Mercy and Misericordism
The New Pope Leo XIV, Between the Second Vatican Council and the Council of Trent
Translator’s note: In the following text, I have chosen to retain the terms misericordism and misericordists, calques from the original Italian misericordismo and misericordisti. These terms are used in certain Catholic theological discussions to criticise a distorted or sentimentalised conception of divine mercy—one that overlooks divine justice and the need for repentance. They do not belong to standard English theological vocabulary but are increasingly used in translations and commentary addressing post-conciliar theological trends.
***
One of the defining themes of Pope Francis’s pontificate—as is widely acknowledged—has been that of mercy. In championing this theme, the Pope has merely deepened and extended a spiritual atmosphere already present in all the major documents of the Second Vatican Council. The Council itself helped us grasp, more profoundly than ever before, the immeasurable breadth of the Father’s mercy toward us lost sinners—a mercy freely given as a remedy for the tragedy of original sin.
Yet it must also be noted that the ecumenical movement initiated by the Council, particularly in its outreach to the Lutherans, has often been misinterpreted by a modernist trend within the Church. This tendency has led many Catholics, while still claiming the Catholic name, to adopt the heresies of Luther rather than faithfully embrace the approach proposed by the Church. The critical issue where this confusion must be clarified is the Lutheran understanding of divine mercy, which is erroneous, since it produces fruits of sin rather than authentic fruits of mercy.
Pope Leo thus faces the difficult and urgent task of addressing and resolving this complex and deeply entangled issue: the question of divine mercy, particularly in its relationship to justice—a relationship that has been distorted in much contemporary Catholic moral theology and, consequently, in Catholic practice and custom.
The modernists have largely succeeded in presenting the Second Vatican Council as a correction of the Council of Trent. Yet, if we wish to avoid the failure of Vatican II’s reforming work, we must demonstrate the relevance and ongoing value of Trent’s response to Luther.
Few today recall that many of Luther’s valid reform proposals were already being addressed—not by Vatican II—but by the Council of Trent itself. Far from simply condemning, Trent also adopted what was sound, while providing a masterful correction of Luther’s errors—errors that, sadly, the Lutherans have not fully grasped to this day, and which modernists stubbornly reject, even going so far as to accuse the Council of Trent of failing to understand Luther.
A key task now falls to Pope Leo: in order to heal the rift between traditionalists and modernists within the Church, he must help the faithful to see that the true ecumenism envisioned by Vatican II—and crucial to stopping the infiltration of Lutheran errors into Catholic life—must recover the Tridentine framework in its engagement with Luther.
Yes, it may be true that the Council of Trent was overly severe in certain respects. But it is equally true that Vatican II has often leaned toward a kind of sentimental leniency—a do-gooder tendency[1]. Thus, what is needed is not rupture but a balance: a pontificate committed to progress in continuity[2].
St. Paul Misunderstood by Luther
It is therefore necessary to pause for a moment and consider Luther himself. The central concern of his theology—and the existential drama of his tormented life—was, as is well known, the desire to be certain of being forgiven and loved by God, despite his condition as a sinner. His longing to feel God’s mercy emerged within a deeply troubled psychological context—one marked by the false belief that he was incapable of acting freely and unable to rid himself of his overwhelming sense of guilt. From this anguished experience came Luther’s famous doctrine of justification, according to which God covers sin but does not erase it, pretending not to see it. In this view, God grants forgiveness and salvation to the sinner who continues, unrepentant, to sin and to suffer remorse for it.
This doctrine is rooted in his idea of the enslaved will, a concept derived from a misinterpretation of a key passage in St. Paul, where the Apostle seems to describe his will as a prisoner of sin:
“I have the will to do what is right, but I cannot do it; for I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want, I do. … I see a law in my members waging war against the law of my mind and making me a captive to the law of sin that is in my members” (Rom 7:22–23).
At first glance, Paul appears to be saying that the sinner—son of Adam—has lost the free will to do good, as though the will were at war with itself: the very moment he wants to do good, his enslaved will compels him to do evil.
Yet this interpretation makes Paul’s argument absurd, for it is impossible for the will to simultaneously desire both good and evil. Indeed, this passage is one of the most difficult in all of Paul’s letters—rhetorically extreme, almost paradoxical—and it concerns a theme of the highest importance: the relationship between the human will and sin.
What Paul means—as the Council of Trent will later clarify—is not that man has lost his free will, but that fallen man finds it difficult to do good. His will is weakened, not destroyed. The Council of Trent firmly rejects Luther’s view, insisting that original sin did not render the human will like that of a beast. Rather, it wounded it. Man retains the capacity to do some good, but due to the pressure of concupiscence, he is unable, without grace, to perform all the good acts necessary for salvation.
Thus, when Paul cries out to God to be “delivered from this body of death” (v. 24), he is not asking to be freed from the created will God gave him—that would be nonsensical. Nor is he asking, as Luther does, for God’s grace to replace his human will, which Luther considers irreparably evil and unusable. On the contrary, Paul asks to be freed from the defects of his will, from its tendency to sin, and to be made capable—with the help of grace—of faithfully keeping the divine law, of doing all the good he is called to do, both on the natural and supernatural levels.
Luther, by contrast, conceives of divine mercy as an unconditional concession of grace, requiring no effort from the sinner to correct himself or to do good, since such effort, in his view, is futile. For Luther, man is relieved of the impossible burden of observing the law; he is allowed to continue sinning, assured of salvation as long as he believes that God forgives him.
Grace, the principle of faith, according to Luther, does not serve to strengthen our will so that it might convert and observe the commandments. Rather, grace is understood simply as a guarantee of salvation—a divine compensation for the evil we inevitably continue to commit. Evil, in this logic, becomes normalized and therefore undergoes a perverse transformation into good. God, in this system, is no longer concerned with whether we obey His commandments. He supposedly leaves us free to act as we please, knowing that we are incapable of true obedience. We are thus exempted from the law; it is enough merely to believe and to trust in His forgiveness.
In this way, the sins that man inevitably continues to commit are no longer considered sins, if by sin we mean an act deserving of punishment. Instead, these actions are excused by God and even reckoned as justice. The sufferings of this life, furthermore, are robbed of any expiatory or redemptive value, even when united with the sufferings of Christ, because He is believed to have already done everything, leaving nothing for us to add. From this logic derives, in Luther’s theology, the uselessness—and indeed the abomination—of the Mass.
Thus, the Christian no longer acts toward salvation using his useless will, but is moved exclusively by the Holy Spirit. He enjoys what Luther calls a supreme freedom—no longer the illusory freedom of the human will (a free will that is not truly free), but rather the very divine freedom itself. In this new condition, as a child of God, the believer is free to do whatever he wishes, in the certainty that he is thereby doing the will of God.
From this mistaken conception of mercy and freedom, by which God becomes complicit in sin and no longer punishes it, arise both modern mercifulness and liberalism. These are nothing more than an extension to all humanity of Luther’s personal experience and of the theological construction he built upon his inner history.
Thus, even though Luther continued to believe in the existence of the damned, reserving the certainty of salvation to himself and his followers, today’s apostles of mercifulness—believing they have grasped even more deeply the greatness of divine mercy along Lutheran lines—have come to view divine punitive justice as incompatible with divine mercy. The result is a distorted image of an unjust God, one who approves of sin and sins Himself in refusing to punish it.
The Failures of Misericordism
Luther opens the way for modern misericordists by interpreting the justice spoken of by St Paul in Romans 5 as mercy, and by unduly extending this identification, valid only in that specific context, to the broader concept of divine mercy. The consequence of this move is the denial that God punishes sin, since the imposition of punishment pertains not to mercy, but to justice.
In this way, misericordism, by denying divine punishment, ends up confusing what God has actually done with what He could have done had He so willed. For, according to divine Revelation, God willed not to prevent the evil of sin, and positively willed the evil of punishment as a sanction for sin.
Yet, if we consider what God could have done had He so desired, we must say that He could have created personal beings and led them to the same glory that Christ now obtains for us, without the detour of sin—bringing them to obedience through an immediate act of full submission to His will.
Misericordism thus arose among those Catholics who, misinterpreting ecumenism with the Lutherans, failed to grasp the necessary link between the Second Vatican Council and the doctrinal clarifications offered by the Council of Trent in response to Luther’s heresies. The Tridentine Council clarified, in this regard, foundational concepts such as grace, free will, predestination, election, and merit.
It is necessary to recover forgotten values
Predestination. God, according to an inscrutable plan of his mercy, conceived from eternity and infallibly effective, predestines some to heavenly glory by purifying them from sin and moving their free will with grace, so that through it the predestined, in grace, convert from sin to justice, observe the commandments, perform good works, and acquire in Christ the merit of entering heaven.
Those who are not predestined are such that, despite having received the universal call to salvation and having had the concrete possibility of saving themselves, since God makes available to all the means of salvation and wills that all be saved, through their fault, reject the divine offer and are consequently punished with eternal punishment.
Election. According to what Christ reveals to us, God, from among the totality of human creatures punished as a result of original sin, chooses a certain number of persons whom He saves by leading them to eternal life (cf. Mt 24:22, 31; Lk 18:7). But it must be borne in mind that even those who are saved or predestined to salvation enter heaven by their free choice. How so? God chooses those whose will He moves to choose Him as their highest good and ultimate end. Those who are not chosen reject, through their fault, the grace that God offers them, without God having any part in this refusal, unlike the act of accepting grace, which is a free act of free will, yet one that is caused and moved by God.
The doctrine of predestination would seem to favour fatalism[3], according to which God decrees from eternity the salvation of some and the condemnation of others without regard for the choices of men. In this view, free will plays no role in man’s destiny: those destined for heaven may sin freely in the certainty that they will be saved regardless, while those destined for hell may live as virtuously as they wish, and yet will be damned.
This doctrine is not far removed from that of Luther. The difference lies only in the formal recognition of the exercise of free will: man may choose between good and evil. But it is akin to Luther’s teaching in denying that free will has any part in the work of salvation, where God alone acts.
We must also avoid a voluntarist doctrine of predestination. One must affirm that, if God wills to save some and not others, He does so by His wisdom, and as a voluntary act grounded in that wisdom, not by a sheer act of will apart from wisdom. God wills something because it is truly good; it is not the case that something is good merely because God wills it. To say that God wills without wisdom, observes St Thomas, is blasphemy. Therefore, if God chooses some and not others, there is a reason. The only point is that only He knows that reason.
Merit. Pope Leo must again remind us that we cannot be saved without merit. As Scripture says, we cannot appear before God empty-handed. If we bury the talent we have received, instead of making it bear fruit, we shall not obtain salvation. We are saved only on the condition that we have observed the divine commandments. To be saved, faith is not sufficient—works are also necessary. Knowledge is essential, but it is useless without practice and love. And love must be real, not merely conceptual or theoretical. On the other hand, there is no true freedom that is not the effect of truth. Justice is the effect of obedience to the law, but always on the condition that the subject enjoys the grace of Christ.
This means that there is a twofold order of merit: on the one hand, there is purely human merit, by which, in virtue of our works, we earn merit with and from men; on the other hand, there is supernatural merit, a participation in the merits of Christ—that merit by which, sustained by grace, we earn from God and with God an increase of grace and heaven itself.
This second kind of merit, as the Council of Trent teaches following St Augustine, is itself a gift of grace and an effect of predestination. To believe that one can merit grace by mere human merit is Pelagian heresy; but to believe that one deserves it after having received grace is a truth of faith. Hence, there is a prevenient grace that causes merit, and a consequent grace, which is the grace we obtain by meriting within grace.
All this in no way excludes the primacy and gratuity of grace—that is, the fact that the initiative of the work of salvation belongs to grace, which is therefore called prevenient. But the Council of Trent makes clear, against Luther, that the consent of the free will is necessary in the work of our justification, because in this work God wills that we cooperate with grace. For this reason, our salvation—on our part—is deserved and is the reward of our works; but on God’s part, it remains wholly gratuity.
Freedom and free will. We must recover the true concept of human freedom, which in Luther first, and in German idealism later, takes on disproportionate dimensions, being assimilated to the absoluteness of divine freedom. As is well known, Luther exaggerates in emphasising the corruption of free will and its subjection to sin and passion.
It was convenient for him because he thus spared himself the tiring ascetic work of self-control and self-correction. By proceeding in this way, we cannot obtain that dominion of the Spirit over the flesh and that reconciliation of the flesh with the Spirit, which is the purpose of the Christian life.
Lutheran pessimism regarding the impotence of free will, in addition to favoring a lax conduct, would also seem to encourage a quietist conduct, such as that promoted by Molinos in the seventeenth century, which is striking considering that in his reforming activity he displayed an intense and multifaceted activity that was prodigious, subjected himself to immense labors, and demonstrated a very strong will capable of making important and even historic choices.
How can all this be explained? By the conviction that Luther had of being an instrument of the Holy Spirit and that therefore everything he said, did, and decided was willed by the Spirit. The question that arises for us, however, is whether the Holy Spirit was truly at work in the spread of his heresies, in his rebellion against the Pope, and in his work of devastation of the Church, or perhaps whether it was another spirit that was not exactly holy.
A task for Pope Leo
The conciliar reform has certainly borne good fruit, promoted by the post-conciliar Popes up to Francis, but, as is well known, it has also been partly disregarded and distorted by the interpretation given to it by the modernists, who have set it in opposition to the work of the Council of Trent, thereby committing a grave error that lies at the root of many ills in the contemporary Church. Rather than oppose, it was necessary to unite; rather than emphasize a rupture, it is essential to highlight continuity, as Benedict XVI rightly affirmed.
As a reference for a more mature judgment on Luther, the Pope could take as a starting point the Dichiarazione congiunta sulla dottrina della giustificazione (Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification) between the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation of 3 October 1999, issued by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.
From this document emerges the correction of certain Lutheran errors, such as double predestination, the comparison of the Pope with the Antichrist, the denial of free will, the coexistence of grace with mortal sin, and the rejection of good works. However, it still lacks recognition of the need for merit to obtain salvation, the necessity of penance, the distinction between sin and concupiscence, the value of the sacraments, the Marian dogmas, and the harmony of faith with reason and nature with grace.
P. Giovanni Cavalcoli OP
Fontanellato, May 10, 2025
Source:
https://padrecavalcoli.blogspot.com/p/misericordia-e-misericordismo-il-nuovo.html
Notes:
[1] See my pamphlet La eresia del buonismo. Il buonismo e i suoi rimedi, Chorabooks Editions, Hong Kong 2017.
(The Heresy of Goodism. Goodism and Its Remedies)
[2] See my book Progresso nella continuità. La questione del Concilio Vaticano II e del postconcilio, Fede&Cultura Editions, Verona 2011.
(Progress in Continuity. The Question of the Second Vatican Council and the Post-Council)
[3] See the collection of writings by various authors, including myself, edited by Francesco Baccilieri, Fatalisti a rischio. Come orientarsi nel proprio e nell’altrui destino, Editions Le Comete Franco Angeli, Milan 2012.
(Fatalists at Risk. How to Orient Yourself Regarding Your Own and Others’ Fate)