Every saint, every blessed one whom God exalts in the course of history in a certain period is one of his messages for that time. God is telling us something through him. What the prophets were in the Old Testament, the blessed and saints are in the New Testament. These are those who speak in the name of God, who bring God and his commandments closer to us, who reconcile us with him, who bring us to him. In a certain sense, we can compare Bl. Ivan Merz with St. John the Baptist. Not only because he was named after him and bore his name (he celebrated his name day on June 24), but as John the Baptist he performed prophetic service. After his death, Dr. Ivan Protulipac closest collaborator of bl. Ivan published a large article about Blessed Ivan under the title THE PROPHET OF GOD.
Blessed Ivan was our contemporary. Until not so many years there were still people alive who knew him. According to these people, blessed Ivan reaches our time, he is our contemporary.
From his rich life as a saint, we have singled out the five most important messages that God sends us through him and which the artist Mr. Anto Mamuša symbolically depicted and illustrated in his official beatification picture, the most successful picture of the Blessed Ivan so far.
At the end, we present a brief account of how Blessed John in his person unites various elements of European nations and cultures into one harmonious whole and can be a role model for other Christians in this great family of European nations.
1. A lay person lives in the world with a lay profession and realizes the sanctity of life
The first thing we see in the picture is a young man in a civilian suit with a tie around his neck. Bl. Ivan was not a cleric, nor a monk, nor did he belong to the church hierarchy. He was a layman, who lives in the world, has his lay occupation, by which he deserves his daily bread; he was a professor of French and German language and literature, i.e. subjects that have no direct connection with religion, which can be taught by any professor of such profession. So, a lay man in the world with a lay profession and on the other hand a saint. And conected these two realities and showed that it is possible to live in the world and perform a lay occupation and realize the sanctity of life. Here is the first message from Blessed Ivan. We are all called to holiness. This clearly follows from the Gospel and it was especially emphasized by the Second Vatican Council in the document Lumen Gentium where it talks about the general call to holiness. Holiness is not reserved only for those who are officially dedicated to God, such as priests, monks, and clerics. Holiness is for everyone. Bl. Merz showed that it is possible. This is his first message for our time.
2. An intellectual who connect science, religion and culture
Let’s look at his picture again. We see that young layman, a worldly man with a book in his hand. A book is a sign of learning, knowledge, culture, literacy. Our Blessed one not only graduated from college, but also earned a doctorate in the profession with a work entitled The Influence of Liturgy on French Writers. He had a wide knowledge, a great education. Read a lot, wrote a lot. He learned and used even ten languages! And all this in the 32 years he had when he left this world! So, a man who is highly educated on the one hand, with a university education that he crowned with a doctorate. On the other hand, a man who is a deep believer to the point of sanctity and has shown that faith and science are not opposed to each other, but that they also go together, in fact they should go together; that highly learned persons should also be an example in faith to other believers in religious life and practice, as was our blessed Ivan.
3. A man of deep love for the Church and loyalty to the Pope
Let’s look at his picture again. The artist painted three churches on his right side: the Banja Luka and Zagreb cathedrals and then the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome. He wanted to highlight the great love and loyalty of Blessed Ivan Merz towards the Church. Prof. Dušan Žanko wrote about him: “There is no stronger idea in the spiritual character of Blessed Ivan Merz than the idea of the Church.” “Love for the Church spoke from his every word,” Cardinal Franjo Šeper said of him. This was manifested in the study of church and papal documents, encyclicals, and the implementation of everything that the Pope recommended. And that was primarily the implementation of the Catholic Action, which, as its pioneer, Blessed Ivan Merz was the first to introduce into the Croatian Church. When he was asked why he loves the Church and the Pope, blessed Ivan answered: “Because in the Church I see a clear image of the beloved Savior and God Jesus with all his perfections, and in the Holy Father the Pope under the likeness of a man I see my God and my Lord.” – His spiritual life, which was all directed towards the Church through the liturgy, was defined by the spiritual father of bl. Ivan, Josip Vrbanek as follows: “He lives the life of Jesus with the Church”. That’s how he lived, that was his strength and greatness.
4. A man who witnesses his faith every day. Apostle of youth and adults.
Today, one can hear the catchphrase that “faith is a private matter” that everyone should live it for themselves. There are some so-called believers who live their faith within the four walls of their apartment, or the four walls of the church, possibly at Sunday mass, and that would be all of their Christianity. No external testimony, no evidence that religion has any role in their social or public life, etc. This was not the case with Blessed Ivan. He not only did not live his faith as a private matter, but he witnessed it, we can say from 0 to 24 hours. “Catholic faith is my life’s vocation” he wrote that famous sentence to his mother from Paris as a Parisian student. After his professional duties as a professor, where he also testified to his faith as many of his students tell us about it, Blessed Ivan dedicated all his free time to God, the Church, Jesus Christ. Especially he dedicated himself to the education of Croatian Catholic youth in the then Catholic Eagle organization. To it he was the spiritual leader, ideologist and to which he gave the motto “, Eucharist, Apostolate, Sacrifice”. That’s why he got the title “Apostle of Croatian Youth”.
The artist depicted this in the picture of Blessed Ivan with the symbol of the Holy Spirit, who inspired and sanctified Blessed John and made him a great witness of faith and an apostle of Christ.
One of his friends writes in his memoirs that it was impossible to talk to Blessed Ivan for more than five minutes without him turning the conversation to religious topics in order to bring the interlocutor closer to God. When Blessed Ivan died, the young people brought a wreath with a ribbon to his grave on which were written these words: THANK YOU, EAGLE OF CHRIST, FOR SHOWING US THE WAY TO THE SUN. This tape has been preserved to this day and is in the Blessed Ivan Museum in Zagreb.
In 2009, the elementary school in Zagreb, which is named after the Blessed Ivan Merz, started a large competition project among young people called WAY TO THE SUN to get to know Blessed Ivan, his character, works and especially the values he promoted and lived. That school is named after bl. Ivan precisely because that building used to be a hospital where Blessed Ivan spent the last two weeks of his life and where, dying, he presented to God his young life as a sacrifice for Croatian youth.
5. As a man of the Eucharist, Pope Benedict XVI included him among the 18 greatest saints of the Catholic Church
Let’s look again at the picture of Blessed Ivan Merz. We see a symbol of the Eucharist next to his head. In recent times, artists usually paint it with the symbol of the Eucharist. The artist wanted to highlight his great Eucharistic piety. The Eucharist was the center of his spiritual life. Every day he went to st. Mass and received st. Communion and often adored. He spoke about the Eucharist and encouraged everyone to receive st. Communion. He also wrote about her. In his diary as a high school student, he wrote these words: “Communion is the source of life”. His Eucharistic piety was so prominent in his spiritual image and activity that it was noticed by the Pope Benedict XVI. Therefore, the Pope in his document Sacramentum Caritatis, the apostolic exhortation on the Eucharist from 2007 in number 94 included bl. Ivan Merza in the company of 18 chosen great saints of the Catholic Church who distinguished themselves in the worship of the Eucharist. That is how our bl. Ivan found himself in that classy company where there are great saints such as St. Benedict, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine of Siena, Blessed Mother Teresa and others. And at the end of that list, here is a Croat who found himself worthy to enter the chosen company of the great saints of the Church.
This is an additional acknowledgment of his holiness, an acknowledgment to the Church in Croatia that it too has one of its spiritual greats to present to the entire Christian world as a role model; but it is also an additional incentive and a call to all of us to make an effort to get to know Blessed Ivan better, his saintly character and especially the message that God sends through him to our time.