Redeemed by Grace: A Catholic Woman’s Journey to Planned Parenthood and Back

Redeemed by Grace: A Catholic Woman’s Journey to Planned Parenthood and Back.  By Ramona Treviño, Ignatius Press, 2015.

 

Ramona Treviño’s memoir is the story of a woman who took paths in life that she later regretted, and then made every effort to start afresh and move in the right direction. Treviño’s presentation of her childhood is a predominantly happy one full of religious faith, but around the age of sixteen she started dating a handsome young man and became pregnant by him. Treviño writes in clear and heartfelt prose, describing her life and her changing emotions with clear and genuine prose.  As she writes, one gets the feeling that she is trying to unburden herself of unpleasant memories, but as the book progresses one realizes that Treviño has written this book to reach out to readers who might need help with a difficult situation.

 

Treviño traces her spiritual journey and changing career paths, tracing her life story and explaining why it traveled in the directions that it did.  She writes:

 

“Looking back at my life as a child, I can see that even though it was not ideal, it’s very obvious that I was loved. 

 

When I became pregnant at sixteen, I learned the meaning of unconditional love.  It was unconditional love that made it possible for me to say yes to my pregnancy.  It was that same love that ruled out the possibility of abortion.  Abortionwas not a word we had ever used in our house, nor considered.

 

Reflecting back, it makes sense why I would be so willing to sacrifice my life for the life of my baby.  Although my parents had their struggles, they taught my sister and me the meaning of love and sacrifice through their actions.  My mother always put our needs before her own, making sure our basic needs of food and clothing were always met.  She did the very best she could with her situation.  My father, though suffering from his own demons, always came through for our family when we needed him the most and found a way to provide.  He never turned his back on me when I made bad choices or made life difficult.

 

Both parents taught me the meaning of love and faith in an unconditional kind of way, by welcoming a grandchild without batting an eye.  God had always provided for us so why would this time be any different?  Their daughter was having a baby, and there was nothing else to be said about it.  If only other young women could have parents as forgiving as mine.” (p. 141).

 

The pregnancy led to a daughter, and Treviño married the father of her child in a secular ceremony.  The marriage was not a happy one, and it eventually became an abusive one. Treviño traces the devastating psychological effects that her emotionally manipulative and physically violent husband had on her, and the great effort it took to escape his control.  A divorce followed, and Treviño struggled as a single mother for a while until finally meeting the man who would become her second husband, who she would later marry in the Church.

 

Treviño’s personal life is frequently referred to throughout the book, and her second husband and children consistently come across as sources of joy and strength.  It is Treviño’s professional life that eventually causes her deep and profound torment.  

 

Treviño’s description of her professional life will no doubt provoke some controversy, but by providing a human face and a complex soul to her situation, it will cause both supporters and opponents of Planned Parenthood to look at the organization in a new way.  Treviño started working at a Planned Parenthood clinic, eventually becoming a manager there.  The clinic dispensed medications and other materials, and performed examinations, but although clients were frequently referred to other venues for abortions, the surgical procedure was never actually performed at Treviño’s clinic.

 

For a while, Treviño had some minor qualms about her work, but quieted her conscience and did not think too closely about the ramifications of Planned Parenthood’s policies and approaches.  Over the years, Treviño began to feel increasingly uncomfortable with her job, and this sense of unease was exacerbated by her discovery of a Catholic radio station that led her to reevaluate her life and future in unexpectedly emotional and disturbing ways.

 

When describing her experiences, Treviño writes:

 

“For the last several months, I had been feeling restless at my job– especially now that God had been revealing so many truths to me. The only time I felt at peace was on the weekends. I would go home and get restored only to face each Tuesday morning with an escalating sense of dread.

 

When I pulled into my driveway in Trenton, I stopped the car and stayed in my seat.  I couldn’t go in– not yet.  With the keys still in the ignition, I turned on the radio.  I wanted to listen again to the Catholic station I had discovered just four months earlier.  The programming both attracted and challenged me.  The featured discussions seemed to resonate with truth, and that captivated me; yet at the same time, they left me troubled. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to confront the possibility that I might have taken some wrong turns.

 

After all, I was the manager of a contraception and abortion-referral clinic.  For three years I had been trying to convince myself that my job didn’t have anything to do with abortions– or at least didn’t make me directly responsible for them– despite the hundreds of girls I had directed each year to another facility to terminate their pregnancies.”  (pp. 1-2).

 

Whatever one thinks about abortion and contraception, Treviño’s approach to these subjects is not that of a polemicist or a pundit, but as a woman who is simply and honestly recounting her own experiences and reactions to a situation.  Her job was destroying her, and only by leaving could she regain her mental, spiritual, and psychological health.  Tied to Treviño’s recovery is her re-appreciation of her religious faith, and a re-evaluation of the morality of her job, along with her relationship with God.

 

“God had never walked away from me.  I was the one who had drifted.  I had allowed my sin to blind me from truth.  And I had had a hand in abortions– a direct hand.  How many girls had I watched walk out of my care and into places that would kill the sweet, innocent lives growing inside them and depending on them for survival?  Those girls had come to me with a sliver of hope, searching for a better solution, and I had taken that sliver and smashed it to pieces.

 

I couldn’t wash my hands of any of it; I knew that now.  But I also sensed that on the other side of my raw pain, a loving father waited with open arms.

 

I love you, and I want to bring you to the other side of this; but first, I need you really to look at what you’ve done and own up to it.

 

It wasn’t too late.  I was here, I was still alive, and that meant there was still time.  God had spared me so that I could get to this very moment and have a chance to repent and save my soul.” (p. 5).

 

Due to the subject matter, this may be a polarizing book, but Treviño comes across as a thoroughly sincere and likeable woman, describing her experiences with sadness and residual anguish, but not anger.  There is no self-righteousness or condemnation in her work, but only a pure, honest emotion.  Throughout the book is the pure feeling of Treviño saying, “I want to help.”  This book is meant to help others, through telling the story of a woman who found a way to help herself.

 

 

–Chris Chan

Practical Theology: Spiritual Direction from St. Thomas Aquinas

Practical Theology: Spiritual Direction from St. Thomas Aquinas.  By Peter Kreeft, Ignatius Press, 2014.

 

Subtitled 358 Ways Your Mind Can Help You Become A Saint from the Summa Theologiae, Practical Theology is a sustained attack on the widespread attitude that faith and reason are polar opposites.  St. Thomas Aquinas is one of the great theologians of all time, but it is easy for contemporary readers to get lost in his work. St. Thomas’s writing style contrasts significantly with today’s prose.  The average contemporary reader prefers writing that can be read easily and without excessive strain, and even dedicated students of theology may find it difficult to read one of Aquinas’s books from cover to cover as they would a novel.

 

Kreeft wrote this book as a tribute and a guide to an author he deeply respects.  In his introduction, Kreeft writes:

 

“In a lifetime of browsing through Aquinas, my amazement has continually increased not only at his theoretical, philosophical brilliance and sanity but equally at his personal, practical wisdom, his “existential bite.”  Yet this second dimension of St. Thomas has usually been eclipsed by the other.  I wrote this book to help bring that sun out from its eclipse.  Since I already wrote an annotated anthology of St. Thomas’ purely rational, philosophical wisdom, Summa of the Summa, extracting it from its larger theological context of faith and divine revelation.  I here try to redress the balance with an easily digestible sample of his much larger distinctively religious wisdom.

 

Here are 358 pieces of wisdom from St. Thomas’ masterpiece the Summa, which are literally more valuable than all the kingdoms of this world because they will help you to attain “the one thing needful,” the summum bonum or “greatest good,” the ultimate end and purpose and meaning of life, which has many names but which is the same reality. Three of its names are “being a saint,” “beatitude” (supreme happiness) and “union with God.”  That was my principle for choosing which passages to use: do they help you to attain your ultimate end, i.e. sanctity, happiness, union with God?

 

St. Thomas would have agreed with Leon Bloy, who often wrote that in the end there is only one tragedy in life: not to have been a saint. 

 

This is the same thing as attaining true happiness.  St. Thomas, like Aristotle, meant by “happiness” not merely “subjective contentment” but “real perfection,” attaining the end or “final cause” or purpose of your very existence.”

 

The purpose of this book is to show just why St. Thomas is relevant to today’s world.  All too often, the leading theologians of centuries past are dismissed as inaccessible, or of use only to the medieval era.  Kreeft makes a point of illustrating how the moral lessons in Aquinas’s work are not just useful to life in the twenty-first century, they are vital to living a just and virtuous life.

 

“The ultimate reason we must become holy is that that is the only way to become real.  For becoming holy is becoming what reality ultimately is, i.e., what God, the ultimate reality and the touchstone for all reality, is: true, good, and beautiful; real, loving, and joyful.  “You must be holy because I the Lord your God am holy” was His ultimate explanation of His law to His chosen people, who were His collective prophet to the world.

 

Attaining this end depends on the will– the will to attain it, the will’s choice to believe God, to hope in God, and above all, to love God and that which God is (truth, goodness, beauty).

 

But the will depends on the mind.  Each truth about God known by the mind is a new motive for loving Him with the will.  It also works the other way around: the more you love any person (human or divine), the more you want to know him (or Him) better, and the more you do.  And this always causes deep joy.”

 

Each of the three hundred fifty-eight subjects in this book is about a page long, with very few being slightly shorter and a small handful being a bit longer.  Each starts with a short introduction to the subject matter, such as “Religion,” “How to Interpret the Bible,” “The “Problem of Evil,” “God and Evil,” “The Greatest Sin,” “Is Sin Due to Ignorance?,” “Passion and Responsibility,” “Why We Need “Organized Religion,”” “Grace and Free Will,” “The Fear of God,” “Anger,” “Why Christ Had to Die on the Cross,” “Why Socrates was the Greatest Philosopher,” “Three Meanings of the Eucharist,” “Denying Communion to Public Sinners,” “Excommunication,” “The Resurrection of the Body,” “Damnation,” “Limbo: Reasons for Its Existence,” “The Amount of Time You Spend in Purgatory,” and “What St. Thomas Didn’t Say,” plus a few hundred more topics.

 

Each topic follows the same basic format.  The subject being studied is numbered and listed at the top of the page.  Kreeft writes a brief introduction to the topic, and then a short excerpt from Aquinas’s work is printed in boldface. Immediately afterwards, Kreeft rephrases and summarizes Aquinas’s main points, all in an attempt to explain it to a contemporary audience.  Sometimes a joke or a fable is referenced in order to make the moral more accessible to the modern reader.

 

“This is St. Thomas’ book, not mine.  I am only one hungry, homeless bum calling to my friends: “Look!  Free steak dinners over there!”  He supplies the steak, I supply only the sauces.  Thus his words are in boldface type, mine are not.  My comments that follow each quotation do not mean to add to what St. Thomas says but only (1) explain it, (2) apply it, and (3) festoon it, like a Christmas tree.  Or, better, they unwrap the Christmas presents St. Thomas gives us.  They are not scholarly theological commentaries but more like what the Jews call midrash: spiritual commentaries: practical, personal, existential, “livable” thoughts.  I have formatted these readings as answers to questions that real people actually ask their spiritual directors.”

 

Kreeft is not doing his own work justice.  Kreeft is performing a public service by making Aquinas accessible to today’s readers.  He is working as a kind of translator and annotator, taking Aquinas’s wise words from past centuries and reiterating and rewording them so that readers can see the value of Aquinas’s arguments and understand how they apply to their everyday lives.  Aquinas can be daunting to many readers, and Kreeft is not dumbing Aquinas down, he is developing ways to help today’s readers connect to a challenging but brilliant man’s work.

 

Practical Theology is an outstanding educational work and a terrific way of making Aquinas’s work accessible to the contemporary reader.  The book should be read carefully and reflectively.  A dedicated reader might want to devote just a few minutes a day to this book, studying one topic every day, taking time to savor the ideas expressed inside the page of text and thinking thoroughly about how one is actually living out one’s religious faith and pondering how to improve and do better in the future.  At the rate of just one subject a day, a reader could complete the book in just under a year, beginning on New Year’s Day and finishing around Christmas.  Or one could sit down and read the book from cover to cover.  The only wrong way to read a book like Practical Theology is to never pick it up at all.

 

–Chris Chan

All Roads: Roamin’ Catholic Apologetics

All Roads: Roamin’ Catholic Apologetics.  By Dale Ahlquist, ACS Books, 2014.

 

Dale Ahlquist, the president of the American Chesterton Society (Chesterton.org), has written a new book on the Catholic Church and how to live one’s faith and defend it.  Most of Ahlquist’s previous works have revolved around G.K. Chesterton.  Chesterton is a constant presence in All Roads, but he is not the central character.  Perhaps Ahlquist is the main figure in this new book, or perhaps Jesus is.  Chesterton is a significant supporting character, as are other figures ranging from writers to popes, all filtered through the amiable light of Ahlquist’s prose.  Indeed, Ahlquist notes that, “You will also note my glorious weakness in quoting my friend Mr. Chesterton to illustrate nearly every point, though sometimes I lapse into quoting the Church Fathers, or even, in extreme cases, Scripture.  It is the part of my apologetics for which I make no apology.”  The heart of this book comes from Ahlquist’s happy descriptions of becoming Catholic and explaining what it means to be Catholic.

 

In his introduction, Ahlquist writes:

 

“Becoming Catholic was the most difficult decision of my life.  It was a decision I had to defend at the time I entered the Church and again almost every day since.  And it was a decision I have never once regretted.

 

In this book, I will begin with an unnecessarily long prologue telling the story of my conversion.  But the rest of it is composed of mercifully short and hopefully sweet accounts of some of the encounters that happened afterwards, the opportunities where I have had the pleasure of defending the faith that I have embraced.  There is always someone or something fighting the Catholic Church, and I have found it nothing less than sublime to give them the fight they are asking for.  But while defending the faith provides the exhilaration of battle, it also provides a certain serenity, a peace of mind that comes from having the truth reaffirmed at every turn.  “If Christianity should happen to be true,” says G.K. Chesterton, “then defending it may mean talking about anything or everything.  Things can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true.” Anything and everything.  That is what these short meditations are about.  The doctrines and teachings of the Catholic Church relate to every conceivable subject, but conversely, every subject, every idea, every issue is a ready opportunity to demonstrate the truths of the Catholic Church.  Everything has a way of pointing to the truth.  I suppose another way of saying it is that all roads lead to Rome.”

 

The introduction to this book is a lengthy overview of Ahlquist’s spiritual development.  It is personal, revealing, and ultimately proves to be an effective means of explaining why Ahlquist would become a Catholic apologist and a Chesterton popularizer.  Ahlquist tells how an in-law (a Christian musician) introduced Ahlquist to Chesterton’s writings after learning of Ahlquist’s interest in C.S. Lewis, and then pointing out that Lewis was deeply inspired by Chestertion.  After the first essay, fifty-six much shorter essays follow.  Many of them are revised versions of articles that were published on various websites and other venues such as the magazine Gilbert.  The articles cover a very wide swath of topics, ranging from theology, to history, to Church traditions, to modern art, to the family, to other religions. 

 

Some of the essays serve as editorials, while others ruminate on current events.  In one of the most memorable chapters, Ahlquist draws upon a recent controversy at a Minnesota museum, where a beloved and beautiful painting was sold by the institution, despite the pleas of fans and art lovers to keep the artwork.  William Adolphe Bouguereau’s Bohémiennewas one of the most-liked and celebrated paintings at the museum, but the management of the Minneapolis Art Institute decided that for various reasons, the Bohémienne no longer deserved to have a place at the museum, and would be sold in order to buy other pictures that the curators believed better deserved wall space at the MAI.  The curators listed various reasons why the portrait ought not be viewed with reverence, leading to disgust from fans and charges that the modernist art critics were incapable of appreciating a work of humanist realism.  The controversy spiraled, fans offered to donate large sums of money if the MAI would keep the painting, but these objections and efforts were ignored. (See http://www.artrenewal.org/articles/2004/Minneapolis/shameful.php for further information on the controversy.) Ahlquist notes that a lovely painting that thousands of people enjoyed was now in a private collection where hardly anybody would ever see it again.  This incident becomes a metaphor for the heart of the book’s commentary of contemporary culture.  The self-styled “elites” of the modern world have contempt for the glories of the past, and average people who appreciate the beautiful and unique wind up getting cheated through no fault of their own.  The truth gets lost amongst the prejudices of people in position of influence, and the broader culture is weakened as a result.

 

Ahlquist’s cultural criticism moves beyond the art world and into theological debates:

 

“There is, however, a creeping error within Christianity, even among Catholics, called Universalism, the idea that everyone will go to heaven no matter what.  This is clearly contrary to the teaching of the Church, and yet we see in many places an increasing resistance to talk about hell and the “tragic possibilities” that accompany the glory of free will.  The Universalists have done the Protestants one better.  The Protestants reduced the scheme of salvation to “faith alone,” but the Universalists have dumped even faith.  It is inclusiveness taken to the extreme.

 

But human dignity depends on the doctrine of free will.  Chesterton says that another name for free will is moral responsibility: “Upon this sublime and perilous liberty hang heaven and hell, and all the mysterious drama of the soul.”  The drama of the soul is this amazing possibility that “a man can divide himself from God.”  But even more dramatic is that a man can be reconciled to God.  It is not logical– or theological, for that matter– that we can be reconciled with God if we cannot be separated from him.

 

Hell is not a subject to be avoided; it is a place to be avoided.  Not thinking about hell is a great danger.  We might even fool ourselves into thinking there is no hell.  But thinking about hell is a very good idea.  It is a good way to keep ourselves out of it.”

 

Ahlquist’s approach to Catholic apologetics is to explain the Church’s teachings, and then explain why they make perfect sense.  The “commonsensical” tactic that Ahlquist uses is meant to make Catholic morality, which is often branded as a relic of medieval times or an arbitrary set of restrictions, an obvious approach to dealing with a muddled world and the quest towards Heaven.  As the above quote indicates, universalism, taken to a conclusion, indicates that actions ultimately do not have consequences.  It therefore might obviously make one wonder if there is any reason to choose virtue over vice, if the eternal reward is the same at the end of both paths.  Throughout the book, Ahlquist cites conversations where he raises questions that certain morally complacent people never dreamed of asking.  Ahlquist argues that finding accurate answers requires the ability to think up relevant questions, a habit that many people have never developed because of a blind reluctance to challenge certain principles. 

 

“Chesterton says, “Becoming a Catholic does not mean leaving off thinking.  It means learning how to think.”  I can scarcely convey how astounding that comment is from someone like Chesterton, who was not exactly a dunce before his conversion.  But I discovered firsthand that the Catholic faith was not only central to Chesterton’s profound thought, it is central to everything.”

 

Ahlquist’s earlier books were largely reworked versions of his television series The Apostle of Common Sense, turning the teleplays into essays.  By going beyond Chesterton’s world, Ahlquist has actually managed to explore Chesterton’s world better.  Since there was virtually no topic that escaped the attention of Chesterton’s pen, there is no reason why one of Chesterton’s biggest fans and supporters ought not to take the same approach to apologetics.  The Catholic Church becomes a magnifying glass that is used to see the world and everything in it with great clarity and detail, with previous misconceptions being jettisoned in favor of firm understandings.  Adopting a Catholic mindset, Ahlquist argues, is more than just regurgitating statements that the Church has compelled its members to memorize.  Catholic thinking means approaching a question with a mind well trained in common sense and logical thought, leading to an intelligent and clear conclusion.  Ahlquist’s book is the story of a journey, but even though his work has taken him around the world, it is the sort of journey that takes place mostly inside one’s head and heart, and he wants his readers to go on a comparable odyssey in order to find the truth in a muddled world.

 

 

–Chris Chan

Fioretti– The Little Flowers of Pope Francis

Fioretti– The Little Flowers of Pope Francis.  By Andrea Tornielli, Ignatius Press, 2014.

 

Over the past year and a half, it has become increasingly apparent that if people want to get a better idea of what Pope Francis is saying and doing, then the traditional media is definitely not a good place to go for information.  Time after time, the religion reporters of the major papers and news services have been caught distorting the Pope’s messages, deliberately misrepresenting his statements, and potentially making comments up out of whole cloth.  This has given many individuals, ranging from staunch Catholics to disinterested nonbelievers, erroneous perceptions about Pope Francis’s goals for his papacy and his message for the world.  

 

People from all walks of life are raising questions.  Is the Pope radically changing Church teachings on certain subjects?  Is the Pope in danger for taking such radical stances?  What does this mean for the future of the Church?  Increasingly, religious bloggers have become the go-to source for reliable information and educated commentary about Pope Francis and his papacy, providing factual correction for the radically distorted narratives widely disseminated in the media, such as the alleged “blistering attack on the Curia” at Christmas (Dawn Eden gives a much more nuanced examination of that statement here, stressing that it wasn’t the lambasting that many news stories asserted it was: http://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2014/12/24/did-pope-francis-really-give-his-own-curia-a-blistering-attack-for-christmas) to the recent “all dogs go to heaven” story that was later proven to be a largely baseless non-story created by unscrupulous reporting (http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/12/pope-francis-didnt-say-dogs-can-go-to-heaven.html).  The corrections have gotten minor attention in the general press, and not nearly as much ink and air time as the original, debunked stories, especially since the retractions tend to come a few days after the first news stories break.

 

In Fioretti, Tornielli is trying to explain to readers what Pope Francis is really saying and doing.  As a longtime journalist at the Vatican, Tornielli provides a professional’s view of what is being said and done, as well as providing extensive quotations as to what is really being preached.  As he explains his goals in publishing this books, Tornielli describes his work as follows:

 

“This book contains incidents, excerpts from homilies, testimonies, encounters, telephone calls that have Pope Francis as their protagonist.  The title echoes the Little Flowers of St. Francis, the famous collection of stories about the beloved Francis of Assisi, whose name the Pope adopted for himself.  The present work makes no claim to completeness, nor does it intend to offer a systematic account of the first months of Francis’ pontificate or to present analyses and commentaries.  It merely tries to offer a collection of fragments, a little selection which page after page, may help the reader to become better acquainted with the Bishop of Rome who came “from the end of the earth.”” (p. 15).

 

The purpose of Fioretti is to present a picture of what Tornielli sees as the real Pope Francis, who comes across as a man of great kindness and charity who is determined to not allow the world and the Church to remain in ineffective old patterns and bad habits.  Early in the book, Tornielli writes:

 

“The message that Francis considers most important, as he himself said in his homily at the Mass in the Vatican parish of St. Anna on March 17, is the message of mercy.  “Without mercy,” he said to the Brazilian bishops during his journey to Rio de Janeiro, “we have little chance nowadays of becoming part of a world of ‘wounded’ persons in need of understanding, forgiveness, love.”  He added, “We need a church able to make sense of the ‘night’ contained in the flight of so many of our brothers and sisters. … We need a church unafraid of going forth into their night… a church capable of meeting them on their way.”  (pp. 12-13).

 

The Pope’s words are quoted extensively as a means of creating a patchwork quilt of Pope Francis’s  “greatest hits,” so to speak, thereby creating a mega-sermon with commentary by Tornielli, who comes across as a staunch supporter of the Pope, who in turn comes across as a man of preternatural warmth and kindness.  In Fioretti, the “little flowers” are examples of how love needs to be an integral component of religious life and evangelization.  The following words are from Pope Francis:

 

“The structural and organizational reforms are secondary– that is, they come afterward.  The first reform must be the attitude.  The ministers of the Gospel must be people who can warm the hearts of the people who walk through the dark night with them, who know how to dialogue and to descend themselves into their people’s night, into the darkness, but without getting lost.  The people of God want pastors, not clergy acting like bureaucrats or government officials.  The bishops, particularly, must be able to support the movements of God among their people with patience, so that no one is left behind.  But they must also be able to accompany the flock that has a flair for finding new paths.

 

Instead of being just a church that welcomes and receives by keeping the doors open, let us try also to be a church that finds new roads, that is able to step outside itself and go to those who do not attend Mass, to those who have quit or are indifferent.  The ones who quit sometimes do it for reasons that, if properly understood and assessed, can lead to a return.  But that takes audacity and courage.” (pp. 13-14).

 

Tornielli observes that sometimes the most dangerous impediments to faith and spiritual improvement come from within the hearts of average individuals.  Sometimes the barriers that stand in the way of someone finding comfort or fulfillment inside the Church are self-imposed, and though Tornielli’s message ought to provoke guilt in those who are not accustomed to introspection, it serves as a profound set of directions for self-help, even though the path to holiness is not an easy one.

 

“We live in a society where we become less and less accustomed to acknowledging our responsibilities and blaming ourselves for our mistakes: indeed it is always someone else’s fault.  Other people are always the immoral ones; someone else is always at fault, never me.  We also experience a certain view of the Church that sees her only imposing requirements and prohibitions that stifle freedom and weigh down everyday life, which is already burdensome.  The message of mercy knocks down both clichés at the same time.

 

There is no doubt that these words of the Pope made an impression on the hearts of many people.  Above all on the fallen-away, on those who have distanced themselves from the Church and from the practice of their faith.  Many pastors from all parts of Italy have testified to this, speaking about the increase in the number of confessions in the Easter season and about the fact that many penitents specifically cited Francis’ words about mercy.”  (pp. 22-23).

 

This is a short book, and at times Tornielli cites the same quotes by Pope Francis multiple times.  This is not meant to be a thorough analysis of the Pope’s sermons and homilies, but it does select some recurring themes that have proven crucial to the pontiff’s worldview and agenda.  This little volume is meant to be a rebuttal to the unpleasantly common view that Pope Francis is reducing the Church’s teachings to a simple “be kind and follow your conscience.”  Instead, Tornielli’s selections from Pope Francis’s writings come across as a far more complex and challenging argument, indicating that nothing is being taken away from the Church’s teachings, but instead, the blinding sins and foibles that people carry with them and nuture through poor decisions need to be torn away in order for people to be brought closer to Christ.

 

 

–Chris Chan