Mercy, The Miracle Of Catherine McAuley’s Legacy
Pope Francis’ announcement at the Lenten penitential service in St. Peter’s basilica on Thursday March 19 2015 took many by surprise – he announced a jubilee year of Mercy starting on the 8th of December 2015 and ending on the 2nd February, 2017. The announcement of a jubilee year may have caused some surprise, the content of that year hardly so!
Mercy, the merciful love of God at work in our lives, has been the hallmark of almost every homily and letter of Francis since his election two years ago. He delights in sharing his own clearly held conviction that no matter what we have done, no matter how far we have strayed, God’s Mercy is always open and ready to receive us.
The preparation for the celebration of this jubilee year of Mercy runs concurrently with a year dedicated to the consecrated life and happens at the same time as the Silver Jubilee of the Church’s recognition (April 9th, 1990) of Catherine’s holiness of life and her contribution to the Church’s own holiness. This presents us Sisters of Mercy and all who share the charism of mercy with a renewed challenge to continue to deepen our reflection and openness to where God is calling us in this time; a reflection that has its roots also, in our Chapter document of 2012.
In his letter to consecrated persons for the Year of Consecrated Life, Francis quotes St. John Paul II:
“You not only have a great history to remember and recount, but also a great history still to be accomplished. Look to the future where the Spirit is sending you in order to do even greater things” (Vita Consecrata, 110).
We look to the past with gratitude
When we look back on and remember our Mercy story and heritage, it is to thank God and to strengthen our bond of unity and our sense of belonging. Our story, Catherine’s legacy, describes high ideals and the creative ways they were implemented, the difficulties faced and the equally creative ways these difficulties were surmounted. As we tell our story, we also begin to realise that we are the living, breathing miracle of Catherine’s legacy, we who share her charism of Mercy.
This realisation brings its own responsibility. Therefore in this jubilee of Mercy we come again to tell our story, a story of love and confidence, a story of generosity and faithfulness, a story of weakness and fragility, a story that reflects a lived experience of the Mercy of God poured into our hearts and spilled out into the world around us.
During this time of Mercy Jubilee, as we join in the Church’s celebration, what creative and innovative ways will we find to tell and retell our story so that God may be glorified and Catherine more widely known?
We look to the future with hope
As Francis says in his letter for the Year of Consecrated Life; “our hope lies not in statistics or in what we do but it is based on the one in whom we put our trust”. Catherine’s trust in Divine Providence is legendary. It was the source of hope which kept her motivated; a way of being that grew and strengthened in her. How often she would say, “Put your whole confidence in God “(letter to Mary Angela Dunne, December 20th, 1837) and how often did she declare her trust in the “steady and steadying love of God”.
We live in difficult and anxious times. To speak of hope is to speak of the future and therefore to speak of God. If we do not have hope we do not have God. A world without God is a world without hope. Our hope for ourselves is also essentially our hope for others, for our world, because of the interconnectedness of all being.
Catherine constantly turned to Jesus to show her how to hope and trust in God. She learned from Him to ask for what she needed. This is a way of life, a way of being that we can share with people around us. In this way we become with Catherine “prophets of a future not our own” (Oscar Romero), bearers of the Good News to all who come into our lives, no matter where we are or what we do. The Holy Spirit can still do great things among us.
Live the present with passion
Pope Francis gives cogent witness to what he writes and asks of others. He lives the present with passion. His compassion for the poor and homeless leads him to wash their feet, to eat with them and visit where they live, to give them permission to wander through the Vatican Museums and mingle with all the other pilgrims there, to have showers to wash themselves with dignity, to hold a raffle in order to raise money to help them.
Catherine for her part, as we know, cared for the orphan, gave shelter to the psychiatric, tended the cholera patient and held bazaars to feed the hungry poor.
Is there some simple thing that we can we do to give witness to the Mercy of God that is poured into our hearts in this special time?
Can we offer a hand of friendship, bite back a snippet of gossip, write a letter to a prisoner and spend a little more time in prayer?
The letter of Pope Francis for the Year of Consecrated Life talks about being “architects of unity”, and Catherine, as we know, consistently urged union and charity.
In this precious time of jubilee, aware that we are loved (Jer.31:3) and forgiven, can we follow Catherine’s dream more closely and become “experts in communion”, witnesses and architects of the ‘plan of unity’, forgiving each other, reconciling with each other and deepening the bond of union in a communion of love?
Conclusion
The celebration of St.at Patrick’s Day in Rome was doubly joyful for the Irish community here since it was on that day that it was announced that Mary Aikenhead was declared venerable. With Nano Nagle thus honoured in October 2013 and Catherine McAuley, twenty five years ago, we have a triad of extraordinary Irish women, who not only lived holy and gospel based lives but who also, through their feminine genius, fidelity and determination, pioneered and developed vital aspects of the social fabric of Ireland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in a way that has engraved itself deep into the “DNA” of Ireland and ought not be minimised or forgotten.
The miracle of their legacies is seen in the living witness to what they pioneered, that did not end with them nor even remained within the confines of Ireland, but which reaches out to embrace people worldwide, impacting many and varied civilisations undreamt of by these women themselves and testifying to the timelessness and universality of the power of Love, Goodness and Mercy.
Brenda Dolphin rsm
Postulator for the Cause of Catherine McAuley
