(Editor’s Note: Mauro Cardinal Piacenza, the major penitentiary of the Catholic Church, spoke with ZENIT News Agency about this season of grace. Lent is always a time to experience God’s mercy, he said, and in this jubilee year, even more so.
(In his conversation with ZENIT at the end of February, Cardinal Piacenza explained the relationship of fasting with the indulgences and the works of mercy. And he reminded us that, in this age marked by religious and social challenges, penance changes people’s hearts.
(ZENIT published the interview in two parts. It is presented here in its entirety. All rights reserved.)
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Q. Your Eminence, the Season of Lent is a penitential time par excellence. What worth does it assume during Jubilee Years?
A. The Season of Lent is certainly typically penitential. Therefore, with the teacher of life that the Divine Liturgy is, in the first Sunday of Lent we are led with Jesus to the desert, the place of austerity, of asceticism and of great silence.
To enter this desert of the spirit it is necessary to come out of the noise and the chatter, the preoccupations and dissipations of every day, an effort must be made to bring about a reduction of multiplicity to the only thing necessary.
The first lenten penance is the reconquest of interior silence, of sobriety, of the essential, of the primacy of the eternal over the ephemeral, of the permanent over the passing. It is almost a restoring of oneself, as we are and not as we seem. It is fruitful to be able to look at oneself in the mirror in one’s naked reality, stripped of appearances, of recitations, of amplifications, of lies.
Then in the silence of oneself and in the desert of things, the Word will resound in all its constructive force.
That this Lent is inserted in the framework of a Holy Year as that proclaimed by Pope Francis, stimulates one ultimately to reflect on the elements that are per se constitutive and essential of a Jubilee: conversion, full return to God and, therefore, to the Sacrament of Reconciliation and to the fruition of the inestimable gift of the indulgence.
Q. An aspect of the Season of Lent that is increasingly neglected is fasting. What can be done to re-launch this practice and to rediscover its spiritual value, which goes well beyond the simple abstention from food and its reduction?
A. Fasting, united to prayer, almsgiving, and to the other works of charity, has always belonged to the life and the penitential practice of the Church.
We must not think simply that to practice fasting means to subject oneself to certain renunciations in the matter of food and drink. If one abstains from some food or drink or if one limits its consumption in a spirit of sobriety, it is not for philosophical reasons or for ideological axioms limiting the faculty of choice, but only to ensure better one’s freedom of spirit in face of the pretenses of our instincts.
The practice of fasting helps to check our passions and to have our intelligence illumined by faith to moderate our impulses.
Christian fasting is not practiced as an isolated act enclosed in itself. It must be accompanied — and in the lenten liturgical texts the Church repeats it often — by prayer, by self-accusation of one’s faults and one’s defects, of merciful attention to the needy at all levels.
True Christian fasting is always inspired by love toward Him who gave the whole of Himself, to the last drop of blood, to give us a divine life and an eternal beauty.
Lent is always a time to experience God’s mercy, and in this jubilee year, even more so.
Defining The Indulgence
Q. Can you explain the role of indulgences during the Holy Year?
A. There is much talk of mercy but little talk of the indulgence, yet the indulgence is a splendid expression of divine mercy, and those who are more or less conscious of it, are thirsty for it.
To be able to live this Year of Mercy fruitfully, the Holy Father invites us all to put ourselves in attentive listening to the Word of God, to meditate on Jesus’ message of love and to receive His mercy to pour it in turn on our neighbor, especially on those who suffer:
“Let us open our hearts to see the miseries of the world, the wounds of so many brothers and sisters deprived of dignity, and let us feel ourselves provoked to hear their cry for help” (Misericordiae Vultus, n. 15).
In this light we realize that in this Jubilee Year of Mercy, precisely because of this, the indulgence assumes a particularly eminent importance.
However, let us seek to understand well what an indulgence is so as not to fall into ambiguities that, in history, have brought grave damage to the Church.
Canon 992 of the Code of Canon Law gives a precise definition of the indulgence, which is “the remission before God of temporal punishment for sins whose guilt is already forgiven, which a properly disposed member of the Christian faithful gains under certain and defined conditions by the assistance of the Church which as minister of redemption dispenses and applies authoritatively the treasury of the satisfactions of Christ and the saints.”
A banal but perhaps eloquent example can be given to understand it. Let us think of a patient who undergoes a surgical intervention from which he comes out perfectly cured but with a large scar requiring plastic surgery to have it disappear. So, the indulgence would be the plastic surgery by which not even the wound is seen.
The indulgence cancels absolutely every trace; it cancels everything. It is, therefore, a magnificent expression of the superabundance of divine mercy. Behind everything is the fascinating doctrine of the Mystical Body, clearly expressed in the apostolic constitution Indulgentiarum Doctrina of Blessed Paul VI, of January 1, 1967.
It is not about juridical bookkeeping but about the ample breadth of a charity that knows no limits and flows beneficially on us pilgrims in this world and on our brothers that live the state of purification.
If well explained with great ecclesiological vision, the doctrine on the indulgence, far from constituting a hindrance, should constitute a help to any serious ecumenical reflection.
Q. Put in the first place during the Jubilee are works of corporal and spiritual mercy. Can these works also have penitential worth, or purification from sin?
A. It is about charitable actions with which we help our neighbor in his spiritual and corporal needs. Let us recall the corporal works of mercy: to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to give lodging to pilgrims, to visit the sick, to visit the imprisoned, to bury the dead.
In filigree, behind each of the works of mercy we perceive Jesus’ words when He teaches us that every time we carry out a gesture of mercy to one of the least of His brothers, we do it to Him (cf. Matt. 25:40). They are the most subversive and innovative words of history.
One can say that every revolution was beneficial in the measure in which it was inspired; and every revolution that was averted only substituted an old egoism with a new one, and to a known arrogance an unheard-of arrogance, often also worse.
Identifying Himself with each man, and especially with the most suffering and ill-equipped, the Lord alerts us that in Christianity it is no longer possible to love God without loving one’s brother; and it is no longer possible to love one’s brother without loving God.
Without an active and concrete charity, there is no authentic religious life but only illusory devoutness; and a solicitude for the other that is not born of a passion for God and for His truth, always runs the danger of being an arid and unfounded philanthropy.
One understands well then how the works of mercy have a penitential worth and constitute a sort of purification of the person that carries them out. Obviously, sacramental Confession remains irreplaceable, one can never say “or — or” but one must always say “and — and.” On the other hand Confession drives one to carry out works of mercy and works of mercy drive one to Confession.
Rediscover Reconciliation
Q. The Apostolic Penitentiary is holding a course on the “Internal Forum.” Can you explain its aim?
A. The course has come this year to its 27th edition, taking place from February 29 to March 4, with the title deduced from n. 17 of the bull Misericordiae Vultus, with which the Holy Father Francis proclaimed the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy, and it is the following: Let us put at the center with conviction the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
Obviously, it is a whole program addressed to priests, to seminarians close to Ordination, to all those who are confessors or are preparing to become so, so that they can be ever better prepared for such a fundamental, great, and delicate task.
In the gesture of absolution, the confessor becomes the means aware of a wonderful event of grace. He becomes the minister of God’s consolation for the spiritual rebirth of the penitents.
How many persons in difficulty seek the comfort and consolation of Christ! How many penitents find in Confession the peace and joy that they sought for a long time! How can we not recognize that also in our time, marked by so many religious and social challenges, the Sacrament of Reconciliation can be rediscovered and proposed again!
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