A Sound of Sheer Silence

If you asked ten people on the street whether the word "mercy" has a positive or negative connotation, I suspect you would get either nine or ten votes for "positive."  You would think that if you changed venues from the street to the inside of a Catholic church on Sunday, you would be guaranteed ten out of ten positive votes.  After all, "Blessed are the merciful," the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy , etc.  You would think. On the other hand, judging from the comments sections of Catholic publications, you might think again.  A few weeks ago, Pope Francis announced a Jubilee "Year of Mercy."  Again, you would think this rank up there with being in favor of Mom and apple pie on the non-controversial scale, but there is a dedicated segment of people that are against the idea of expanding or widening or broadening or whatever the mercy of the Church (or, more accurately, the mercy of God as communicated by the Church).  The concern, these...

First off, I have it on good authority that my post " The Moral Theology of the Devil " was discussed during the course of a first date.  It is flattering that someone is reading my writing, but I suspect such a relationship is doomed from the start if that is a relevant topic.  Still, good on you, I guess. Anyway, two additional thoughts along these lines.  The first one is that the Moral Theology of the Devil plays on human resistance to what I believe is the most difficult teaching of Christianity (and, probably, all of Abrahamic monotheism)--God loves everyone equally.  I remember a lecture from Tom O'Meara, a Dominican theologian, who explained that people want to be convinced that they "have more God" then others.  But no one has more God than anyone else.  God is the creator of everyone, and so everyone is equally loved. If you look at traditional religions, with their panoply of gods and spirits, the entire purpose of religion is to generat...

Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk and writer who did most of his work in the 1950s and 1960s (he died in 1968 under somewhat mysterious circumstances--he electrocuted himself in a bathtub).  His most famous book is his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain , which talks about his entry into the monastery.  For my money, however, his best work is a short essay that was included in a collection called New Seeds of Contemplation .  The essay is entitled "The Moral Theology of the Devil."  Every word of it is worth reading ( reprinted here ), but I would particularly like to focus on this section: The people who listen to this sort of thing, and absorb it, and enjoy it, develop a notion of the spiritual which is a kind of hypnosis of evil. The concepts of sin, suffering, damnation, punishment, the justice of God, retribution, the end of the world and so on, are things over which they smack their lips with unspeakable pleasure. Perhaps this is why they develop a deep...