‘Shame is a grace – when one feels His mercy, he feels shame’

The Pope reveals how he learned the grace of being ashamed of his sins after a confession when he was 17 – and how that feeling of God’s mercy has stayed with him.

I can read my life in light of chapter 16 of the book of the Prophet Ezekiel. I read those pages and I say: everything here seems written just for me. The prophet speaks of shame, and shame is a grace: when one feels the mercy of God, he feels a great shame for himself and for his sin. There is a beautiful essay by a great scholar of spirituality, Fr Gaston Fessard, on the subject of shame in his book The Dialectic Of The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius. Shame is one of the graces that St Ignatius asks for during his confession of his sins before Christ crucified. That text from Ezekiel teaches us to be ashamed, it shows us how to feel shame: with all our history of wretchedness and sin, God remains faithful and raises us up. I feel this. I don’t have any particular memories of mercy as a young child. But I do as a young man. I think of Fr Carlos Duarte Ibarra, the confessor I met in my parish church on September 21, 1953, the day the Church celebrated St Matthew, the Apostle and Evangelist. I was 17 years old. On confessing myself to him, I felt welcomed by the mercy of God.

Ibarra was originally from Corrientes but was in Buenos Aires to receive treatment for leukaemia.

He died the following year. I still remember how when I got home, after his funeral and burial, I felt as though I had been abandoned. And I cried a lot that night, really a lot, and hid in my room. Why? Because I had lost a person who helped me feel the mercy of God, that

miserando atque eligendo, an expression I didn’t know at the time but I eventually would choose as my episcopal motto. I learned about it later, in the homilies of the English monk the Venerable Bede. When describing the calling of Matthew, he writes: ‘Jesus saw the tax collector and by having mercy chose him as an Apostle saying to him: “Follow me.”’ This is the translation commonly given for the words of St Bede. I like to translate

miserando with another gerund that doesn’t exist: misericordando or mercying. So, ‘mercying him and choosing him’ describes the vision of Jesus who gives the gift of mercy and chooses, and takes with him.