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The Holy Father Benedict XVI on the Divine Mercy

Today, just as yesterday, God’s merciful love strongly unifies the Church and turns the humankind into one big family; through crucified and risen Jesus, God’s love forgives our sins and renews us internally (Regina Ceali, 19.04.09)

The Holy Father Benedict XVI began his pontificate with the encyclical Deus caritas est – God is love (2005) which talks on the mystery of God who reveals himself through love. God’s mercy, which characterizes God’s relationship to man, is not only a sign of God’s presence in the contemporary world and in the lives of individual people, but it also constitutes a wide plane enabling man’s communication with other fellow human beings.

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Following the canonization of St. Sister Faustina Kowalska, the institution of the Feast of Divine Mercy on the first Sunday after Easter (2002) and the entrustment of the world to the Divine Mercy by Pope John Paul II on the 17 August 2002 in Kraków, the topic of the Divine Mercy, always important in Catholic theology, has now become a central issue in Christian spirituality.

By taking up and developing the thoughts of the Holy Father John Paul II, contained in his encyclical Dives in misericordia – “On God Who is Rich in Mercy” (1981), Pope Benedict XVI outlined the program of his pontificate in his Encyclical “On God Who is Love” – Deus caritas est. In this way, the Pope entered into the very center of revealed faith and touched upon the very existential problems that are of vital interest to contemporary Christians.

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Pope Benedict’s reflection on the God of love relates to some new aspects of the concept of faith which are the result of a juxtaposition of the experience of faith as revealed in the Old Covenant with the Greek thought. For while talking about the God of mercy, fully revealed in Christ, John Paul II referred to the Semitic concepts of love, Pope Benedict XVI seems to focus his attention on the Hellenic thought which at some stage of the development of faith, became an instrument of its expression.

In his encyclical Deus caritas est, Pope Benedict XVI reminds us that from the very beginning of his existence, man tried in various ways to define who God is. The Greek philosophers were looking for the first cause, or principle of the world. They meditated on the concept of beauty, the harmony of shapes and thoughts. The sages of the Far East – India, China and Japan spoke of a power that penetrates the entire cosmos.

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Pope Benedict XVI emphasizes that the Christian faith leads man to God who is love (1 Jn 4:16), and that Christians are people who “have known and put their faith in God’s love towards ourselves” (1 Jn 4:16). Getting to know God who reveals himself as love exceeds our intellectual cognition as well as our aesthetic experience. Whereas it assumes a personal relationship between God and man, in which man’s love is the response to the gift of God’s love.

This God revealed to us by Jesus Christ is not an abstract concept; it is not a thought or truth, but it is love. Christ’s disciples listened carefully to the words of their Master, registering deep in their hearts Jesus’ every word and expression. It seems that St. John who was the most beloved disciple, reveals to us the most about the mystery of the Father which Jesus Christ disclosed to the world. For it was him who in his First Letter wrote: “God is Love and anyone who lives in love lives in God, and God lives in him” (1 Jn 4:16). The above statement conveys the whole truth about the identity of God and man.

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