So love poverty, like a mother. I would just suggest, should any of you want, that you ask yourself: “How is my spirit of poverty doing? How is my interior detachment?” I think this may be good for our consecrated life, our priestly life. After all, let us not forget that this is the first of the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” those who are not attached to riches, to the powers of this world.
Sister also spoke to us of the least, of the little ones, who, whatever their age, we end up treating like children because they act like children. The least, the little ones. These are words that Jesus used, words that appear in the list of things on which we will be judged: “What you did to the least of these brothers and sisters, you did to me.” There are pastoral services which may be more gratifying, from a human point of view, without being bad or worldly. But when we seek above all to prefer serving the little one, the outcast, the sick, those who are overlooked and unloved … when we serve these little ones, we serve Jesus in the best way possible.
So you were sent where you didn’t want to go, and you cried. You cried because you didn’t like it — which doesn’t mean that you are a “whimpering nun,” right? May God free us from whimpering nuns who are always complaining. This phrase isn’t mine; St. Teresa of Avila said this to her nuns; it’s her phrase. Woe to the nun who goes about all day moaning and groaning because she suffered an injustice. In the Castilian Spanish of that age, she said: “Woe to the nun who goes about saying, ‘They treated me badly for no reason.’”
You cried because you were young, you had other dreams, perhaps you thought that in a school you could do more, that you could organize young people’s futures. And they sent you there, to the “House of Mercy,” where the tenderness and the mercy of God are most clearly shown, where the tenderness and the mercy of God become a caress. How many women and men religious “burn” — let me say it again, “burn” — their lives, caressing what is discarded, caressing those whom the world throws away, whom the world despises, whom the world wishes did not exist, those whom today’s world, with new technologies, when it looks like they may come with a degenerative illness, thinks of “sending them back” before they are born. The little ones.
Young women full of dreams begin their consecrated lives by making God’s tenderness, in his mercy, alive. At times they do not understand, they have no idea, but how wonderful it is for God, and how much good it does us, for example, when a person with palsy tries to smile or when they want to kiss you and they dribble on your face. That is the tenderness of God. That is the mercy of God. Or when they are upset and they hit you. “Burning” my life like this, with what the world would discard, that speaks to us of one person alone. It speaks to us of Jesus, who out of the sheer mercy of the Father became nothing. He “emptied himself,” says the text of Philippians, Chapter Two. He became nothing. And these people to whom you dedicate your life imitate Jesus, not because they wanted to, but because this is the way they came into the world. They are nothing, they are kept out of sight, hidden; no one comes to see them. And if it is possible, and there’s still time, they get “sent back.”
So thank you for what you do, and, through you, I thank all those many women consecrated to the service of those considered “useless,” since they cannot start a business, make money or do anything “constructive” at all — these brothers and sisters of ours, these little ones, the least among us. There Jesus shines forth! And that is where my decision for Jesus shines forth. I thank you and all the consecrated men and women who do this.
“Father, I’m not a nun. I don’t take care of sick people. I’m a priest, and I have a parish, or I assist the pastor of a parish. Who is my beloved Jesus? Who is the little one? Who shows me most the mercy of the Father? Where must I find him or her?” Obviously I continue following the sequence of Matthew 25; there you have all of them: the hungry, the imprisoned, the sick — there you will meet them. But there is a special place for the priest, where the last, the least, and the littlest is found — and that is in the confessional. And there, when this man or this woman shows you their misery, take care, because it is the same misery as yours, the misery from which God saved you. Is that the case? When they reveal their misery to you, please don’t give them a hard time. Don’t scold them or punish them. If you are without sin, you can throw the first stone. But only then. Otherwise, think about your own sins; think that you could be that person. Think that you could potentially fall even lower, and think that in this moment you hold in your hands a treasure, which is the Father’s mercy.
Please — I’m speaking to the priests — never tire of forgiving. Be forgivers. Like Jesus, never tire of forgiving. Don’t hide behind fear or inflexibility. Just as this Sister — and all those in the same ministry as she is — do not become irate when they find a sick person who is dirty, but instead they serve him, clean him, take care of him. In the same way, when a penitent confesses, don’t get upset or worked up, don’t cast him out of the confessional, don’t give them a hard time. Jesus embraced them. Jesus loved them. Tomorrow, we celebrate the feast of St. Matthew. He was a thief; he even, in a way, betrayed his own people. And the Gospel says that that evening Jesus went to have supper with him and others like him. St. Ambrose has a phrase which I find very moving: “Where there is mercy, the Spirit of Jesus is there; where there is rigor, his ministers alone are there.”
Brother priest, brother bishop, do not be afraid of mercy. Let it flow through your hands and through your forgiving embrace, for the man or woman before you is one of the little ones. They are Jesus. This is what I thought I should say after hearing these two prophets. May the Lord give us these graces that these two have sown in our hearts: poverty and mercy. Because that is where Jesus is.
Homily
We are gathered in this historic Cathedral of Havana to sing with psalms the faithfulness of God towards his people, with thanksgiving for his presence and his infinite mercy. A faithfulness and mercy not only commemorated by this building but also by the living memory of some of the elderly among us, who know from experience that “his mercy endures forever and his faithfulness throughout the ages.” For this, brothers and sisters, let us together give thanks.
Let us give thanks for the Spirit’s presence in the rich and diverse charisms of all those missionaries who came to this land and became Cubans among Cubans, a sign that God’s mercy is eternal.
The Gospel presents Jesus in dialogue with his Father. It brings us to the heart of the prayerful intimacy between the Father and the Son. As his hour drew near, Jesus prayed for his disciples, for those with him and for those who were yet to come (cf. John 17:20). We do well to remember that, in that crucial moment, Jesus made the lives of his disciples, our lives, a part of his prayer. He asked his Father to keep them united and joyful. Jesus knew full well the hearts of his disciples, and he knows full well our own. And so he prays to the Father to save them from a spirit of isolation, of finding refuge in their own certainties and comfort zones, of indifference to others and division into “cliques” which disfigure the richly diverse face of the Church. These are situations which lead to a kind of isolation and ennui, a sadness that slowly gives rise to resentment, to constant complaint, to boredom; this “is not God’s will for us, nor is it the life in the Spirit” (Evangelii Gaudium, 2) to which he invited them, to which he has invited us. That is why Jesus prays that sadness and isolation will not prevail in our hearts. We want to do the same, we want to join in Jesus’ prayer, in his words, so that we can say together: “Holy Father, keep them in thy name … that they may be one, even as we are one” (John 17:11), “that your joy may be full” (John 15:11).