Mercy AND Justice?

By: Jennifer E. Miller, S.T.D., Professor of Moral Theology

NDS Blog Feature

This is a continuing feature on the NDS Blog. Dr. Jennifer E. Miller translates and offers commentary on the Pope’s General Audience every Wednesday.

This catechesis continues the catecheses on the Jubilee Year of Mercy which began on December 8, 2015. These catecheses are intended to help the faithful in living and witnessing well to the mercy of our Lord during this Extraordinary Jubilee.

Dr. Miller’s comments can be found in the blue boxes as you read her translation.

6. Mercy and Justice

Dear brothers and sisters, good morning,

The Sacred Scriptures present God to us as infinite mercy, but also as perfect justice. How can the two be reconciled? How can the reality of mercy be connected with the demands of justice? It could seem that they are two realities that contradict one another; in reality, it is not so, because it is precisely the mercy of God that brings true justice to completion. But of which justice are we speaking?

If we think of the legal administration of justice, we see that one who considers himself victim of an abuse turns to the judge in the tribunal and asks that justice be done. This is a retributive justice, that inflicts a punishment upon the guilty, according to the principle that to each must be given that which is due to him. As the book of Proverbs reads: “He who practices justice is destined to life, but he who pursues evil is destined to death” (11:19). Jesus also speaks of it in the parable of the widow that went repeatedly to the judge and asked him: “Give me justice against my adversary” (Lk 18:3).

This street however does not lead yet to true justice because in reality it does not conquer evil, but merely checks it. It is instead only by responding to evil with good that evil can truly be conquered.

For this Jubilee Year, Pope Francis is giving special Jubilee Audiences on Saturdays, to make it easier for people to attend. The first, this past Saturday, linked mercy and mission, and touches upon this same aspect, “The mercy that we receive from the Father is not given to us as a private consolation, but makes us instruments so that others may receive the same gift. There is a tremendous circularity between mercy and mission.”

Here is then another way to bring about justice that the Bible presents to us as the master street to travel. We are speaking of a procedure that avoids recourse to the tribunal and that envisages that the victim addresses himself directly to the guilty person, in order to invite him to conversion, helping him to understand that he is doing evil, appealing to his conscience. In this way, finally repentant and recognizing his own wrong, the guilty person can open himself to the forgiveness that the injured party is offering to him. And this is beautiful: after following the persuasion of that which is evil, the heart is opened to the forgiveness that is offered to him. This is the way to resolve the conflicts within families, in the relationships between spouses or between parents and children, where the person offended loves the guilty person and desires to save the relationship that binds him to the other. Do not cut this relationship, that rapport.

Certainly, this is a difficult journey. It requires that he who has suffered a wrong be ready to forgive and desire the salvation and the good of the one he has offended. But only in this way can justice triumph, because, if the guilty one recognizes the evil done and ceases to do it, the evil is there no longer, and he who was unjust becomes just, because he is forgiven and helped to find once more the way of the good. And here is precisely where forgiveness, mercy fits.

In his recent book, The Name of God is Mercy, Pope Francis recounts the stories of confessors from whom he learned mercy. One, a Capuchin in Buenos Aires, confided that sometimes he would be troubled by the scruple of having forgiven too much. He would then go before the tabernacle and say to Jesus, “Lord, forgive me, because I forgave too much. But it was you who gave me the bad example!”

It is thus that God acts before we who are sinners. The Lord continuously offers us his forgiveness and helps us to welcome it and to become aware of our evil in order to liberate us from it. Because God does not want our condemnation, but our salvation. God does not want the condemnation of anyone! One of you could ask me: “But Father, was not the condemnation of Pilate merited? Did God want it?” – No! God wanted to save Pilate and also Judas, everyone! He, the Lord of mercy, wants to save everyone! The problem is allowing Him to enter into our hearts. All the words of the prophets are a passionate and loving appeal that seeks our conversion. Here is what the Lord says through the prophet Ezekiel: “Do I perhaps find pleasure in the death of the wicked […] or not rather that he desists from his conduct and lives?” (18:23; cfr. 33:11), that which pleases God!

And this is the heart of God, a heart of a Father that loves and wants his children to live in the good and in justice, and therefore they may live fully and be happy. A heart of a Father that goes beyond our little concept of justice in order to open to us horizons overrun by his mercy. A heart of a Father that does not treat us according to our sins and does not repay us according to our guilt, as the Psalm says (103:9-10). And precisely it is the heart of a father that we want to encounter when we go into the confessional. Perhaps he will tell us something to help us better understand evil, but in the confessional we all go to find a father that may help us to change our lives; a father who may give us the strength to go on; a father who may forgive us in the name of God. And for this reason being confessors is a responsibility so great, because that son, that daughter that comes to you seeks only to find a father. And you, priest, who are in the confessional, you are in the place of the Father that brings about justice with his mercy.

IN DEPTH: This conversion of evil to good through forgiveness is also well-illustrated in Pope Benedict XVI’s Wednesday Catechesis on May 18, 2011. He points out that Abraham’s intercession to save the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah ” ‘Will you then destroy the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it?’…brings a new idea of justice into play: not the one that is limited to punishing the guilty…but a different, divine justice that seeks goodness and creates it through forgiveness that transforms the sinner, converts and saves him…obviously [in Sodom and Gomorrah] it is not possible to treat the innocent as guilty, this would be unjust; it would be necessary instead to treat the guilty as innocent, putting into practice a ‘superior’ form of justice, offering them a possibility of salvation because, if evildoers accept God’s pardon and confess their sin, letting themselves be saved, they will no longer continue to do wicked deeds, they too will become righteous and will no longer deserve punishment. It is this request for justice that Abraham expresses in his intercession, a request based on the certainty that the Lord is merciful. Abraham does not ask God for something contrary to his essence, he knocks at the door of God’s heart knowing what he truly desires.”

About the Author: Jennifer E. Miller, S.T.D., Professor of Moral Theology

Cajun by birth, Dr. Jennifer E. Miller comes from the Lafayette area. She earned her BA in theology from the Franciscan University of Steubenville in 2002, after which she worked for two years in youth ministry in the Ville Platte area of southern Louisiana.

Travelling to Rome to complete her studies, she earned an STB at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in 2007 and an STL in moral theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in 2009. After a year of postgraduate studies at the John Paul II Pontifical Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, Dr. Miller began work on a doctorate in Catholic Social Doctrine at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross. During this time, she also worked as assistant to Msgr. Martin Schlag, consultor to the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, and as the Directress of Studies at the Markets, Culture and Ethics Research Centre, an interdisciplinary research center between philosophy, theology, and economics that seeks to encourage and promote the virtuous culture necessary for an ethical economic system. Her STD was completed in 2013, with a thesis critiquing and reformulating Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach in light of the principle of subsidiarity and the family.

Dr. Miller has previously taught moral theology at the Aquinas Institute in Lafayette, Louisiana and was involved in teaching at Christendom College’s Rome Campus and at the Institute of Higher Religious Studies at the Apollinare (ISSRA), located at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross. She has taught and published both in English and in Italian. Dr. Miller believes that the moral life is best lived when it is understood as the call to holiness, to the beauty of the virtuous life in Christ directed towards beatitude, rather than as a system of exterior rules and obligations; she seeks to impart this understanding and this way of living the moral life to her students.

Jennifer E. Miller, S.T.D.
Office Location
St. Joseph Hall – Room 109

Contact
Email: jmiller@nds.edu

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