Category Archives: Year of Mercy

Justice and Mercy

Mercy, Year of Mercy

Shortly before his death, Pope St. John Paul II prepared a homily for the celebration of Divine Mercy Sunday.  As Providence would have it, he died on the vigil of the great feast of mercy and never actually gave the homily.  For this reason we can look at this homily almost like it was the  Saintly Pope’s last will and testament.  What was his last testament?  “How much the world needs to understand and accept divine mercy!”  Notice how the Pope didn’t merely say that the world needed to accept divine mercy, but also to understand it.  In essence, Saint John Paul II thought we both needed to engage both head (understand) and the heart (accept).  All of us want to have God’s mercy realized in our life, but according to the Divine Mercy Pope we first need to understand the truth of God’s mercy before it can be realized in our lives.

One of the reasons we do not understand it is because it gets caught up with God’s justice.  In what has become somewhat commonplace, the less traditionally minded have attempted to do away with God’s justice altogether and focus solely on His mercy.  On the other hand the more traditionalist leaning among us often can only see justice and mercy as two different sides of God.  As long as you stay on His good side and avoid His bad side, you will receive mercy rather than justice.

In truth these two are not in opposition to each other.  In a typically Catholic fashion—embracing both/and rather than either/or—we can say that God is both just and merciful at the same time.  Each of us, regardless of our eternal destination, receive both mercy and justice.

If we can make a distinction regarding God’s attributes then we can begin to gain insight into the relationship between justice and mercy.  St. Thomas distinguishes between those attributes which relate to God’s being (i.e. what He is) and those related to His operation (what He does).  Those properties belonging to His being are things like unity, immensity, goodness, etc.  With respect to His operations we have things like wisdom and love with its two virtues justice and mercy.  Since God is by nature good (or to be more theological accurate Goodness itself), He loves only one thing—goodness.  It is this love of the good that links justice and mercy in such a manner that they cannot be opposed to each other.

Justice is to render to each his due.  Because we recognize that God can be the debtor to no one, we tend to only equate justice with punishment.  But this is only a partial aspect of justice.  From all eternity God is just so “before” creation He was just and there was no one to punish.  This is because God is first and foremost just to Himself.  God in being just to Himself decreed that there should be fulfilled in creatures both what His will and wisdom require and what most makes His goodness known.  In other words, God is just towards His creatures by giving them all they need (c.f. Mt 6:25-34) primarily because He is acting justly towards Himself. While punishment is part of justice, it does not exhaust it.  Truth be told, it is only a fraction.

While Justice renders to each His due, God’s mercy is the foundation of the divine love of mankind.  To distinguish between justice and mercy, St. Thomas point out that when “a man’s love is caused by the goodness of the one he loves, then that man who loves does so out of justice but when loves causes the goodness in the beloved then it is a love springing from mercy. The love with which God loves us produces goodness in us; hence mercy is presented here as the root of the divine love.”  It is mercy that is the cause of all that is good in us.  So mercy is not only about forgiving our sins but a recognition that “Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights” (James 1:17).

It is not just in opposing justice and mercy that we err.  There is also a tendency to put justice somehow above mercy, when it is exactly the opposite.  First, mercy precedes justice.  Out of a superabundance of goodness, God made man and woman the crown of visible creation because of their innate capacity for friendship with Him. If He has to reward us for anything it was first because He was merciful in creating us.

Second, St. Thomas suggests that if we look at justice and its three acts we can see how mercy is what he calls “love’s second name.”  First, God’s justice consists in giving what is necessary for each creature to reach the end it was made for.  We have all that we need to reach our natural end of virtue.  But in His mercy He provides us with more—namely all that we need to reach the supernatural end He desires to give us.

Little Flower

Justice also rewards each according to his merits.  But our reward far exceeds what we our owed.  Being natural creatures we can never, no matter how good we act, reach the share in His divinity that God is offering us.  He must bestow this capacity upon us.  Even if Mary remained sinless throughout her life, if she did not have sanctifying grace that was given to her, she could never have been made Queen of Heaven.  Heaven is not a reward for the good people.  It is the true home of the holy people that God has made.  Only God is holy and only He can bestow Holiness on us.

Justice also has to do with inflicting punishment.  But mercy trumps justice.  This is where the head and the heart must meet.  Mercy is the “sorrow at the misery of another as though it were his own.”  This sorrow is not merely affective but effective.  Its effect is to endeavor to dispel the misery of the other.  And this is why Our Lord is truly Mercy Incarnate.  He took our misery at if it was His own in order to dispel it.

We may think sometimes that God could have merely “cooked the books” in sending His Son.  But there could be no mercy without justice.  Justice is not merely superfluous because of mercy.  Why?  Because they both have the same “source,” namely, God’s love for the Good.  If the created order is “very good” and sin has violated the order, then God’s love (i.e. mercy) demands its restoration (justice).  Despite our human efforts (especially recently) to the contrary, the misery must be acknowledged as such and its source must be repaired in order for the action to be merciful.  Mercy requires that there be some actual misery to be overcome.

The movement to the heart from here has been recently navigated by St. Therese and her Little Way and she can serve as our guide.

“I know well that it is not my great desires that please God in my little soul, what He likes to see is the way I love my littleness and my poverty; it is my blind hope in His mercy, this is my only treasure…. The weaker one is, without desires or virtues the more ready one is for the operations of this consuming and transforming love…. God rejoices more in what He can do in a soul humbly resigned to its poverty than in the creation of millions of suns and the vast stretch of the heavens.”

The Gospel is only truly Good News for the captives, namely the “little ones.”  Justice demands we acknowledge our misery so that mercy can be activated.  By trusting in His promise and never giving in to discouragement, we too can become great saints.  St. Therese, Pray for Us!

Mercy as the Last Word

Mercy, Pope Francis, Year of Mercy

In his book-length interview with Italian Journalist Andrea Tornielli entitled The Name of God is Mercy, Pope Francis offers what, is in essence, an extended commentary on his Bull of Indiction for the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy.  Like his three Papal predecessors he is convinced that we are living in an important time of mercy.  Because of this, one gets a sense of urgency in his words as he tries to move us from mercy as an abstract idea to a concrete reality—a reality that in many ways is the Church’s only reason of existence.  “Wherever the Church is present, the mercy of the Father must be evident” (Misericordiae Vultus, 12).  He speaks of his experience as a confessor where he looks for the slightest opening in which God’s mercy might enter.  The Holy Father ardently believes that “when you feel His [Jesus] merciful embrace, when you let yourself be embraced, when you are moved—that’s  when life can change.”   He even draws parallels between the Church’s approach and that of the fictional priest, Fr. Gaston, in Bruce Marshall’s novel To Every Man a Penny.  A young, dying soldier comes to the priest for confession.  The problem is that although he confesses to numerous amorous affairs, he is unrepentant and admittedly would do it all over again.  Distressed that he will be unable to offer him absolution, Fr. Gaston asks the soldier if he is sorry that he is not sorry.  The priest absolves him based on that sorrow.  The Holy Father comments that it is simply proof “His mercy is infinitely greater than our sins.”

This Year of Mercy is not just about indulgences and confession, but as the Pontiff says, the  main purpose for calling this Jubilee is for the Church “to gaze even more attentively on mercy so that we may become a more effective sign of the Father’s action in our lives” (MV, 3).  His point is that while the Sacraments of the Church are efficacious signs of God’s mercy, the entire Church needs to contemplate this same divine attribute so that we all become sacraments of His mercy.  “[W]herever there are Christians, everyone should find an oasis of mercy” (MV, 12).

It is in this spirit of reflection and witness that the Holy Father expresses his “burning desire that, during this Jubilee, the Christian people may reflect on the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. It will be a way to reawaken our conscience, too often grown dull in the face of poverty. And let us enter more deeply into the heart of the Gospel where the poor have a special experience of God’s mercy” (MV, 15).

The Holy Father is inviting all the Faithful to participate in this great Jubilee of Mercy by actively practicing the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy.  These particular acts of love, because they touch those in most need, act as chisels on the hard hearted so that God’s mercy may enter.  The Works of Mercy have fallen into disuse in recent decades and so Francis reminds us all during his interview that the works of mercy are “still valid, still current.  Perhaps some aspects could be better ‘translated’ but they remain the basis for self-examination.”  If what Our Lord told St. Faustina is true, namely that, “I demand from you deeds of mercy, which are to arise out of love for Me. You are to show mercy to your neighbors always and everywhere. You must not shrink from this or try to excuse or absolve yourself from it” (Diary 742) then this is a grace filled time for us to re-introduce these practices to our spiritual lives.

Year of Mercy

It is helpful for us to reflect on two reasons why these practices may have slipped the minds of many in the Church.  The first is that we often fail to see God’s mercy as something personal and real for us.  Most of us don’t have great conversion stories or a real awareness of grave sin in our lives.  Sure we see places where we have drifted from God and He has led us back, but it is often so subtle that we do not even know it at the time.  That in and of itself is mercy.  To see into my own heart and no I am capable of just about anything at times and yet to never have fallen—that is mercy.  In fact to receive the mercy of preservation is one of the most beautiful gifts that God gives us.  He spares us so much pain.  This is why a favorite spiritual practice of St. Augustine when he did his Examen and could not find any sin that day was to thank God in His mercy for all the things that he kept the Saint from falling into.

The point is that we can never spread God’s mercy until we see how He has touched us personally with it.  The word mercy literally means “a heart moved by misery.”  If you do not know what misery “feels” like, it is very difficult to be moved by it in another.  This is why mercy and empathy go hand in hand.  Empathy, according to John Paul II, is “experiencing another person within ourselves as the other person experiences himself.”  It is a path to love and mercy because by seeing the other from the inside, we see them as a subject and not just an object.

A second reason why the Works of Mercy have fallen into disuse is because we set our goals to high.  We assume we must go somewhere to practice them.  We may not have time amidst our family life to volunteer at the Soup Kitchen.  But that misses the point.  How many of the Works of Mercy does a parent perform daily with their children?  Add the supernatural intention of showing them the love of God and all of family life becomes sanctifying.  Children grow up with an innate sense of the Merciful love of the Father.

Jesus addressed a similar obstacle to St. Faustina when he said,

“write this for the many souls who are often worried because they do not have the material means with which to carry out an act of mercy. Yet spiritual mercy, which requires neither permissions nor storehouses, is much more meritorious and is within the grasp of every soul. If a soul does not exercise mercy somehow or other, it will not obtain My mercy on the day of judgment. Oh, if only souls knew how to gather eternal treasure for themselves, they would not be judged, for they would forestall My judgment with their mercy.”

Pope Francis further attempted to simplify things by grouping the first four spiritual works of mercy (counsel the doubtful, teach the ignorant, forgive offenses, be patient with difficult people) are all part of the “apostolate of the ear.”  As proof that these are most needed at this time, look at all the money spent of therapists just because they listen to their patients!

There is one Spiritual Work of Mercy that ought to be of particular focus during this Year of Mercy and that is admonishing the sinner.  If there is one unforgivable sin today even among the most secular it is “being judgmental.”  While obviously this is an abuse of Jesus’ words to “judge not,” there is a truth to it.  Perhaps the greatest tragedy of a culture that is dominated by relativism is that it keeps so many from seeking God’s mercy (no absolute moral law, no sin, no need for mercy).  So it is extremely important that we all realize that to admonish the sinner without pointing them towards the mercy of God is no act of mercy.  It is simply a condemnation.  This is not because sin is inconsequential or because there is no such thing as mortal sin, but because sin can never have the last word.  God’s mercy is more powerful.  The Holy Father is quick to say that “The Church condemns sin because it has to relay the truth: ‘This is a sin.’ But at the same time, it embraces the sinner who recognizes himself as such, it welcomes him, it speaks to him of the infinite mercy of God.”

How different our approach to admonishing sinners is if we do so only with mercy in mind.  For those who have been truly touched by God’s mercy, they want nothing more than for that sinner to experience it too.  A good way to examine ourselves on how we are doing with this is to see our response when we encounter someone who is doing something gravely sinful.  Is my first response, almost visceral in that I despair that the person could be lost?  Or am I concerned only with the fact that they are breaking some rule?  Neither of the two downplays sin, but only the former allows mercy to have the final word.  In truth it might be that for those people who cannot point to specific instances of God’s mercy in their own lives, the greater Work of Mercy is not to admonish the sinner at all.  Blessed are the merciful, for mercy has been theirs!