Blessed Are the Merciful

Daniel O'Connell

Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

But what is mercy?

Doing good to others beyond what is required by your formal responsibilities to them; beyond what justice requires.

The church has traditionally listed seven corporal “acts of mercy.” These are not all Biblical, and cannot be derived directly from the Sermon on the Mount, but they have the warrant of established tradition.

1. To feed the hungry.
2. To give water to the thirsty.
3. To clothe the naked.
4. To shelter the homeless.
5. To visit the sick.
6. To visit the imprisoned, or ransom the captive.
7. To bury the dead.

Then there are the seven “spiritual works of mercy”:

1. To instruct the ignorant.
2. To counsel the doubtful.
3. To admonish sinners.
4. To bear patiently those who wrong us.
5. To forgive offenses.
6. To comfort the afflicted.
7. To pray for the living and the dead

Doing these thinks is not self-evident, not spontaneous to the conscience. For they involve actions above and beyond what justice requires. Those whose morality derives from the Confucian rather than the Christian tradition do not observe the corporal acts of mercy. Western foreigners are often shocked by this when they visit China.

One is not exempted from the corporal acts of mercy because one pays taxes to the government, and the government does it. It is great that the government does it, but you do not pay taxes voluntarily, so that does not redound on you.

Nor does one demonstrate this virtue by voting for candidates who promise to do more on these matters. While that might make your own taxes go up, for the most part, you are demanding that others do this, not doing it yourself. Politicians usually promise to make “the rich” pay, not the average voter.

And we are worse at the spiritual acts of mercy. In contemporary life, there is obvious resistance to admonishing sinners. There is even resistance to the idea of instructing the ignorant. Instead, everyone now is supposedly entitled to “their truth.”

And “forgiving offenses” and “bearing wrongs patiently” are widely misrepresented. This does not mean ignoring or overlooking them. This would conflict with the virtue of admonishing sinners.

The proper sense of these virtues was modelled by Gandhi or Martin Luther King, both of them following a trail blazed by Daniel O’Connell. You point out the wrong as loudly as possible, but refrain from revenge or exacting punishment.