Monday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 473

But God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with Christ (by grace you have been saved), raised us up with him, and seated us with him in the heavens in Christ Jesus...

Today the Catholic Church celebrates Pope Saint John Paul II for the fifth time since his canonization in 2014. Rather than the day of his death, this is the fortieth anniversary of his installation as pope in 1978. He is remembered and honored by many as "the great" for his enormous influence on the Church and the world during his long reign, the second longest in history. 

In today's reading from Ephesians we hear that favorite expression of the saint, God is "rich in mercy." He used the expression as the title and first words of his second encyclical. Whenever we think of God, that should be our first impression and first experience. If God is our judge, he is a merciful judge. If he is our disciplinarian, his aim is only goodness. If he is our creator and healer, we are created and healed by mercy. Our very existence is proof of God's superabundant generosity.

Dives in Misericordia  begins with: 

It is "God, who is rich in mercy" ¹ whom Jesus Christ has revealed to us as Father: it is His very Son who, in Himself, has manifested Him and made Him known to us.² Memorable in this regard is the moment when Philip, one of the twelve Apostles, turned to Christ and said: "Lord, show us the Father, and we shall be satisfied"; and Jesus replied: "Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know me...? He who has seen me has seen the Father."³ These words were spoken during the farewell discourse at the end of the paschal supper, which was followed by the events of those holy days during which confirmation was to be given once and for all of the fact that "God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ."⁴

If the Church has lost standing in the world it is largely because we continue to represent that mercy which is unyielding. 
I was chaplain in the University of Minnesota Hospital when I visited a teen aged, single mother and her infant. The toddler had been playing with a tube of liquid Tylenol and drank an excessive amount. She lived but would suffer a severely damaged liver for the rest of her life. I asked the child mother, "Why didn't you take the Tylenol away from her?" 
"She might cry." she said. 
Mercy would have snatched the poison and let the baby cry. 

Every few years the Church elects another pope and millions of people eagerly await his reversal of the Church's sexual teachings about divorce, abortion, artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, and birth control. "Surely," they think, "he will understand that changing times and  circumstances demand new teachings." With every new pope they are disappointed. 
This year also marks the fiftieth anniversary of Pope Saint Paul VI's encyclical, Humanae Vitae. Many Catholic periodicals have celebrated the event, recalled the controversy and noticed that his predictions were right. Women have not been spared from violence by their use of birth control. Quite the contrary, they are blamed for irresponsibly getting pregnant by their male lovers. With the universal acceptance of birth control, sexual activity and childbearing are disconnected, as if they are entirely separate decisions.  
If the axial age (600 bc to 400 ad) began with the realization that men "beget" children of women, this new age has lost that insight and women, once again, are solely responsible for child bearing and raising. We have returned to primitive, pre-civilized forms of human life. 
But God is rich in mercy; he still teaches us that we are responsible for our behavior; we are neither driven by savage instincts, nor controlled by an impersonal, uncaring destiny. Made in God's own image, male and female, we may choose not to drink the poisonous medicines that are hawked to consumers by desperate merchants. Saint John Paul II reminded the world in another encyclical that neither as consumers nor as workers are we commodities to be bought, sold, transported, devoured or wasted in the open market. 
Rather we are persons of enormous dignity, saved by the Blood of Christ, participants in his divine life and saving work. These truths do not change.