{"id":327816,"date":"2015-12-08T09:00:01","date_gmt":"2015-12-08T08:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/mercy-from-the-viewpoint-of-a-nonbeliever\/"},"modified":"2024-05-16T15:02:16","modified_gmt":"2024-05-16T13:02:16","slug":"mercy-from-the-viewpoint-of-a-nonbeliever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/mercy-from-the-viewpoint-of-a-nonbeliever\/","title":{"rendered":"Mercy from the viewpoint of a nonbeliever"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"YearofMercy-a\"The Indiction of the Jubilee<\/a> of Mercy has taken the word \u201cmercy\u201d far beyond Vatican walls, and to the ears of the secular world it can sound outdated and laden with religious significance. The nonbeliever tends from the start to not accept the mystical meanings with which this word is usually invested, especially now as it is raised to disturbing centrality in worldly society. The nonbeliever finds synonyms, or presumed synonyms, that would allow the word to be taken beyond the borders of Christianity: pity, compassion, empathy . . . in a growing confusion that the online dictionaries are not able to reduce. The first impulse is to identify it with \u201cpity,\u201d the sentiment of people with \u201ccompassion,\u201d of people who emotionally perceives the sufferings of others as their own and would like to alleviate them (and, by the way, in Christianity the term \u201cpity\u201d is close to the term \u201cmercy\u201d.) Well, then, why not \u201cempathy\u201d which is not a feeling but an ability to fully understand the state of soul of others, to place oneself in someone else\u2019s shoes especially after the discovery by neurosurgeons on the mirror neurons that tends to confirm that empathy does not have its origins in intellectual effort but in the genetic code of the species? Words such as pity, mercy compassion, like all respectable words, will have their positive and negative meanings. Just think of the derogatory meaning of phrases such as: \u201cI feel pity for you;\u201d or \u201cI pity you;\u201d \u201cHe needs to be pitied.\u201d What about the misericorde weapon that was used in medie-val times to deliver the death stroke, the \u201cmercy stroke\u201d? You will say that \u201cmercy\u201d is compassion, yes, but \u201cactive\u201d compassion that is substantiated by action, by works. And it may be that it represents a fundamental concept, which is key to the Christian life, as the Dr. Cardinal W. Kasper underscores. Well, then you would need to distinguish between a Christian mercy and a secular mercy based on humanitarian values which, while they march side by side and intertwine, nevertheless belong to two different orders that are to be re-spected in their nature. Therefore, it is not a matter of contrasting secular good works with Christian good works, but of \u201csearching for that hidden harmony that brings relief to the world;\u201d and harmony \u2013 like dialogue \u2013 \u201cis not given in homogeneity, but it lives in diversity. . .\u201d Mario Frontini<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What does this word mean for someone who does not have faith? Empathy, compassion, pity. . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-327816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-categorizzato"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=327816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327816\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=327816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=327816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=327816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}