Jesus, Mercy Incarnate

Kelly shows, however, that the more considered teaching of St. Athanasius, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Cyril of Alexandria was that although the Incarnation in and of itself exalts human nature, the Passion and Death of Christ were also necessary to pay the ran- som-price for man’s sin, removing the sentence justly due to man for his transgressions. Moreover, these Fathers taught that it is only the encounter and union with risen and glorified humanity of Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit, that enables us actually to receive and lay hold of the blessings of immortality and sanctifica- tion that the divine Word made available to the whole human race through His Incarnation. 4 Nevertheless, the underlying point of this stream of patristic teaching remains significant: in some way, blessings were already being bestowed upon the human race simply by the fact that the divine Son of God assumed our human nature in the womb of the Blessed Virgin. In a different vein this was also the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, who held that the Incarnate Lord began to merit our salvation from the moment of conception. 5 We are in good company, therefore, if we adopt a similar point of view, and seek to explore further, with the help of the saints and doctors of the Church in the Holy Spirit, what these blessings are that flow to us from the divine Infancy of our Savior. In particular, we will turn for help to the writings of two holy souls who were exceptionally devoted to the Child Jesus. The first is St. Alphonsus Liguori, the founder of the Redemptorist order and a “Doctor of the Church;” St. Alphonsus probably wrote more meditations on the Infancy of Christ than any other saint in our his- tory. The second is a Polish religious sister who had almost no for- mal education at all, who wrote only one book, her diary, at the command of her spiritual director, and who died at age 33 from tuberculosis. That sister, of course, was St. Faustina Kowalska (Sr. Maria Faustina of the Most Blessed Sacrament). She knew the Christ Child not so much from discursive meditations, but from supernatural visions: a gift of divine grace from the Lord to her soul as she struggled for spiritual perfection. These two holy souls, 22 Jesus, Mercy Incarnate