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Opening of the Door of Mercy
Extraordinary Holy Year of Mercy
Guadete Sunday 2015
St Mirin’s Cathedral
Dear Brothers and Sisters
We have gathered here today in our diocesan Cathedral of St. Mirin because
Pope Francis has decreed this Year as a Jubilee Holy Year of Mercy and has,
himself, inaugurated it a few days ago in St. Peter’s, Rome on the Solemnity
of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, with the opening
of the Holy Door of Mercy.
Today, the Third Sunday of Advent or Gaudete Sunday, we gather, rejoicing.
It is perhaps a long time since we have experienced such a joy on a Gaudete
Sunday. Truly we can feel applied to us here today the words of the Prophet
Isaiah, proclaimed at this Sunday’s Masses: Shout for joy, daughter of Zion, Israel,
shout aloud! The Lord has repealed your sentence;. The Lord is in your midst. The Lord
Who, today, exults with joy over you, and in this Jubilee Year will dance with shouts of joy
for you as on a day of festival.
We rejoice because the Holy Father has decreed that today, in every
diocesan Cathedral— the Mother Church of the faithful - a Door of Mercy is
to be opened for all the people for the duration of the Holy Year. So, here
today, in St. Mirin’s Cathedral, our own Jubilee Holy Year is inaugurated
with the opening of our Door of Mercy.
The Door of Mercy is now open in the diocese of Paisley! Let this open door
stand, from now on, as a permanent reminder to us, and all those poor ones
who are lost, that God our Father, Rich in Mercy, has thrown open the door
of Heaven itself and stands before the world with open arms, inviting all
humanity once more into His Kingdom of love and justice, of holiness, truth
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and grace. Let this Open Door introduce us into the very mystery of God,
Who has committed irrevocably His steadfast love to the world in Our Lord
Jesus Christ, the living face of the Father’s mercy. This year let us declare
from the rooftops how this same Lord Jesus Christ came into the world, not
to condemn it but to save it so that it might have life, and that to the full, all
because His Father delighted in the world so much.
We will come from all corners of our diocese in the course of this Year of
Mercy and make our way through these Holy Doors. As we do so, may we
declare in our hearts, once again, how Jesus Christ, full of the Father’s
mercy, is the only door through which our world can find salvation. Jesus
Christ, the Emmanuel –God with us- is the One Way, the wide Door of
Mercy, that leads to the Father!
Our Solemn Procession into the Cathedral - bishop, clergy and lay faithfulis an integral part of the rite that begins our extraordinary Holy Year.
Religious processions are symbols of our Church’s pilgrimage through
history, and the practice of pilgrimage to this Door by parishioners
throughout our diocese has a special place of honour in the Holy Year. As
the days, weeks and months of this gracious year pass may we take up
afresh that ageless pilgrimage which our Church first began at Pentecost, in
companionship with Her Lord, Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and
forever- and together with Mary and the Holy Spirit. May we will never tire
of receiving and bestowing the Father’s mercy along the Way,
till our
journey ends at the last in the House of our Father.
As God’s Holy People we have renewed of our Baptismal promises for we are
a people of faith who come to (the Father) believing that He rewards those
who seek him. As you make your pilgrimage in faith and prayer you will no
doubt ask the Holy Spirit to guide you in your life from now on and, like the
people who went to John the Baptist in today’s Gospel, you will ask: What
must we do? The Holy Spirit recalls to you the same words of John: share
your tunic with the man who has none, and the one with something to eat
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must do the same. For this is nothing other than a call to show mercy
everywhere and these words remind us how mercy is a goal for us to reach
that does not come easily but requires dedication and sacrifice.
In faith we listened to the Proclamation of the Gospel of Luke and were
caught up in the rejoicing in heaven (at the thought of the) sinner who
converts.
It is a Gospel that challenges each of us and our whole diocese
together, especially in this same year of our Diocesan Synod, to go out into
the world joyfully as witnesses of our Father’s mercy.
Jesus urges us even to recklessness.
In showing mercy
“What man among you having a
hundred sheep and losing one of them would not leave the ninety-nine in the
wild and go after the lost one until he finds it?, Jesus asks. We wonder what
the shepherds who were listening to him at that moment thought of what He
said. Maybe they laughed to themselves and said: You can tell the holy man
from Nazareth is a carpenter and not a shepherd. For if we had one hundred
sheep and lost one we would not leave the ninety-nine in the wilds in case
they went missing too. We would cut our losses, write of the one that was
lost, and get on with the ninety-nine. And who could disagree with them?
What sensible shepherd would abandon ninety-nine safe, healthy and
prospering sheep for the sake of one, no matter how lost, afraid or in
danger? He would need to be mad! Yet this is the Church the Lord wants: a
Church foolish with love for the lost, beside Herself with anxiety till they are
found, ready to go anywhere, do anything, consider whatever crazy scheme,
bear whatever potential loss, be prepared actually to lose everything, till they
are home.
Are we this kind of Church, my brother priests, my sister religious, my dear
brothers and sisters, or have we become, in fact, the kind that serves the
safe, the healthy, the promising and discounts the lapsed and the lost, the
smelly and unseemly, as mere collateral damage - too bad, in a sense, but
just the way it is? This year of diocesan Synod and Universal Mercy is a
double challenge and, please God a double grace to us, as a call to our
whole diocese to conversion, to think again, to think radically –without fear
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or inhibition but with generosity and daring- and, above all, with the eyes of
mercy that compel us to seek with real earnest what has been lost and never
rest till it is once again found.
This challenge, of course, makes us think of Pope Francis’ call for diocesan
conversion in his Apostolic Letter, Evangelii Gaudium. There we remember
his dramatic insistence that, as a Church: We cannot leave things as they
presently are and of how any pastoral plans we think up which are about
nothing more than mere administration (of parish life along the same lines as
before) can no longer be enough.
church
structures
(in
place
in
He goes on to warn us that: there are
our
times
which
actually)
hamper
evangelisation (and, precisely because of this), Church renewal can no longer
be deferred. Instead he calls us, as a Church, to reshape ourselves radically
so that we become a Church so focused on our mission to the lost that it
drives everything; so that the Church's ways of doing things, our language
and structures are all channelled for the evangelisation of our world rather
than for our own self-preservation.
Who could fail to be enthralled, excited
and rejuvenated by his dream of a new Catholic Church! I prefer, he says, a
Church that is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the
streets rather one which is unhealthy from trying to cling to its own security.
He goes on: Too many of our brothers are living without the strength, light and
consolation that come from friendship with Christ or a community of faith,
without meaning or a goal in life. And he concludes: At our door people are
starving and Jesus does not tire of saying to us: Give them something to eat!
How beautiful to be accused of being a Church that welcomes sinners and
eats with them! How wonderful to be a Church of real Gospel joy -of the
only true joy there is in the Gospel- that rejoicing with Jesus that, because
of us, He has found His sheep that was lost.’ What a divine invitation, to
share in the joy of Heaven itself over that sinner who repents.
My own fervent prayer as your bishop, today and throughout this Year of
Grace, is for each of us personally and our diocese as a whole to: constantly
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contemplate the mystery of mercy (which is) a wellspring of joy, serenity, and
peace. Mercy, the basic law dwelling in the heart of every person who looks
into the eyes of his brothers and sisters on their shared life’s journey: Mercy,
the supreme way by which God came to meet us and that opens our hearts to
the hope of being loved forever despite our sin: Mercy, that grace upon which
the life of the world depends!
The Bull of Indiction of the Holy Year reminds us how: In the fullness of
time God sent his only Son into the world, born of the Virgin Mary (so that)
whoever sees Jesus sees the Father. (And) Jesus of Nazareth Who reveals to
us the mercy of The Father, is forever the Son of Mary.
On the Cross, when He endured in his own flesh the dramatic encounter of
the sin of the world and God’s mercy, Jesus could feel at His feet the
consoling presence of His Mother and His friend. At that crucial moment, as
He made ready to pass through the Door of the Father’s mercy on our
behalf, Jesus said to Mary: Woman, here is your son and so left us His
Mother to be Our Mother. Only after doing so did He know that all was now
complete. At the supreme hour of the new creation, Christ led us to Mary
because he did not want us to journey without a mother and, ever since that
moment, She has always been present in the heart of God’s people. She
joined the disciples in praying for the coming of the Holy Spirit that made
the missionary outburst of Pentecost possible and, this Year, She means to
do so again.
At the beginning of this Year of Mercy we implore her maternal intercession
that our diocese may become a home for many peoples and that a Door of
Mercy may be opened to the birth of a new world.
It is Her Son, Our
Merciful Lord Who tells us, with a love that fills us with unshakeable hope:
See, I make all things new!
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