Mercy

This excerpt comes from the book Beautiful Mercy by various authors, including Christopher West, who authored this part.

The Latin word for mercy, misericordia, means "a heart which gives itself to those in misery." Our world today exhibits a veritable desert of misery related to our failure to understand the true meaning of love and how our sexuality is meant to express that love. Pope Francis' oft-quoted description of the Church as "a field hospital after battle" couldn't be more fitting in our post-sexual revolution world.

When marriages are crumbling and children are growing up without both a mother and father; when idealized and hyper-eroticized images of the human body have become our cultural wallpaper and people are valued only if they are accordingly stimulating; when the gross distortions of hardcore pornography have become our main reference point for understanding sexual behavior, and sexual addiction masquerades under the banner of liberation; when the blessing of fertility is considered a curse to be eliminated and the innocent human life that springs from sexual union a threat to be exterminated; when governments institutionalize gender confusion and insist the sexual difference has no real meaning; when parents refuse to identify their children at birth so they can "choose their own gender identity" later in life; when society glorifies those who mutilate their bodies so they can "become" the other sex and vilifies those who raise warning flags; and when our Christian parents, teachers, pastors, and confessors are largely unable to respond to these challenges in any compelling way for lack of proper formation themselves, we are a deeply, deeply wounded people.

"I see clearly," said Pope Francis, "that the thing the Church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds." And this means that "ministers of the Church must be ministers of mercy above all."