Dives in Misericordia: “He Who Sees Me Sees the Father” (2, continued)

Chapter II of “Dives in Misericordia” (“Rich in Mercy”) is entitled “The Incarnation of Mercy.” It continues as follows:

“2. . . . The present-day mentality, more perhaps than that of people in the past, seems opposed to a God of mercy, and in fact tends to exclude from life and to remove from the human heart the very idea of mercy. The word and the concept of ‘mercy’ seem to cause uneasiness in man, who, thanks to the enormous development of science and technology, never before known in history, has become the master of the earth and has subdued and dominated it.¹⁴ This dominion over the earth, sometimes understood in a one - sided and superficial way, seems to have no room for mercy. However, in this regard we can profitably refer to the picture of ‘man’s situation in the world today’ as described at the beginning of the Constitution Gaudium et spes. Here we read the following sentences: ‘In the light of the foregoing factors there appears the dichotomy of a world that is at once powerful and weak, capable of doing what is noble and what is base, disposed to freedom and slavery, progress and decline, brotherhood and hatred. Man is growing conscious that the forces he has unleashed are in his own hands and that it is up to him to control them or be enslaved by them.’¹⁵”

14. Cf. Genesis 1:28.
15. Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World Gaudium et spes, no. 9: AAS 58 (1966), p. 1032.

 

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Pope John Paul II: “Dives in Misericordia”