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

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Gold Coin

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.

 

 

Sacrilegious Communion: Pope Francis Won’t Get Any More Clear Than This

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How long must I keep doing this!

How long must I keep doing this!

Fr. Z links to a video from the Pope’s recent homily. In it Pope Francis laments couples who want to return to the Church and go to Mass but , due to their ‘mistakes’, must ‘stay right there’ and not go anywhere.  The Pope blames the rule-makers, the ‘doctors of the law’ who destroy.

It seems to me the Pope is, characteristically, speaking both figuratively and directly at the same time.  (He seems to do this so that everyone understands him except for those who don’t want to.)  If I interpret him correctly, this is the first time he’s made it so clear that he thinks people in open mortal sin should go to Holy Communion, quite a frightening thing for a Pope to indicate.  Fr. Z seems to agree:

Hmmm… it seems to me that there is something missing.  Of course these are only off-the-cuff remarks that have no magisterial weight whatsoever and no preacher can be expected in a short time to hit every possible point.   But it seems to me that he has set up a straw man: who the heck are these “doctors of the law” whom he has been disparaging with some frequency?  I think he means those who argue that people who are divorced and civilly remarried should not be admitted to Holy Communion because they are objectively living in a state that is inconsistent with our understanding of the Eucharist.

It’s time to stop pretending the situation isn’t stark.  Cardinal Burke seems to have gotten the message a while ago.  Catholics must be prepared to resist.

 

Do Communists Think Pope Francis is a Communist?

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The Peoples' Pope

The Peoples’ Pope

Why is it considered unsophisticated and hysterical to write about Communism these days when totalitarian statism has never been more accepted?  Why is it so difficult to see the effects of it’s influence, of it’s backers and their patient efforts, even inside the Church?

Communists see traditional Catholicism and the Ancient Mass as products of an oppressive elite?  Why not?  They see everything else that way.  Communists think of the new vernacular Mass as the “people’s” Mass.  So does Pope Francis, the same Pope who sees the difference between Catholicism and Communism as only one of semantics.

Take Communism and add some God and you’ve got the Catholic Church according to Francis; you know, a Church where the ‘poor are the center of the Gospel’ and all that, where if you don’t help the poor on the peripheries it doesn’t matter what ‘religious observances’ you follow.

Just as Communists praise Francis today, I suspect that Communists were quite happy with the Paul VI Mass.  Why?  What do they care?  It is because Communists are atheists who cannot realize their goals without thwarting the graces of the Church, causing widespread rejection of God, and a depraved rootless people.

Pope Francis is entirely wrong when he links Communism to Catholicism, but he’s not wrong when he links his own concept of the Church to it.  FrancisChurch, moving “forward” from Paul VI, is entirely compatible with Communism because it enables it quite well.

At Breitbart, Austin Ruse follows up on what Communists, and Reagan Era Communist-fighting men see in the New Pope of the People.

A largely overlooked column by human rights advocate Armando Valadares raises questions about the initiative of Pope Francis toward the “island-prison” of Cuba.

In early January, Valladares, who spent 22 years in Castro’s prisons and went on to write a highly influential book about it, says the recent opening to Cuba by the West is part of an “Obama-Francis axis” that he calls a “spiritual-political axis which… will now provide the repressive apparatus of the Cuban regime with rivers of money and favorable publicity.”

He says Pope Francis and President Obama are merely replacing the Soviet Union, then Venezuela, and finally Brazil as Castro’s financial enablers.

Two days after the simultaneous December 19th announcement by Rome, Washington, and Havana of the diplomatic rapprochement, Valladares reported a Cuban Coast Guard boat “began ramming a boat fleeing Cuba with 32 people on board, including seven women and two children, to sink the frail craft.” Valladares called it “a brutal action by a regime that feels back up by powerful allies. A criminal event so seriously damning for the Castro regime would deserve a worldwide outcry of repudiation but was hardly noticed…”

He said the event wasn’t even notice by “churchmen who should imitate the Good Shepard by being ready to give their lives for their sheep.”

Valladares, who served as U.S. Ambassador to the UN Human Rights Commission under Presidents Reagan and Bush, charges that the “most serious and tragic aspect of this agreement” between the US and Cuba, “falls upon Pope Francis, its most eminent architect and mediator.”

But, he says, “This is not the first time that Francis takes measures that objectively favor the political and ecclesiastical left in Latin America… For example, he personally attended the World Meeting of Popular Movements held in Rome from October 27 to 29. It gathered 100 revolutionary world leaders, including well-known Latin American professional agitators.” Valladeres called the meeting a kind of “beatification of these Marxist-inspired revolutionary figures…”

Valladares also points to Francis’s overturning the suspension of the Nicaraguan priest Miquel D’Escoto who had been the Foreign Minister of the revolutionary Sandanista regime, “a leading pro-Castro figure in liberation theology.”

Where Valladares might be described as a man of the right, a man of the farthest left sees the same thing in Francis and approves.

Despite the continual refrain that now ‘martyr’ Oscar Romero was not a Liberation Theologist, just ‘used’ by them; Romero is their hero, and the Pope has backed his cause despite years of it’s being blocked.  (Note the similarities between the populist ‘art’ surrounding Romero and the material produced by the Pope’s Vatican artist, Chinese propagandist, Shen Jiawei.)

Richard Greeman, a writer for the Marxist website New Politics, wonders if “Catholicism is the new communism.” He describes his years, after the Second Vatican Council, working in Latin America, participating in the rise of “liberation theology.” He says, “Liberation theology Catholics were consistently more revolutionary than Leftists of all stripes.”

Read the rest here.  The ties between Communism and the modern radical revolution in the Church must be revisited, not shamefully hidden, in the new Francis Era, if only for the fact that a disabled Church is key to the success of statism.

Ruse closes with a chilling reality that we must squarely face.

Greeman asks, “How did such an openly radical priest manage to get elected.” Valladares may be asking the same question.