The false conception of mercy which is seeping into the Body of Christ from the top down is a danger to souls.
Fr. McTeigue:
“...The mercy at work at Calvary, and its message of hope revealed at Easter, will be triumphant only if we accept the full horror and glory of its blood-soaked nature. Only the Cross of Christ could prove decisively that mercy is free but not cheap, that the moral order cannot be eradicated, and that God’s love, paradoxically, is both resistible and undeniable. Mercy is rightly received and ratified not by treating it as divine permission to persist in sin and the illusion that sin can ever be without consequence, but only when we treat this underserved second chance as our opportunity to love the goodness of God and hate our own evil that would separate us from Him. Divine mercy, expressed at the terrible cost of the violent death of God’s Only Begotten Son, is worthily received when we choose to repent of the sin we could not get free of on our own. The proof that God’s mercy was not wasted upon us is shown when we live our gratitude for mercy by striving after holiness with zeal and joy...”
http://www.aleteia.org/en/religion/news/lent-a-time-of-blood-soaked-mercy-5780783721611264?page=2
Straining toward Heaven is very humbling and thankfully it is certainly eased by Mercy, Himself, in the Sacrament of Confession and Penance, and the Holy Eucharist. Our colloquial version of mercy is being tested and our understanding is key.
It is hard to understand what we don’t know. “My people perish for lack of knowledge”, is epidemic both in and out of the Church.
Even though I