God’s Justice or God’s Mercy? by Dr. Jeff Mirus

By Dr. Jeff Mirus, Catholic Culture, Sept. 03, 2024

Jeffrey Mirus holds a Ph.D. in intellectual history from Princeton University. A co-founder of Christendom College, he also pioneered Catholic Internet services. He is the founder of Trinity Communications and CatholicCulture.org

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, I used to wonder why mercy was so much emphasized in contemporary Catholicism, especially since it seemed to be stressed most by those who were leaning as far away as they could from the clear and specific teachings of Christ and His Church and the need to adhere to them. Suddenly the emphasis was on the “deep reality” that we are all wounded and that we must all depend not so much on hard truths as on God’s mercy.

Of course I still reject the substitution of an emphasis on God’s mercy for an emphasis on God’s justice—that is, for the need to be obedient to God’s commands. I also still think the renewed emphasis on mercy has at times been used as a way of escaping the need to talk about those commands. But for all that, I possessed in my youth only a very superficial understanding of our basic human woundedness. I failed to grasp that we are all not only earthen vessels, but even cracked and broken earthen vessels. …

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