our need for it. God waits; he waits for us to concede him only the smallest glimmer of space so that he can enact his forgiveness and his charity within us. Only he who has been touched and caressed by the tenderness of his mercy really knows the Lord. For this reason I have often said that the place where my encounter with the mercy of Jesus takes place is my sin. When you feel his merciful embrace, when you let yourself beembraced, when you are moved—that’s when life can change, because that’s when we try to respond to the immense and unexpected gift of grace, a gift that is so overabundant it may even seem “unfair” in our eyes. We stand before a God who knows our sins, our betrayals, our denials, our wretchedness. And yet he is there waiting for us, ready to give himself completely to us, to lift us up. Thinking of the episode cited in Marshall’s novel, I start from a similar premise and point in the same direction. Not only is the legal maxim of
in dubio pro reo
—which says that when in doubt, decisions should be made in favor of the person being judged—still pertinent, there is also the importance of the gesture. The very fact that someone goes to the confessional indicates an initiation of repentance, even if it is not conscious. Without that initial impulse, the person would not be there. His being there is testimony to the desire for change. Words are important, but the gesture is explicit. And the gesture itself is important; sometimes the awkward and humble presence of a penitent who has difficulty expressing himself is worth more than another person’s wordy account of their repentance.
Y OU have often defined yourself as a sinner. When you met with the prisoners in Palmasola, Bolivia, during your 2015 journey to Latin America, you said, “Standing before you is a man who has been forgiven for his many sins….” It’s truly striking to hear a Pope say these things about himself.
Really? I don’t think it’s so unusual, even in the lives of my predecessors. For example, in the documents related to the process of the beatification of Paul VI, I read that one of his secretaries confided that the Pope, echoing the words I have already quoted from “Thoughts on Death,” said, “For me it has always been a great mystery of God to be in wretchedness and to be in the presence of the mercy of God. I am nothing, I am wretched. God the Father loves me, he wants to save me, he wants to remove me from thewretchedness in which I find myself, but I am incapable of doing it myself. And so he sends his Son, a Son who brings the mercy of God translated into an act of love toward me….But you need a special grace for this, the grace of a conversion. Once I recognize this, God works in me through his Son.” It is a beautiful synthesis of the Christian message. And then there is the homily with which Albino Luciani began his bishopric at Vittorio Veneto, when he said he had been chosen because the Lord preferred that certain things not be engraved in bronze or marble but in the dust, so that if the writing had remained it would have been clear that the merit was all and only God’s. He, now bishop and future Pope John Paul I, called himself “dust.” I have to say that when I speak of this, I always think of what Simon Peter told Jesus on the Sunday of his resurrection, when he met him on his own, a meeting hinted at in the Gospel of Luke (24:34). What might Peter have said to the Messiah upon his resurrection from the tomb? Might he have said that he felt like a sinner? He must have thought of his betrayal, of what had happened a few days earlierwhen he pretended for three times not to recognize Jesus in the courtyard of the High Priest’s house. He must have thought of his bitter and public tears. If Peter did all of that, if the Gospels describe his sin and denials to us, and if despite all this, Jesus said, “Tend my sheep” (John 21:16), I don’t think we should be