiting.”
His idea of the Church was not that of a “perfect society” made of little angels, but a “field hospital” for the wounded people of our times. Remember that “the person in front of you is always greater than the wrong positions he may have.”
The privileged space for the Church’s mission is the periphery, also because Christ’s exceptionality can be recognized by those who have had to struggle. As Péguy said: “There is something worse than having a bad soul…. It’s having a habituated soul. We have seen the … games of grace … penetrate a bad soul…. But we have not seen what was varnished, to get wet, we have not seen what was waterproof, to get penetrated, we have not seen what was habituated, to get wet.”
Thank you, dear Pope Francis, for your human and Christian witness here and now. May we verify your prophecy in the present and for the future.
And you, who have never missed an opportunity to ask us to pray for you, now continue to pray for us, too.
20250427 2nd Sunday of Easter (John 20:19 - 31), the day after the funeral of Pope Francis (Homily by Fr Michiel Peeters, Tilburg University Chaplaincy)
