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F e a t u r e A r t i c l e
Social Justice and Divine Mercy
By Jay Dunlap
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This Rock
Volume 12, Number 4
 April 2001 
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In the diocese where I grew up, a long-time pastor now in his mid-sixties has made local headlines by leaving the priesthood to marry a woman he met on vacation in Hawaii. This intelligent and capable priest, once rumored to be a strong candidate for bishop, has used a columnist in the local newspaper as a megaphone to vent his anger at the Catholic Church. His chief complaint: The Church is abandoning its advocacy of social justice in favor of personal piety.
Around the same time, the Church hosted a seminar in Rome entitled "From Debt Relief to Poverty Reduction," chaired by Archbishop François Xavier Nguyên Van Thuân, the longtime prisoner of Communist oppressors in Vietnam and now president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. The fact that world leaders largely acquiesced to the Holy Father's plea to eradicate Third World debt during the Jubilee year is one of the great triumphs of social justice in our day. The seminar took place because debt relief in itself is not enough; the Holy See is seizing the moment to move the policy discussion forward.
So why is it that some-dare I say many?-advocates of social justice in the Church are angry or defiant? Why do they give John Paul II credit for only token progress in social justice? This contemporary conundrum is an important issue for today's apologist trying to reach two groups: dissenters within the Church and those outside it who think, "If I can do social justice absent any faith, why do I need Christ?" Both the insider and the outsider distance themselves because they differ with the magisterium on matters of faith and morals.
In my own faith journey, I used to be that insider who would accuse the Holy See of truncating the "spirit of Vatican II" by clinging to a patriarchal hierarchy. It has been helpful for me to compare that perceived "spirit" with the actual documents of Vatican II. The Holy Father has urged all Catholics to revisit them. Read Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, and you find that the third chapter, which gives a beautiful description of how Christ instituted his Church as a mystery in the midst of history, bears the title "The Church is Hierarchical."
But the competing ecclesiologies of the post-Vatican Church do not fully account for the anger others and I have experienced as social justice advocates. I submit that advocates tend to be angry if they do not temper the call for justice with prayer for mercy. Justice and mercy are by their very natures inextricable. They are the options facing any judge who passes sentence-whether a parent, a teacher, an employer, a jurist, or even the Lord himself. In some ways mercy and justice can be synonymous. Indeed, works done in the name of social justice by a child of the 1960s may be done by a child of the 1930s (or the 1990s) as corporal works of mercy.
But let's not blur a key distinction: Justice is to render unto each his due, while mercy is to grant a reprieve from suffering. Some suffering is merited, some is not. Christ's death and resurrection transformed the cosmic landscape by rescuing fallen mankind from the justice that is our due. This was accomplished through love. If God had chosen justice for us instead of mercy, then woe would have befallen us all. That is why we pray for universal justice at our own peril if we do not balance it with prayer for mercy.
The social justice advocate whose outlook is not tempered by mercy has a tense relationship with the world. He has chosen to judge humanity on the basis of the sufferings of untold masses. The causes of this suffering are manifold, but much of it is the result of what has come to be known as "institutional injustice." In the view of many social justice advocates, we incur guilt by being willing participants in the institutional realities that precipitate this suffering. These are often identified as -isms: consumerism, materialism, industrialism, globalism, which take on the same gloss as more overtly sinful acts such as racism or totalitarianism.
A major problem with this perspective is that nearly every person in the world-especially in the First World-participates in some of these -isms daily. The advocate is left, then, with bitterness and contempt for his neighbor. Even as the advocate makes the preferential option for the poor, his mindset can drive a wedge between his goal and its origin, which is God's love and mercy. This is perhaps why a priest might abandon his vocation after decades in the fray and loudly claim the Church has abandoned its commitment to social justice.
Part of the irony here is that the social justice advocate thinks of himself as the open-minded one, and those deemed "more pious than socially progressive" are thought of as judgmental. But the reality can be exactly the opposite-it has been for me-especially when one's piety makes one profoundly aware of God's mercy. The social justice advocate can needle others, alienate them, and lose potential allies for the cause. It does not take much conversation with someone like this before you realize you have been judged and called upon to make radical changes. Ever gone on a missionary adventure only to come back insufferable? I have.
It is weak-kneed to seek the esteem of others at the expense of proclaiming Christ's prophetic message. But evangelization is done better by the Christian devoted to God's mercy. Such a person can see and proclaim that all humanity participates in the structures of sin but then concludes this is cause for compassion, not condemnation. Christ began his ministry by calling people to repent, but he ended it by taking our sins upon himself on the cross. This, then, must be the apologist's tool: the love that is Christ's mercy.
Perhaps the notion of mercy is associated with pious practices now even more than in the past because of the rise of the Divine Mercy devotion. St. Faustina Kowalska, the apostle of Divine Mercy, wrote frequently in her diary of submerging herself in "the abyss of Christ's mercy." She reported visions of Christ explaining that, for even the most hardened sinner, a final appeal to his mercy can be salvific. The social justice advocate might see in that a pious escape from doing the hard work of loving one's neighbor as oneself. But let's not forget that the First Commandment is to love God. Yes, that love demands active service. But first it involves being present to the Beloved-in short, prayer.
The human need for mercy in the face of justice is not a notion exclusive to Christianity. Consider Greek mythology dramatized by Aeschylus in the Eumenides, in which the spiraling violence of families seeking vengeance upon vengeance requires a divine intervention to transform the Furies into the Mercies. Even before Christ, humanity understood that mercy is the key to a just society and that unrelenting pursuit of justice condemns us all to violence and strife.
No character in literature better personifies the injustice of justice-at-all-costs than Javer, the intrepid pursuer of Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo's masterpiece, Les Miserables. Javer insists on exacting justice according to the letter of the law, despite the overwhelming evidence that Valjean is a just-even saintly-man. Valjean, who served nineteen years of hard labor in a prison camp for stealing a loaf of bread, underwent a conversion because a saintly bishop showed him extravagant mercy after he was freed from prison and stole the bishop's silverware. When in the end Valjean shows mercy to Javer, it explodes the legalistic ideal of justice that has governed Javer's life, thrusting him into despair. Unable to face a world where mercy trumps justice, he commits suicide.
Which may be all too like a priest abandoning his vocation of four decades in a Church where divine mercy must temper social justice.
Jay Dunlap is communications director for the Legionaries of Christ and Regnum Christi and an occasional contributor to the National Catholic Register.
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