Jubilee will make mercy ‘foundation of Church’s life’

 Pope Francis has unveiled his vision for the Jubilee Year of Mercy saying that the Church must put a new and overriding emphasis on forgiveness.

The formal announcement of the Year at Vespers in St Peter’s Basilica last Saturday was accompanied by the release of the bull Misericordiae Vultus, or “The Face of Mercy”. The document opens with the declaration, “Jesus is the face of the Father’s mercy”. Francis notes that the year starts on 8 December, Feast of the Immaculate Conception and also the fiftieth anniversary of the closing of the Second Vatican Council. “The Church feels a great need to keep this event alive,” Francis writes. “With the council, the Church entered a new phase of her history … The walls which too long had made the Church a kind of fortress were torn down and the time had come to proclaim the Gospel in a new way.”

What is needed now, the Pope writes, is a shift in emphasis on the part of the Church, from a “necessary and indispensable” focus on justice, towards the “joyful call to mercy”. “The time has come” for this, he says.

The document was handed out to heads of dicasteries, representing different regions of the world, before the Holy Door of the Basilica. In a gesture read by some as expressing a particular concern for the Jubilee in Africa, he handed the bull to Archbishop Bartolome Adoukonou of Benin, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Culture. One of Francis’ aims is to focus the minds of the Synod on the Family in October on a “merciful” solution for the divorced and remarried, some Vatican observers have claimed.

Francis said in the document that it would be a time for Catholics to contemplate just how merciful God has been to them and to understand better how they are called to be merciful to others. Mercy, he wrote, is “the very foundation of the Church’s life” and “all of her pastoral activity should be caught up in the tenderness she makes present to believers”.