How has the Church engaged the global political world in recent times? Sometimes its relationship has been one of convergence with the goals of the international community. From the time that Pope Benedict XV advanced proposals for the peaceful settlement of World War I that anticipated those of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, the Church has espoused international law, human rights, the peaceful settlement of disputes, and the reduction of war, eventually embraced the economic development of poor nations, and most recently took up the cause of environmental protection through Pope Francis’ encyclical, Laudato Si. At other times, the Church has stood in tension with dominant secular forces, for instance, over the role of abortion and family planning policies at the Cairo conference of 1994 and the Beijing conference of 1995.


There is another kind of engagement with the world that the Church sometimes pursues, though, that I wish to convey here—namely a world-shaping role. In this creative and distinct posture, the Church taps into its deepest logic and retrieves and adapts it to the times, yielding new possibilities for peace and justice.

Over the past generation, the Church has acted as a world shaper through a message that Pope Francis has now elevated into the theme of the current Jubilee Year: mercy. “This age is a kairos of mercy,” quipped Pope Francis on the flight back to Rome at the close of his first overseas trip to Brazil in 2013. In naming the age one of “kairos,” Francis is declaring mercy a “sign of the times,” a movement in history animated by the Holy Spirit. He continues and develops a theme inaugurated by Pope John Paul II, who declared that “loud cries should be the mark of the Church of our times.”

What is especially striking and surprising about the popes’ teaching on mercy is their application of it to politics. Mercy is not a virtue typically associated with politics, especially in the modern nation-state, and has little pedigree in Western political thought. So, recent popes’ calls for mercy in the political order, along with its close cousins, reconciliation and forgiveness, come as an innovation. There is at least one historical precedent for a politics of mercy – Pope Benedict XV's plea for the nations of Europe to practice forgiveness after World War I, which he articulated in his encyclical of 1920, Pacem, Dei Munus Pulcherrinum. The nations largely ignored his plea, pursued a politics of revenge that led to a second world war, and the teaching of mercy in politics was largely placed on hold.

It was John Paul II who took it up again and established its relevance for our times. His experience of living under Nazism and communism in Poland, as well as his devotion to the popular message of divine mercy of the Polish nun Sr. Maria Faustina, gave him a keen sense of the need for mercy in the world. After John Paul II became pope in 1978, he penned his second encyclical, Dives in Misericordia, in 1980 on the message of mercy and in the last section proposed reconciliation and forgiveness as practices for the political order. He repeated the message in his Message for the World Day Peace of 1997 and 2002, the latter appearing just over three months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States. Pope John Paul II also stressed the social dimension of mercy during the three years anticipating the Jubilee Year, 2000, when he asked for forgiveness for historical misdeeds committed by Catholics in the name of the Church.

Pope Benedict XVI, John Paul II’s successor, carried forth the message of mercy and reconciliation and gave it application in Lebanon, China, and Africa and in his Message for the World Way of Peace of 2011, where he linked peace and reconciliation to religious freedom. Pope Francis’ own fervent dedication to mercy has led to his own interventions in peacemaking and reconciliation, including leading a global prayer for peace in Syria, inviting heads of Israel and Palestine to the Vatican, and making a risky papal trip to the war-ridden Central African Republic in November 2015.

Such papal gestures and utterances of mercy give concrete clues to mercy’s meaning for politics. Most saliently, mercy, especially as it is expressed in reconciliation, has found application in the large number of countries engaged in processes of dealing with their past over the past generation. One context for these processes is what is known as the Third Wave of Democratization – a set of some 90 countries who have trod the path from authoritarianism to democracy (or at least part way, and not without reversals) since 1974 in Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, and East Asia. Another is the historically large number of civil wars that have been settled through negotiation since the end of the Cold War in 1989. Still another is democracies like Australia and Canada addressing past injustices like the maltreatment of native peoples. In all of these cases, countries face the question: What is the meaning of justice in the wake of massive injustice? Trials, truth commissions, reparations, public apologies, and forgiveness are among the measures they have adopted.

While reconciliation does not reject the principle of justice for wrongdoing, its core concept is restoration of right relationship and it involves a far wider array of principles, practices, and activities, including the transformation of attitudes and emotions, apology, forgiveness, and healing through the public acknowledgment of suffering. Reconciliation has been advocated and practiced in the political realm in South Africa, Chile, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Guatemala, Timor Leste, El Salvador, Peru, Germany, and numerous other locales. Reconciliation measures have brought a degree of healing and restoration of unity to societies riven by war and massive injustices that rights, punishment, and the rule of law alone could not have achieved.

Advocates of reconciliation are disproportionately but not exclusively religious. Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, Catholic Bishop Juan Gerardi of Guatemala, and John Baptist Odama of Uganda are examples of leaders who became prominent advocates of a reconciliation paradigm, in some cases over and against a judicial punishment paradigm rooted in the liberal peace. This religious influence is not surprising, for reconciliation is at the core of Christian theology. Its vertical dimension, God’s reconciliation of the world unto himself in Christ, is meant to be reflected on a horizontal plane, that is, among human beings and even within political orders. A major component of reconciliation is forgiveness, and in numerous locales where reconciliation has been a prominent paradigm, victims have practiced forgiveness of their perpetrators, often on a widespread scale.

Reconciliation’s animating virtue is mercy. In Dives in Misericordia, John Paul II wrote that mercy is “manifested in its true and proper aspect when it restores to value, promotes and draws good from all the forms of evil existing in the world and in man.” True, it is hardly the case that all of the reconcilers of the past generation have been inspired directly by John Paul II and his successor popes, although many surely have been. The rise of reconciliation in global politics over the past generation, though, converges strongly with these popes’ claims that the current age is a “kairos of mercy.” To the degree that this message has been heard and put into practice, especially in political orders, the Church has acted as a world-shaping institution.
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