Jubilee Year 101: Mercy is Social Justice and Social Justice is Mercy

There are two sides to this coin I owe you.

Much is being made of the Pope’s unorthodox, untimely, and frivolous use of the Jubilee Year to continue to ‘re-educate’ the world on ‘true mercy.’ Thankfully there have also been some warnings against a radical misunderstanding of God’s mercy which, if those running things have their way, can lead to widespread presumption and sacrilege.

Fr. Longenecker at Aleteia discusses the Year of Mercy and what it may mean.  Be prepared not to be over-simplistic.

The tradition of a Jubilee year dates back to the Old Testament. Every fifty years a jubilee was celebrated to mark the universal forgiveness of sins and pardon for all. Debts were forgiven and slaves were set free. The Catholic tradition of Jubilee years begins in the year 1300 when Pope Bonfiace VIII established a celebration in which sins would be fully forgiven for those who prayerfully and faithfully visited Rome to pray in the basilicas associated with the apostles.

At first pilgrims had only to visit the Basilica of St. Peter, but later the basilicas of St. Paul Outside the Walls, St. John Lateran and St. Mary Major were added. The Jubilee year was first intended to be only once a century, but because of popularity it began to take place every fifty years, then every thirty three years, then extraordinary jubilees were added for special events. Thus in Pope John Paul II’s pontificate there was the usual thirty three year jubilee in 1983 and an extraordinary “great jubilee” for the celebration of the millennium in 2000.

Then, in the “Time of Mercy”, 15 years later, we had another.

In order to fully appreciate the Jubilee of Mercy we have to fully understand what Pope Francis means by “mercy.” The most common understanding of mercy is being excused for a crime. A criminal stands before a judge and knowing his guilt and realizing that he deserves punishment, he pleads for mercy and a lighter sentence. While this understanding of mercy is not wrong, it is also not complete. Mercy is more than simply letting someone off the hook and not punishing them as severely as they deserve.

So mercy is even more than forgiving those who owe us debts.

In fact mercy and justice must be seen as two sides to the same coin. Justice is fulfilled, not denied when true mercy is exercised. This is because the justice which the law demands is always rightly balanced by the mercy which the human heart demands. Justice is completed by mercy and mercy is fulfilled by justice. In the Christian understanding, our redemption is completed when mercy and justice are both fulfilled by Christ’s death on the cross. There punishment for sin is finished and mercy and redemption are won through Christ’s victory.

Can this possibly make sense?  Mercy isn’t “completed by justice”.  If the heart demands something, does that mean we owe it?  Wouldn’t that be justice then to pay it?  And Jesus did not “finish punishment for sin.”  He just gave us a opportunity to receive His mercy through our repentance and His saving grace.  Punishment isn’t finished.  It’s still available.

Why must these important terms be so conflated and commingled?  I think perhaps it’s so next we can be convinced that mercy is justice and vice versa, so that in the end what we have is something wrong.

I know one group of people who would definitely agree with Fr. Longenecker though: our Bishops.  The American Bishops, who hide behind Prayers of the Faithful, and routinely support Leftist policy in the name of justice; also think mercy is justice.  In fact the entire faux social justice campaign is founded on an idea of justice that is really more akin to mercy, especially if by mercy you mean giving people things they have no right to and acting like you’re relieving them of a debt.

The common idea of Catholic social justice may be something like mercy, but it’s nothing like just.