“BLESSED ARE THE MERCIFUL FOR THEY SHALL OBTAIN MERCY”. (MATT. 5: 7).
This year’s Love Feast is tagged: HEART OF JESUS, FULL OF DIVINE MERCY AND LOVE, and the Holy Father declared this year: A JUBILEE YEAR OF MERCY. So, everyone talks of Mercy this year. In my Church – Christ the King Catholic Church Ilasamaja Mushin, Lagos, this year’s Harvest is tagged: HARVEST OF DIVINE MERCY. I believe it is true in so many other Parishes this year.
This is why I deem it very pertinent to share my reflections on the Year of Mercy with my fellow Apostles in the League of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, our Guests and other Brethren through this media – our Feast’s Brochure. Thanks to the Chairman of this Year’s Love Feast Committee, and our Committee members for giving me the privilege to share this with you and for giving the public the opportunity to gain from it.
THE REFLECTION
I and all others who care to know could recall that for some years there were so much scandals even among the Church Leadership. There was the pressure from the feminine section for Female Priests. The worst was the abominable pressure to legalize Same Sex Marriage in the Church, the efforts of the agents of darkness – in the name of Secularism – to destroy the Family, which is the Nucleus of the Church and, even the Secular Society.
This is what led me to write the Book: The Laity in the Modern World – A Call to Evangelization, for the relevant of the Church in the World of Today. In this I cried aloud that the Church should go back home and put Her House in order. As if the Call reached the Pope, he called for the Year of Faith.
So the aim of this reflection is to present before us the link running from the Year of Faith through the Year of the Family Life, to the Year of the Consecrated Life, then, this Jubilee Year of Mercy.
Due to the situation described above, the trend of the Church flowing away from the root of her Faith, every one living as he or she pleases, the previous Pope Benedict XVI started the move to reform the Church and put Church’s House in order. This he handed over to the present Pope Francis, who then declared the Year of Faith in 2013.
The Year of Faith is the year in which we were called to go back to the Root of our Faith. We were called to pick up our Faith Foundational Documents: the Bible, the Vatican II Document and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, re – study them and re – model our lives according to what they teach us as Catholic Christians.
In 2014, the Church, through the Pope, believing that we have gone through the foundation of our faith: the Bible, the Vatican II Documents and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Laity, through the Family were told to examine their Vocation as married people in the eyes of the Foundation of our Faith which we were taken back to in the previous year. We were expected to have discovered the areas we were doing it wrong in our marital lives: between husbands and wives, parents and their children and the Children among themselves, between couples and their God, and the Church, and even among the families that make up the Body of Christ – the Church.
In the same way, in 2015, the Clergy and the Religious under the Title: The Year of the Consecrated Life, were also called by the Church to re – examine themselves in view of What the Bible, the Vatican II Documents and the Catechism of the Catholic Church say about them and their Vocation. They were meant to, in the eyes of these Documents, look into how they have been living out their Vocational Vows, and found out where they had not been getting it right all the while.
“We were expected to have discovered the areas we were doing it wrong in our marital lives: between husbands and wives, parents and their children and the Children among themselves, between couples and their God, and the Church, and even among the families that make up the Body of Christ – the Church.”
Now, in this year, the Church – through the Pope, believing that her members must have made proper use of the opportunities and the grace of their different years, and having discovered their mistakes, and the areas they have been derailing in their responsibilities due to their different vocations, and are dully in need of God’s Mercy, declared the Year of Mercy. As a loving and caring Mother, the Church calls her members to the fact of God’s Mercy. She tells us that God is a merciful and forgiving Father. She also pleads for us before the God of mercy. She obtained for her members the forgiveness, and pardon of the punishments due to the sins committed within the previous years – the years we were living contrary to what our Faith teaches us through the Bible and the other Documents as stated above – from God. Thus she declares this year for indulgences on those who would undergo or meet up some conditions – in this case, a Pilgrimage to some designated Churches in each Archdioceses or Dioceses, and to pass through a particular door of the chosen church within this declared Jubilee Year of Mercy.
This Jubilee Year of Mercy is a great opportunity for us all to avoid our dying with the guilt of sins. Those of us who could not make any thing out of the Family Year are given another opportunity to search our selves, pick out our sins, confess them, and participate well in the programs of the Jubilee Year. It is by this that the Jubilee Year’s Indulgences and grace will soak us like water, and the glory of God will fill us.
Brother John U. Uchefuna,
PRESIDENT/PROMOTER, AOP.
C.K.C. ILASAMAJA.