Homily on World Day Against the Death Penalty, by Fr. Brian McDermott, SJ

Sunday, October 13, 2024 / 28th Ordinary / Cycle B
Holy Trinity Catholic Church, Washington, DC
Extracts

This past Thursday was the United Nations-sponsored World Day Against the Death Penalty. Pope Francis spoke out on that day: “The Death Penalty is always inadmissible, because it attacks the inviolability and dignity of the person. I appeal for its abolition in all countries of the world. We must not forget that a person can repent and change, even up until the very last moment of their life.”

That evening I was privileged to attend the celebration in the Vatican Embassy of the 15th anniversary of the DC-based organization called the Catholic Mobilizing Network. This group advocates for the elimination of the death penalty in every state of our country and seeks to promote restorative justice, a form of justice that is concerned with to healing of all those who are involved in a serious crime, from the victims and their families and friends to the victimizers and their families and friends and to the attorneys and judges involved and the prison guards. With proper regard for the demands of justice, restorative judgement works for the enhancement of the human dignity of all those caught up in serious misdoing. It allies itself with God’s efforts to bring whatever wholeness is possible to traumatic situations involving terrible crime.

Each and every one of us is the recipient of God’s infinite, incomprehensible, unconditional love. No matter how we treat ourselves and our neighbors, no matter how well we return God’s love or not, God’s love for us is forever, and God’s desire is that, within the compass of our lifetime from childhood to the moment of our death, that we trustingly surrender to God’s love more and more, mainly showing that love in how we love our neighbor. When I use the word “love” here I mean the biblical understanding of it, namely, truly desiring the authentic well-being of the other. God will never let up on us, forgiving us 70 times 7, because God is totally intent on our flourishing.

But God is also mysteriously dependent on how we freely choose to treat ourselves and how others freely choose to treat us. But nothing outside us can separate us from God; only we ourselves can do that, if we make that choice. It’s crucial that we relate to other persons and to our possessions in such a way that we don’t make mini-idols of them, but relate to them as the finite creatures that they are. We are called to let God alone be the possessor of our hearts, of our lives, and that divine possession of us will be our total beatitude, our full completion, our perfect whole-making.

That can come to be only if, through our lifetime, we are willing to entrust ourselves, more and more, in naked trust, to the One who is the infinitely incomprehensible Mystery of our life, whom we stumblingly call “God.”