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Mercy is omnipresent in Catholic debates. Mercy calls to consider an individual's needs and this conflicts with justice necessitating equal treatment for everyone. This is most apparent in the Sacrament of Penance, and other forms of penitence, forgiveness, and reconciliation where mercy both transcends and undermines justice.
About the author
Judith Hahn, Dr. theol. JCL, is Professor of Canon Law at the Faculty of Catholic Theology, Ruhr University Bochum. She has published extensively on legal theory and sociology of religious law, including
Church Law in Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
Gunda Werner, Dr. theol., is Professor of Dogmatic Theology at Karl-Franzens University Graz and Chair of the Department for Systematic Theology and Liturgy at the Faculty of Catholic Theology at that same university. She has published comprehensively on the Sacrament of Penance, nineteenth-century Catholic theology and religious community formation in late modernity, including
Die Freiheit der Vergebung (Pustet, 2016).
