A very good piece on how the Christian Faith defines mercy and how that definition has become terribly muddled in our day. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Our secular culture mixes mercy and kindness in a way that makes it harder to see how shocking mercy is and how uneasily it lies alongside justice. Lifting burdens from the innocent may be an act of misericordiain the sense of “pity” but it is not the shocking mercy of the Cross. For mercy to be mercy, there needs to be a genuinely merited punishment that is being remitted for the good of the person struggling under its weight. Mercy does not make sense in a world that can’t imagine how sin can be forgiven or how forgiveness could be different from forgetting.

The standout, startling moment that summed up the papacy for many people around the world was Pope Francis’s “Who am I to judge?” In 2013, Pope Francis was answering questions on the papal plane, and, when a reporter asked about the possibility of a gay man serving as a priest, Pope Francis answered, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?”

It doesn’t quite sit correctly as an expression of mercy, however often it was framed that way. Mercy is for the guilty. Nothing in Pope Francis’s remarks suggested he was thinking of a man engaged in sexual sin. When the poor and fearful are welcomed in from the peripheries, it is not mercy but justice. The Church is emphatic that we are finally ceasing to sin against the poor when we restore to the weak what they are owed. It is not an act of magnanimity. For many of the advocates who most hoped Pope Francis would change the Church’s teaching on sexual morality, welcoming LGBTQ people could not coherently be seen as an expression of mercy. In their view, refusing to “judge” a gay man is an act of justice. Advocates believed there was nothing to forgive.

Read it all.