One instantly feels right at home with all the other sinners who have come for the same reason, hungry for the same food.

The Catholic Church: Home for Sinners

by Regis Martin

Perched majestically atop courthouse buildings in almost every land, there stands the Roman goddess Justitia, armed with sword in one hand, scales in the other, exercising her fine art of giving all and sundry exactly what they deserve. Often depicted wearing a blindfold to emphasize the pure impartiality of her judgments, one cannot help but admire the sheer unbending objectivity by which she executes justice. Such a satisfying prospect it must be to punish the wicked, to acquit the innocent.

And haven’t we all longed to settle scores along the lines of some ideal paradigm of justice? Indeed, to adjudicate the fate of those we secretly pine to punish? When asked once to weigh the comparative evils of Rousseau and Voltaire, Dr. Johnson asked, “How does one determine the proportions of iniquity between a flea and a louse?” How we should all relish the job of doing something like that.

But forget for a moment the tablets of human justice, what about the exercise of justice on, say, a divine scale? Wouldn’t that be great fun? Suppose, for example, you’d been asked to drive a stake right through the heart of Christianity. Go ahead now. Just do it. Would not the invited incision provide a perfect separation of sheep and goats? Wouldn’t a clean surgical strike straight down the middle, forcing everyone to the margins, pretty neatly drive the wicked and worldly to one side, the upright and godly to the other? Is that the line of division, do you suppose, prescribed by faith?

Because from a certain angle, it does look wonderfully, seductively simple to pull off so neatly packaged a solution to the problems of good and evil. Precise as a pin.

Simple as soup. At least that’s how it looks on paper, where all complexity can be so easily flattened out like a map. In the real world, of course, none of us would survive the pruning shears. If you insist on a standard of membership in Christ’s Body so pure that only saints could qualify, the unwashed masses having sunk too deep into the morass of sin for God to salvage them, then you might as well write off the entire human race as being hopelessly reprobate. Where then would you locate the love and the mercy of Almighty God? It would have nothing whatsoever to work on.

“It does not matter what level of perfection you reach,” writes Luigi Giussani in his book The Psalms. Nor does it matter, he adds, “what others think or don’t think of how much you do.” In fact, it scarcely matters what you think. “All that matters is that mercy has taken you for ever, from the very origin of your existence. Mercy called you to love, because mercy loved you.”

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