Jesus and the Canaanite Woman
The encounter between Jesus and the Canaanite woman, that foreign woman who begs Christ to deliver her tormented daughter. This passage is one of the most striking in the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. The woman does not belong to the people of Israel. She finds herself, one might say, outside the visible boundaries within which Christ’s mission was then being carried out. Yet she already recognizes Jesus as the “Son of David” and persists despite his silence, the disciples’ reaction, and the apparent harshness of the response she receives.
Leo XIV first emphasizes this faith that, in a sense, precedes their meeting: “They had never met, but faith had already mysteriously taken root in her.” This sentence is undoubtedly one of the doctrinal keys to his argument. God’s grace does not begin with the institutional action of the Church. It precedes it. Catholic theology has always distinguished between the necessity of the Church’s visible mission and God’s sovereign freedom, which is capable of working in people’s consciences even before the Gospel is explicitly proclaimed to them.
