Pope Francis’s Muddled Mercy

Pope Francis began a Jubilee of Mercy in 2015, and now, in the aftermath of his death, “mercy” is the watchword in both the religious and secular reflections on his life. Pope Francis best embodied mercy in his extraordinary gift of presence with the person in front of him. However, for those who couldn’t reach him in person, his legacy of mercy is a muddled one. He was most celebrated for reaching out to those his supporters already believed were not guilty. His solicitude toward the genuinely culpable caused scandal. 

Our secular culture mixes mercy and kindness in a way that makes it harder to see how shocking mercy is and how uneasily it lies alongside justice. Lifting burdens from the innocent may be an act of misericordia in the sense of “pity” but it is not the shocking mercy of the Cross. For mercy to be mercy, there needs to be a genuinely merited punishment that is being remitted for the good of the person struggling under its weight. Mercy does not make sense in a world that can’t imagine how sin can be forgiven or how forgiveness could be different from forgetting.

The standout, startling moment that summed up the papacy for many people around the world was Pope Francis’s “Who am I to judge?” In 2013, Pope Francis was answering questions on the papal plane, and, when a reporter asked about the possibility of a gay man serving as a priest, Pope Francis answered, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?”

It doesn’t quite sit correctly as an expression of mercy, however often it was framed that way. Mercy is for the guilty. Nothing in Pope Francis’s remarks suggested he was thinking of a man engaged in sexual sin. When the poor and fearful are welcomed in from the peripheries, it is not mercy but justice. The Church is emphatic that we are finally ceasing to sin against the poor when we restore to the weak what they are owed. It is not an act of magnanimity. For many of the advocates who most hoped Pope Francis would change the Church’s teaching on sexual morality, welcoming LGBTQ people could not coherently be seen as an expression of mercy. In their view, refusing to “judge” a gay man is an act of justice. Advocates believed there was nothing to forgive.

Pope Francis did offer repeated acts of personal kindness and indulgence to the unambiguously guilty during his papacy, but these are not the choices for which he is lauded as the pope of mercy. In one of the more controversial cases, Pope Francis allowed Bishop Gustavo Óscar Zanchetta to resign for “health reasons” when in fact he faced scrutiny for his abuse of seminarians in Pope Francis’s native Argentina. Francis didn’t just shield Zanchetta from public shame, he appointed Zanchetta to a Vatican finance job invented for him. For years, the Italian posting allowed Zanchetta to avoid standing trial or facing temporal consequences. 

Fr. Marko Rupnik is another example of a cossetted abuser. Rupnik, a mosaic artist whose works were displayed at Lourdes and many other shrines, was credibly accused of repeated, blasphemous abuses of religious sisters. After years of delay, he was expelled by the Jesuit order, but allowed to continue operating as a priest and leading his art institute. His art, sometimes created in concert with acts of abuse, was repeatedly selected by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication for promotional material.

When American journalists asked why a church still struggling with the wounds of the sex abuse crisis would keep sharing the art of an abuser, Paolo Ruffini, the prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication, pushed back. “Who am I to judge?” he said. 

Or rather, who am I to judge Rupnik. For the people posing questions, Ruffini had plenty of judgement: “I think you’re wrong. I think you’re wrong. I really think you’re wrong. . . . [Removing the art] is not a Christian response.” He contrasted his questioners with the Jesuits who kept their Rupnik art on display, a choice he termed “inspiring.” Among those Jesuits was Pope Francis, who kept two works by Rupnik in his private rooms, long after his accusers had asked for justice.

Mercy as the mere protection from punishment is unsatisfying. For mercy to have weight, it must come alongside the acknowledgement of real sin. Mercy must be aimed at helping the guilty repent and live differently, not just duck consequences. Hiding from justice is not the same as living abundantly in mercy. Pope Francis offered Rupnik and Zanchetta mercy, by a certain definition—he spared them from being punished. But this was not among Pope Francis’s admirable acts. These men may have needed reminding of God’s mercy to avoid despairing in their sin, because they had committed crimes that were greater than their own ability to make right. However, Francis did not care for their souls in the way a father should, by offering correction and admonition. Punishment, in these cases, is mercy.

Theodore Cardinal McCarrick, the notorious abuser of seminarians, managed to run out the clock on his court cases. He relied on protection from powerful friends to prey with impunity, and never faced a judge until he was too old and infirm to stand trial. The injustice to his victims is obvious. But the greatest sorrow of McCarrick’s escape for McCarrick is that none of his brother bishops seemed to value his soul, just his money and influence. They did not prepare him to repent and die in friendship with Christ. 

Mercy is rooted in love, in willing the good of the guilty. It is active, not a quiet disavowal of judgement. Mercy begins with naming sin clearly, and then unbarring the doors for the guilty to rise, walk, and sin no more. 

Pope Francis’s best articulation of mercy came not in his visits to wash the feet of prisoners nor in his protection of wicked men. It was in his March 2020 Urbi et Orbi blessing, when the world seemed to pause to watch one man hold Christ aloft in the rain. The pandemic was like a storm, he preached, waking us out of our complacency, returning us to reality. Before the shock of Covid, he said, “We carried on regardless, thinking we would stay healthy in a world that was sick.” 

Imagining that health can be achieved by ignoring sickness mirrors the idea that mercy is simply overlooking a fault. Mercy is radical deliverance, restoring the hope of health to those who lay dead in their sin. 

As an American pope, Leo XIV knows better than most cardinals how destructive it is to the faith of the people to refuse to name sin as sin. I hope he can be a pope of mercy who can love the sinner and the victim together, aware that both need to see sin treated as an urgent threat.