For most of us, New Year's Day means both celebrating what's ahead and learning from the year that's ending. For Catholics, it's seeing the past year not just through the rearview mirror, but refracted through the lens of faith. A new year offers us more than a fresh start. It can be an opportunity for conversion of heart -- to take what we have experienced and resolve to grow more deeply as people of faith.
Peter Maurin — co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement along with the more widely known Dorothy Day — used to say that the Church’s mission should be to announce, not to denounce.
Lent is marked by prayer and fasting, but also “almsgiving,” or works of mercy. Regarding this final category, Christ’s words in Matthew 25:40 are a clear foundation: “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.”
Liturgically, Lent is a season. Spiritually, some call it a way of life. Whether an inner journey or an in-house parish pilgrimage, however we move through Lent — through prayer, fasting, almsgiving, works of mercy and penance — all are a means to bring us to the foot of the cross of Jesus Christ. This is a real Lent.
On a Sunday afternoon in October, 14 inmates in the chapel of the Minnesota Correctional Facility-Stillwater listened as Jeanne McDonald, 60, read a prayer by Blessed Solanus Casey and highlighted two lines she thought they’d especially relate to: “Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger.”
“I lived in perfect love, and my children lived in perfect love for a week, and I as a caregiver was served,” Adkins said. “To know that God can and does provide — that is another huge faith thing for me because of it.”
The National Council of Catholic Women said their members have recorded more than 1 million works of mercy during the Jubilee Year of Mercy proclaimed by Pope Francis.
Gretchen Thibault will never forget the news footage 17 years ago that altered her family forever: a CBS News special showing a Romanian orphanage where malnourished toddlers were tied up in cribs.
“It was like, ‘Poof!’” she said. “Something changed. At that moment I realized I had a special spot in my heart that was just waiting to be used. It was filled with love.”
While it is good to give something up for Lent, and daily fasting is certainly a part of a good Lenten discipline, I encourage you and your family to go to confession and do some regular corporal and spiritual acts of mercy.
Lent is a time of conversion and a time to deepen one’s faith, demonstrating and sharing it through the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, Pope Francis said.
