The cry for mercy in today’s world

In today’s world, mercy is a somewhat neglected concept. Pope John Paul II was aware of this when he wrote his encyclical on mercy, Dives in Misericordia in 1980. “The presentday mentality, more perhaps than that of people in the past,” he said, “seems opposed to a God of mercy, and in fact tends to exclude from life and to remove from the human heart the very idea of mercy” (DM 2). To show mercy in today’s cultural milieu is often taken to be a sign of weakness. Retaliation and vengeance seem to be the overriding policy of human relations across many frontiers. Our world of today has shown a remarkable descent into the materialisation and mechanisation of human life. Human beings are treated as objects for the satisfaction of other ends. Ultimate human loyalty has been given over to money, fame, drugs, and sex. We have inherited a capitalist culture that places high premium on stiff cutthroat competitiveness, run-away success and unbridled achievement, at whatever cost.

In his book, God Has a Dream, Archbishop Desmond Tutu explains how this capitalist culture works: “You must succeed. It matters little in what you succeed as long as you succeed. The unforgivable sin is to fail. Consequently, it is the survival of the fittest and devil takes the hindmost. It is a no-holds barred contest as we strive frenetically for success at all costs.” With this contemporary mentality, there is often no space for mercy. We have had to pay a high price for our disdain of human frailty. According to Tutu, “Our capitalist culture despises weakness, vulnerability and failure, but God knows that failure is an inevitable part of life and that weakness and vulnerability are part of creaturehood. They are part of what makes us human. It is through weakness and vulnerability that most of us learn empathy and compassion and discover our soul.”

But the world does not think this way. We have tended to treat the weak, the poor, the unemployed, the failures with disdain because success and power have become the gods at whose altars we have burned incense and bowed the knee. We have tended to be embarrassed by compassion and caring as things that were inappropriate in the harsh, callous world of business. Despite the philanthropy that so many capitalists turn to late in life, we are told capitalism cannot easily tolerate compassion and caring. They reduce one’s competitiveness. This contempt for weakness was the essence of Nazism. It is the doctrine that the strong shall rule over the weak and that being weak is something to be despised and held in contempt. This ideology is still present in our world of today. We still live with this deep-rooted tendency to do away with weak and vulnerable people. Once people no longer satisfy our contemporary economic model of producing value, we discard them into the trash can. This is what Pope Francis has called the ‘throwaway culture’ that has overtaken modern sensibility.

Quoting Harald Ofstad’s book, Our Contempt for Weakness given to Nobel laureates, Desmond Tutu says: “We admire those who fight their way to the top, and are contemptuous of the loser. We consider ourselves rid of Nazism because we abhor the gas chambers. We forget that they were the ultimate product of a philosophy which despised the ‘weak’ and admired the ‘strong.’ The brutality of Nazism was not just the product of certain historical conditions in Germany. It was also the consequence of a certain philosophy of life, a given set of norms, values and perceptions of reality. We are not living in their situation but we practice many of the same norms and evaluations.”

The century that lies behind us can be said to be a merciless and horrible century in many respects. It left a legacy of blood, anguish and tears, with two world wars, genocides and mass murders, which consumed millions of human lives. In his 1991 book, An Afro-Christian Vision: Towards a More Humanized World, Father George Ehusani says: “With the dropping of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, humanity woke up to a frightening possibility - the extinction of the human race, and the obliteration of all life on earth, to be brought about by the product of our intelligence and the work of our hands. But rather than abate our appetite for war, the 1945 experience seems to have fuelled the craze for the accumulation of atomic, biological and chemical weapons of destruction, the development and maintenance of which has not only poisoned the natural environment, but also robbed humanity of enormous human and financial resources, which could otherwise have been used to fight the ghosts of poverty, ignorance and disease, which still hold most of humanity captive.”

Writing in the 1960s, Henri Nouwen put into perspective the core challenges facing humanity: “We are confronted not only with the most elaborate and expensive attempts to save the life of one person by heart transplantation, but also with the powerlessness of the world to help when thousands of people die from lack of food. We are confronted not only with humanity’s ability to travel to another planet, but also with our hopeless impotence to end a senseless war on this planet. We are confronted not only with high-level discussions about human rights and Christian morality, but also with the torture chambers of Brazil, Greece, and Vietnam. We are confronted not only with incredible ingenuity that can build dams, change river-beds and create fertile new lands, but also with earthquakes, floods and tornadoes that can ruin in one hour more than human beings can build in a generation.”

Although the twenty first century is still relatively young, we are faced with threats of ruthless terrorism, violence, and bloodshed on a large scale. We live with the challenges of global poverty, hunger, misery, and outrageous injustice, which are affecting hundreds of millions of people. In some parts of the world, there is widespread persecution of religious minorities, denial of freedom of religion and other rights and freedoms. Every now and again, our television screens beam to our living rooms the devastating consequences of natural catastrophes like earthquake, volcanic eruption, tsunami, flood, and drought. These