Dear brothers and sisters we are gathered here, the fifth Sunday of the Liturgical Year on the cusp of Lent, looking forward with Catholics the whole world over to our Ashes on Wednesday and the joyful season of forty days of prayer and penance in anticipation of the Feast through which we are brought back to life in Christ.
This Lent will be special since it is in the Holy Year of Mercy and, along with Eastertide, will mark the highpoint of this favourable moment of God’s grace. Pope Francis encourages us to focus on three tasks for our Lenten penance.
Firstly, to meditate daily and deeply on the Scriptures, both those telling of God's mercy for us and those challenging us to show mercy to each other. The Gospels and Psalms, Old Testament and New Testament mercy are our daily fair for the Lenten pilgrimage.
Secondly, on the 4
th and 5
th of March there will be
'Twenty-Four Hours with the Lord' the centre of which will be Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament in our Cathedrals and a marathon of Confessions so that this Year will be a fresh start for the Church, renewed in mercy and prayer, in total conversion and in rediscovery of the joy of the Gospel.
Of course, ordinary experience shows us that, even though Confession takes away our sins, something bad lingers on inside us, like a nagging sense of unworthiness or a tendency to sin again. It is here we discover the power of the Plenary Indulgence which offers us total healing, removing all sense of worthlessness and granting us strength to give up, once and for all, sins we had been repeating over and over again. Indulgences reassure God’s people that He truly is a God who can, at chosen times of grace like now, heal us in a complete and surprising way.
Thirdly, we are to take up the works of mercy, reaching out in earnest to those lost on the margins of life. Jesus made performing these works the test of true discipleship: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless and visiting the sick. He saw the spiritual works of mercy, of course, as just as important: giving good advice to people in doubt, telling of Jesus to those who do not know Him, correcting each other’s sins, spending time with the grieving and forgiving those who hurt us.
As well as commemorating Ash Wednesday the Church also celebrates, this Friday, the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes. When we reflect on Our Lady’s desire that her Grotto be a place of pilgrimage, prayer and penance, Lourdes can be seen, too, as Our Lady’s way of sending Her children out on their Lenten journey.
In this Year of Mercy Lourdes is a message of the mercy of God. Mary appeared in a cold, damp and grotty cave where pigs fed and sheltered, and to Bernadette, the poorest of little girls. There, unconcerned about Her dazzling white mantle, Mary descended into the dirt of our humanity. Thus Lourdes is a story of God coming to dwell with His People in poverty, whom He never distains but always loves only with a Father’s heart.
But Lourdes is also a stark call to repentance. Mary asked Bernadette to rub her face in the mud of the cave and to eat the grass growing there. Both together form a telling image of how sin robs us of our dignity. Bernadette’s soiled face shows how badly we are disfigured by the ugliness of sin. The sharp taste of raw grass on her lips reminds us of the bitterness of human transgression and the need to pray for our world’s conversion. Like the grotesque picture of Bernadette, dirty faced and weedy lipped, our Lenten penance holds up to us a mirror that reflects the poor sinners we sadly are and allows us a bit more tolerance of the failings of our neighbours.
Above all, of course, the message of Lourdes is about the power of prayer, little by little, to cleanse and transform our hearts. At the end Mary asked Bernadette to "Go to the spring to drink and wash herself there." At first there was only a little water, still muddy, but enough for a small drink. Bernadette persevered, however, and the water, bit by bit, became fresh and clear and soon flowed into a stream that overflows abundantly even to this day. It is a message of hope to all of us to persevere beside the source of God’s mercy. Even if at first the experience of praying for God’s mercy is bitter and gritty, in the end it is true and lasting cleansing for every human heart. A few days later, of course, we know how a blind stonecutter, bathing his eyes in the same stream, reported a miraculous cure, inspiring the millions of God’s people to journey there, year after year, for healing by the river of God’s mercy.
Within decades of the apparitions pilgrims began to make their way from Scotland to pray at the Grotto and, ever since, a constant flow of the faithful has travelled there in prayer, penance and pilgrimage, confident in the hope of receiving God’s mercy. Each summer dioceses bring clergy, religious and faithful with their sick and the
hospitalite of healthcare workers who tend them. Truly pilgrimage to Lourdes is interwoven into the fabric of the life of the Catholic Church in Scotland.
So it is fitting that the Sunday around the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes is celebrated as our White Mass in thanksgiving for the dedicated work, of course of Lourdes
Hospitalite, but more generally of all our Catholic Health Care Professionals who work day in, day out in our hospitals and clinics, hostels, labs and homes, with the same spirit of Lourdes and its Gospel of Mercy for God’s sick and poor ones. Today I warmly welcome our Catholic physicians, nurses and medical personnel from across the country and acknowledge the contributions you make to the wellbeing of our fellow citizens, inspired by the commitment of your faith and profession skill. This "White Mass" is our way of thanking and blessing all those who spend themselves healing our sick and fostering wellbeing among our people.
It is good to do so in these times of unprecedented threats to health provision in our country. At a time when our fellow citizens value our health service as a national treasure it seems to be threatened as never before in resources spread ever more thinly. We salute our health care workers up and down the land who give of their best in trying circumstances, and we know how natural it is for them to feel something of the frustration of the apostles in today’s Gospel, having ‘fished all night and caught nothing’.
These are times, of course, not only of threats to resources in healthcare. Today’s healthcare environment also brings unprecedented threats to our Catholic values about medicine and our vision of the dignity of the human person. Just as Jesus challenged His disciples in Galilee, today He calls His Catholic healthcare disciples to the high standard of the Gospel of life and to give courageous witness to the sanctity of life of the unborn, to the regulation of fertility by natural methods and to protecting the elderly from euthanasia, and so forth. The field of healthcare seems to be the epicentre of a battle to safeguard the dignity of the human person as revealed in our Catholic faith against the onslaught of the pro-choice forces of our secular age. It is a battle in which –we have to be honest- not all Catholics have held firm and in which many have fallen away, one or two even enlisting in the ranks of the enemies of the Gospel. Perhaps for many Catholic healthcare workers, searching for a way to be faithful, the Church has seemed aloof and unsupportive. They can identify with Isaiah in today’s reading who saw the Lord seated on a throne far too high, all too Holy and glorious, His voice shaking them in their boots with fear. Like Isaiah, too, perhaps they live their days in quiet fear for their wretched state, feeling themselves unclean and fearing that day when they will stand before the Lord as Judge face to face.
How much we need this Year of Mercy and new beginning! How we need St. Paul’s experience of God’s mercy in today’s second reading. St. Paul discovered that it is especially for those who feel they hardly deserve the name of disciples that the Lord reserves His greatest mercy. Jesus died for each of us in our sins, and rose for our salvation and His grace is always fruitful in anyone who humbly asks His mercy and can even become in them a power that works harder that all the others.
Lent and Lourdes are not messages about perfection but about journey, about pilgrimage, about a constant struggle for faithfulness, no matter how much falling and getting up again it takes.
We entrust this Season of Lent to Our Lady, our Mother of Mercy. At the foot of the Cross She heard, first hand, Her Son say, 'Father forgive them', on behalf of the very ones who were putting Him to death. Hearing this, Mary understood how no-one can ever be excluded from the Father's forgiveness. Assumed into Heaven She now sits in the Tribunal of God's mercy, praying to Her Son to grant our world a fresh outpouring of forgiveness. May we see in Her sweet face the desire of Her Son to take away even our most entrenched sins and wrap us in His love, so that this time of grace may be a new beginning for each of us as well as for our Church and our world.