Pope Francis has been busy opening doors lately—the celebrated Holy Doors that a pontiff opens at Rome’s Patriarchal Basilicas when a Jubilee Year begins. It used to take 25 years before the next Jubilee Year, and so, provided one was strong, one could count oneself lucky to see three of them. There have been Extraordinary Jubilee Years, however, like the one proclaimed by St. John Paul II on the eve of the millennium. This, too, is an extraordinary jubilee year, and Pope Francis has asked the world to fix its gaze on vultus misericordiae… the face of mercy.
Significantly, the very first Holy Door Pope Francis opened was not in Rome, but in Bangui, in the African continent, in the heartland of a region of the earth rent by so much cruelty: both the cruelty of factions in relentless wars of attrition as well as the cruelty inflicted on those left in misery and poverty as the rich nations of the world grow even richer! The cruelty that sent six million to gas chambers and starvation camps remains a defining moment on human contemporary history. But the cruelty has not really ended. Not too long ago, the prone, lifeless body of a toddler who had drowned in an attempt to migrate with his father from war-ravaged lands became a potent—if truly heart-rending—indictment of the world’s mercilessness: the arrant cruelty of a continuing war fanned both by an insatiable lust for power as well as by religious fanaticism, and the cruelty of countries that have been closing their borders to migrants, forcing them, in many instances, back to the sea and to almost certain death.
Why can people be so cruel? It will not do to say that there have always been cruel persons in human history. The Infancy Narratives in the Gospels are splattered with gore. But the fact of human evolution makes it a valid question: Should we not have evolved by now from the cruelty so characteristic of more primitive phases of the evolution of the human spirit? Do not our laws, so refined and pointed in their concern with the vulnerable and the weak, attest to the law’s aspiration that we be more merciful?
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines —not really intending the coincidence—had marked out 2016 as the Year of the Family, just as the year before was the Year of Consecrated Life and of the Poor. But there is something to be learned from this fortuity.
A person learns mercy in the family. The Hebrew word of mercy—one of the remaining fragments from an utterly forgettable course on Biblical Hebrew from seminary days —rahamim, has much to do with a mother’s feelings for a child. Mercy, from this perspective, is a family commodity. A mother holding a crying child close to her chest, and nourishing him at her breast is one of the most poignant images of mercy. It is also how the child learns what it is to be merciful—by being the beneficiary of mercy. Regrettably, however, there is much cruelty in families today. Many Filipino families are starved for mercy! There can be hardly anything that impresses itself more lastingly in a child than the rancorous separation of parents and sundering of everything that has been safe and familiar. And what is there that can induce in the human heart callousness for the prodding of mercy more than the cruelty visited on a child who is sexually molested by those supposed to protect him? Or made to work long and difficult hours either in the home or in some form of clandestine employment? Or shamed and screamed at, reminded of his worthlessness at almost every waking hour, finding solace only in sleep, and only when he can get it?
What about the cruelty of old age, because our society has made of youth an obsession and of aging, a dreadful malady? In many homes, the aged members are left by themselves to spend long, seemingly endless hours with none who show them the mercy of care, attention, affection and acceptance? Far more important than the discounts to which senior citizens are entitled by law is the mercy that no law can really bestow: the mercy of company, of the patience of those who care for them, of those who assure them that they do count, and very dearly!
The Year of Mercy has to be the year of the family’s rebirth and, if anything at all, for us in the Philippines, it should mean getting families together again. It is supremely ironic that a “wired generation” like ours that has refined modes of communications in ways that were but the stuff of science fiction only a few decades ago is also a generation of non-communicative family members. Texting and networking keep us busy, even at family gatherings, and grown-up children seem to have no room among their “contacts” for members of their own families, particularly the elderly.
It is a pious exercise to pass through a Holy Door— most cathedral doors are—and to recite the prayers that the Church assures us will grant us the benefits of this blessed time. But it is perhaps more pious still to make of the doors of each home holy doors through which mercy may once more pass so that a family renewed may emerge from within!
rannie_aquino@sanbeda.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@csu.edu.ph
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