With Liberty and Justice and Mercy for All

Charting the intersection of those two virtues is by no means the sole prerogative of theologians. I suspect that some of you are feeling the absence of Justice Scalia this morning, so long a fixture at the Red Mass. He was someone who seemed to understand the necessity of exploring the connection between justice and mercy. In addressing law students at the University of St. Thomas in my Archdiocese last year, shortly before he passed away, he stressed the importance of their moral formation, stating that “the rule of law is always second to the law of love.” Those of you who knew and worked with Justice Scalia or who are students of his jurisprudence know that we certainly should not be interpreting his statement as suggesting a lack of appreciation for the rule of law, but rather as a reflection of a heightened appreciation for the importance of the law of love—and for the mercy that flows from it—in the practice of law and in the administration of justice.

What are the implications in our lives as we strive to be faithful to our calling and to promote the common good? Concretely, with particular relevance for those of us who are gathered here this morning, Pope Francis has noted that mercy “does not approach ‘cases’ but persons and their pain.” As he reminds us, “Mercy gets its hands dirty. It touches, it gets involved, it gets caught up with others,” it necessarily “gets personal.”

Working in an environment so often populated by Jane Does and John Does, we need to remember that real people are at the heart of what we do and are affected by the decisions that we make.

That call to “get personal” by no means requires that we abandon our commitment to justice. It is an oversimplification to think of mercy as requiring that we blindly let another off the hook. Even the Holy Father has cautioned against the temptation to a “deceptive mercy” that binds a wound before it is cured. Our concern for the person and our concern for society makes it imperative for us to assess accurately the “wound” to the best of our abilities, to the best of our professional standards, using the tools available to us, so that we might be instruments of the Lord in bringing the real healing that redounds not only to the individual but also to the common good. While mercy, as the Pope notes, can be a “visceral emotion,” it “can also be the fruit of an acute intellectual insight—startling as a bolt of lightning but no less complex for its simplicity.”

Those insights can be drawn from our professional training and experience but also from our observation of the world around us. How difficult it is to perform our work well –whether that be adjudication or advocacy or policy-making or ministry, if we are not students of human nature and of the totality of factors that might have an impact on an individual’s daily actions and decision-making. As Pope Francis has noted in this context, “We can understand so many things simply by seeing someone barefoot in the street on a cold morning….”

With an eye to that challenge, I hope that we can draw comfort from the assurance that St. Paul offered in our second reading this morning that the spirit bestowed by our God is not “a spirit of cowardice but rather of power and love and self-control.” The Holy Spirit invoked at this Mass is indeed a spirit that can be counted on to “empower” us, to help us to act with neighborly love, to assist us in temperately twinning justice with mercy.

In a society in which shopping malls and discos and schools have all too often become places of unthinkable horror, at a time when old hatreds and prejudices seem to be rearing their ugly heads, or when our first freedoms are so easily put at risk, we could easily be tempted to throw up our hands and simply join the lament that we heard in our first reading: “How long, O LORD? I cry for help but you do not listen! I cry out to you, “Violence!” but you do not intervene.”

The “spirit of power, love and self-control,” gratuitously bestowed upon us in such abundance, however, prevents that murmur — and indeed leads us instead to an acceptance of a privileged role as the hands of God’s mercy, hands that are capable, under the Spirit’s direction, of bringing the balm of that mercy to a world that cries out for healing.

At this difficult time, instead of giving up in discouragement, we, enlivened by the Spirit, need to join the Apostles in their fervent prayer: “Lord, increase our faith.” I find it significant that Gospel specifies that it was the apostles as a group, rather than any one apostle, that approached the Lord with that request. There is surely strength in numbers. When we put our heads together, when we support each other in doing what’s right, when we pool our strengths and compensate for each other’s weaknesses, we can — by God’s grace and the work of the Holy Spirit — do amazing things.

I am grateful to Cardinal Wuerl, to the Archdiocese of Washington, and to the John Carroll Society for having the insight to bring us together this morning for this moment of common prayer and mutual support. Surely between us we will be able to come up with faith at least the size of a mustard seed, faith capable of moving the mountains of despair and division, faith capable of pursuing justice while manifesting mercy, faith capable of making a difference in our lives and in our communities. Through the workings of the Holy Spirit, may the Lord in his mercy bring to fulfillment the good work that he has begun in us this morning.