What Is Mercy?

What Is Mercy?

Etymologically, mercy (in Latin misericordia) is the sentiment of a heart (cor, cordis) that is touched by some misery or poverty. Through mercy one we saddened by the misfortune of a neighbor as if it were our own: “A merciful man looks at someone else’s misery as his own and is distressed by it as though it were his personal misery,” St. Thomas Aquinas writes. 

Mercy is not only a movement of the emotions: as a virtue, it is a movement of the will guided by reason. This virtue aims at a happy medium between insensitivity or harshness and immoderate passion in temperaments that are too tender-hearted. 

When mercy flows from charity, it is a supernatural virtue, which has in mind the natural goods of one’s neighbor and, even more, his supernatural goods. 

The Stages of Mercy

Let us describe the stages of the supernatural virtue of mercy, the one that is an effect of charity. 

Mercy begins by seeing the neighbor's misfortune.

Not to see misery is to prevent oneself from practicing mercy. Blindness to another person’s misfortune can be caused by selfishness and individualism, which make people indifferent. One does not watch out for other people and what affects them: that is the main reason for this insensitivity. 

In order to be truly merciful a Christian must look at people through the eyes of faith. Faith makes a person grasp in depth the misfortune of souls; through it, mercy will respond above all to a sin, a moral disorder. On the contrary, mercy that has been falsified by relativism pretends to see in sin and error nothing but weaknesses, or a lesser good.

The sight of another person's misery produces in the soul a movement of sadness; it arouses compassion for this misery.

But true mercy is not the emotion of philanthropy. Christian mercy springs from charity; it is a theological virtue, because of God. In particular it is gripped by compassion for sinners. And to have compassion on another person’s sin is certainly not to encourage him in his error. It is to contemplate the holiness of God, who has been offended by the sin, and to think about the eternal suffering that awaits the hardened sinner. 

Compassion is not self-sufficient. Authentic compassion leads to action, attempts to relieve that misery, and does everything in its power to offer help efficaciously. 

Here too, the eyes of faith allow us to discern the true miseries of our neighbor. Some generous persons would like to relieve all the miseries in the world, but limit themselves to material poverty. Now the greatest misfortune is to be far from God. 

The work of mercy par excellence therefore is witnessing to the Faith, which is called the mercy of truth. Only instruction in the true religion will bring human beings out of the great unhappiness in which they are imprisoned, by their involuntary or culpable ignorance. Liberalism and relativism, which remain silent and keep people in their illusions, are not only errors but a horrible form of indifference. 

The New “Mercy”

A new concept of mercy was already found in the teachings of the predecessors of the current Pope. In his speech at the opening of the Second Vatican Council, Pope John XXIII announced the new doctrine by proclaiming: “Today, the Bride of Christ prefers to resort to the remedy of mercy rather than to brandish the weapons of severity.” 

The great Catholic thinker Romano Amerio correctly observed: “This announcement of the principle of mercy as opposed to that of severity overlooks the fact that, to the Church’s way of thinking, the condemnation of error is itself a work of mercy, since by striking error we correct the one who erred and we preserve others from error.”[1]

In reality, the new attitude abandons many truths. It disregards the mercy of telling people the truth, however, which is the most important kind because it touches the deepest ailment. True mercy would consist of having great pity on the souls that lie “in the shadow of death,” and preaching Jesus Christ to them and the faith that is indispensable for salvation. 

In fact the new “mercy” will turn more to the miseries of this world than to those that are the most serious: spiritual miseries. The predominant faction in the Church has in mind serving man in his earthly life rather than pursuing the mission that Our Lord gave to the Church, that of directing souls toward Heaven and saving them. 

The Primacy of Conscience

To the modern way of thinking, each person’s conscience has priority over everything else. What is good and legitimate to pursue is no longer what is in keeping with the order established by the Creator’s wisdom, as expressed in the divine law; rather, it is what appears good to the individual, in his heart of hearts: his conscience. The divine law is set aside, and it is replaced by individual conscience, which is set up as an absolute. 

This idea has made its way into the Church since Vatican II: so as not to inconvenience consciences, avoid making any reference to the truth. As a result, Christianity is reduced more and more to a vague humanitarianism that is content with preaching a consolation that we can find elsewhere, without any need to turn to the Church. This sentimental humanitarianism is manifested in their way of presenting Jesus Christ. He who proved to be demanding with sinners is transformed into a liberal, sympathetic teacher, everyone’s pal, who seems to make no claim to transform our lives and to uproot sin from them. This Jesus does not judge and guarantees paradise for everyone. 

Mercy Without Repentance

In the current preaching of the Church, the idea of mercy is detached from that of conversion and repentance. Pope Francis does not talk about divine judgment and never misses an opportunity to devalue the divine law, as though it were only the concern of Pharisees. We find this in quite a few of his statements and speeches. 

A typical document is the Post-Synodal Exhortation on the Family, Amoris laetitia, published in 2016. In it Francis gives Christians the option of deciding questions of morality in marriage on a case-by-case basis, according to their individual conscience. The necessary and clear guidance given by God’s law is passed over in silence. 

The document is permeated with the idea that there is some human right to be forgiven, without any need to convert, and that God has a duty to forgive. As if anyone could imagine such a right and such a duty! The authentically merciful God who forgives those who repent is replaced by an understanding God who always excuses and justifies. A God who is not the real God. For, as the Italian journalist Aldo Maria Valli said, “God, the God of the Bible, is certainly patient, but not lax; He is certainly clement, but not permissive; He is certainly attentive, but not accommodating. In a word, He is Father in the most complete and the most authentic sense of the word.”[2] 

The Bible could be summed up as a call to repentance and a promise of forgiveness; one cannot be separated from the other. This is still true in the New Testament. One of the main missions given by Jesus to the Church is to call sinners to repentance: “Penance and remission of sins should be preached in His name, unto all nations” (Lk. 24:47). 

Our Lord gave to His apostles the authority to absolve sins, but not to excuse them. A priest cannot redefine the laws that God establishes; he cannot modify the Ten Commandments. And although he can give absolution for a past sin, he certainly cannot give permission for the sin to continue. 

True mercy is shown to a sinner by encouraging him and helping him to get out of his state of sin. On the contrary, through false mercy, sinners are reassured and confirmed in their sinful situation. Instead of seeking to bring them back to God, this pretend-mercy can lead them to eternal damnation. It is a serious lack of charity toward those souls that have gone astray. 

Mercy exists because sin exists. True mercy presupposes justice and demands a clear awareness of the depth and gravity of sin. By considering divine mercy independently of truth and justice, by stripping it of the dimension of judgment, by denying guilt in practice, they diminish divine forgiveness, they devalue it. God no longer delivers us from sin. His omnipotence and His infinite love are not any greater for it; quite the contrary. 

Protection of the Common Good

In the name of mercy, supposedly we have to allow all sorts of behavior, avoid any sign of “discrimination,” ignore the blatant insults against God’s honor, and silence the rights of truth and of the Church. But discrimination does not come from an alleged lack of charity. The truth is that condemning public sin is just a form of mercy, since the evil threatens to affect others souls in the flock. It is the Church’s duty to denounce evil so as to protect the other believers from it. It is necessary to differentiate between good and evil, in order to preserve the common good of virtue against the bad example of vice. 

A New Morality to Please the World

Ambiguity and relativism have not only entered into the Church; they have taken on magisterial form. From now on Catholic morality is obsolete, replaced by sophisms that undermine it and go so far as to transform the Church’s moral teachings into their opposite. No one wants to say any more that there are things that lead toward Our Lord and other things that turn us away from Him and His love. Thus sin is no longer even mentioned, and the divine law is bent to suit man’s supposed autonomy.

No longer does the sinner have to repent and convert, but rather the Church must convert and “mercifully” acknowledge those who show unwillingness to follow her teachings or God’s. She must no long impose her will; she must limit herself to “listening,” “understanding,” “accompanying,” thus going from tolerance to laxity, so as to adapt to the very sin of the world. 

True mercy is the opposite of this relativism, which we can say is really a profanation of mercy. A truly merciful man, for example, sees the marital act outside of marriage as an offense against God, the destruction of Christian marriage, the death of souls, and a social revolution. And he laments it. But from now on the moral law has to be adapted to the current behaviors, those of divorced-and-“remarried” persons or of those who live in unnatural unions. 

The conciliar Church deceives people when it disguises acquiescence in vice and sin as mercy. False mercy puts on pretty sentiments and pastoral solicitude, but it debases the ideal and presents a Christianity with no requirement of moral renewal. Basically, the Church thereby gives up Christianizing customs. From now on human beings are considered to be incapable of observing even the natural law, which is abolished: nothing else is left. 

Leading churchmen have found a way of aligning themselves with the injunctions of the modern world, which is an enemy of God, and of winning its applause, while seeming to preserve a Christian justification for their new morality. But this causes immense scandal in souls. 

[1] Romano Amerio, Iota Unum, p. 74. 

[2] Andrea Maria Valli, Interview with Radio Spada, February 27, 2021.