As Pope Francis's Year of Mercy comes to a close, it seems fitting to reflect one more time on this theme.
It's been an interesting year. Mercy has been everywhere, yet sometimes I feel that I have actually learned very little from what has been said about it this year.
Rightly or wrongly, the dominant - and by no means new - characteristic of mercy that most immediately comes to mind is a mercy understood as a liberating sandpaper which frees the person from the rough and unfeeling edges of dogmatic faith, a kind of "frontier" mercy that benevolently (paternalistically?) metes out its tender concessions to a somewhat helpless and passive individual, over and against other informing features of faith.
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