Magnetic Mercy: Weekly Message for 8-16-16

Dear Fellow Digital Pilgrim, pax Christi:

A most intriguing figure in the Church last century was Dorothy Day. A radical activist with a checkered past, she founded the Catholic Worker Movement in the 1930s. Today her name is discussed as a possible candidate for canonization.

Pope Benedict XVI praised her for “the ability to oppose the ideological enticements of her time in order to choose the search for truth and to open herself to the discovery of faith.” Pope Francis referred to her as an exemplary American in his address to the U.S. Congress last year.

Day’s conversion to Catholicism was a miracle of God’s mercy. How else could we explain the turnaround in such an unconventional life? Like a powerful electromagnet that can lift scrap metal and even entire cars from a junkyard pile, God’s mercy can raise even the most sin-laden souls from the depths of despair.

Fortunately for us, that mercy endures.

All around us we can see battered lives, broken families, botched polities. And yet … all around there are signs of renewal. People find their way to conversion. Families hang together. Babies are still being born. Popes are still being listened to. That electromagnetic of God’s mercy is ceaselessly at work pulling souls out of the dumps and prepping them for spiritual recycling.

That recycling reminds us that Our Lord hasn’t given up on the world.

Such is the perseverance of his love, and such is the basis for our hope. The latest RC Spirituality retreat guide, “Miracles of Mercy: Miracles of Jesus,” could help to remind us that what moved the heart of Jesus in New Testament times still moves it in our era.

Perhaps the retreat guide will help keep your spiritual life on track this summer. Consider it as a mini-vacation for the soul.

God bless,
Father Edward McIlmail, L.C.
Ask a Priest contributor