An Ethics of Mercy: On the Way to Meaningful Living and Loving

Sexual experimentation, living together, raising children outside of

marriage, remarriage after divorce, and same-sex relationships… These

behaviours have become common in the wider society as well as among

Christians and Catholic Christians. Not only do they think and act

differently than the official Church teaching, but they do so convinced

that they are acting rightly. This challenges ethics to respond by what

can be called an ‘ethics of mercy’, by meeting people where they are and

helping them to grow towards the fullness of life and love. Such a

pastoral and educational ethics of growth should dare to stand within

the tension between what is desirable and what is attainable, without

surrendering the ‘pro-vocative’ idea of conjugal covenant as the basis

for the family. Mercy is needed not only after ethics but in ethics.

In harmony with Pope Francis’s plea for a ‘gospel of mercy’, this book

seeks a middle way between merciless rigourism and relativising

subjectivism. It proposes an ethics of redemption that accompanies

people on their way to meaningful living and loving, grounded in a

spirituality that springs from the salvation offered in Jesus.