This month Position Papers focuses in a particular way on the connection between mercy (this being the Year of Mercy) and marriage. In his recent Good Friday homily in St Peter’s Basilica, Fr Raniero Cantalamessa OFM Cap., the preacher of the Papal Household, addressed this very theme, pointing out that marriage and the family, “the most precious and fragile thing in the world at this time” can be saved by mercy (and perhaps by nothing other than mercy).
Love, at least where human beings are concerned, always requires this dimension of mercy. Only where there is a loving relationship exempt from weakness and sin – like in the love between God and the Blessed Virgin – could there be a love without the need of mercy. For the rest of mankind love must always be followed by mercy; a relationship always starts with love (a couple don’t marry moved by mercy but by love) but can only survive with the addition of mercy. In the words of Fr Cantalamessa: “Mercy adds agape to eros, it adds the love that gives of oneself and has compassion to the love of need and desire. God ‘takes pity’ on human beings (see Ps. 102:13). Shouldn’t a husband and wife, then, take pity on each other? And those of us who live in community, shouldn’t we take pity on one another instead of judging one another?”
The mutual forgiveness of spouses for their defects and failings echoes Christ’s supreme act of forgiveness during his crucifixion: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34) and so paves the way towards re-establishing unity and harmony.
In fact we could even say that there is something particularly beautiful about a relationship which is marked by forgiveness; it attains a certain new charm, as there is in God’s relationship with the world, and each one of us, following sin. Sin becomes that felix culpa or “happy fault” in the words of the beautiful Exultet chanted at the beginning of the Easter Vigil ceremony; a happy fault because it won for us such a Redeemer. Likewise, the inevitable failings and shortcomings within marriage can become either wounds which damage and even destroy a marriage, or when the spouses respond to them with a merciful love, they can become those “happy faults”. This way the omnipotence of love is once again revealed, for love (and love alone), in the words of St Paul’s Hymn to Charity: “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7).