My prioress has flown back to her family home in France to be with her father for his eightieth birthday. This is news of importance for the whole convent, for her father is a significant figure not just for her but for all the sisters. Papa, as we all call him, has embraced the joys and sorrows of the entire community for the twenty-five years since his daughter’s entrance as a postulant. He prays for us; he counsels and guides us; once, to everyone’s alarm, he even mounted a ladder on a holiday visit to fix our gutters. In return, the community has made Papa’s joys and sorrows its own. And so this week we are not just celebrating Papa’s birthday, but also the fact he will soon have the opportunity to welcome a long-standing friend of his, whom we shall call Philippe, into his home.

This has never happened before. Papa and Philippe have an unusual friendship, which began under unusual circumstances. This sort of domestic visit simply has not been possible in the many decades since they first met. But their affection for each other is true and strong, and Philippe has said that Papa is the only person he has ever known who has taken the time to properly understand him. So we rejoice with Papa that he will have the great gift of a visit from his old friend for his birthday.

Perhaps it is worth explaining why Papa and Philippe’s friendship is so unusual; it has relevance, I think, to recent events in the Church. They met in a courtroom, when Papa was working as a lawyer in Toulouse. Philippe was on trial for the brutal, sexualized murders of multiple women. Papa was Philippe’s prosecutor. The reason Philippe has never been able to visit Papa at home is because, having assessed the facts of the case, Papa successfully persuaded the jury that these murders warranted a sentence of life imprisonment from which Philippe has only recently emerged.

How, then, did the two become friends? Simply because Papa gave Philippe more than justice. As well as arguing for the strictest possible sentence, Papa also pointed out to the jury that Philippe’s actions, though absolutely inexcusable, were also in some way explicable. Having closely studied Philippe’s medical and psychiatric reports, Papa brought together certain facts about him—events from his early years, weaknesses in his character, black spots of anger, resentment and shame in his inner life—that suggested why Philippe had committed these murders. In doing so, he gave Philippe a gift that would, slowly and gradually, change the course of his life. Papa demonstrated to Philippe that he was a person deserving not merely condemnation, but also kind and compassionate attention. And he provided Philippe with the beginnings of a self-knowledge and self-understanding that, over his time in prison, would lead him to genuine contrition and open up his capacity to build safe and meaningful relationships with others.

It might seem strange that Philippe feels such love and gratitude towards the man responsible for his prison sentence. But for Papa, there is no contradiction between being a just judge and a merciful father; both, after all, are simply reflections of the justice and mercy of the one God, from whom all fathers take their name.

When I recently emerged from silent retreat, I discovered that the incurvatus in se of the ecclesiastical summer news cycle had, once again, coiled round on itself to consider the topics of justice and mercy. What, we are all wondering, is mercy? Maybe it is giving a convicted rapist the role of archdiocesan chancellor, as the Archbishop of Toulouse would have us believe. Or maybe it is rehabilitating a cleric found guilty of possessing images of child abuse with a position in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State. We may recall that we were prompted to reflect on similar subjects last year when Dr. Paolo Ruffini, defending the decision to continue using the artwork of the disgraced Marko Rupnik on the Vatican News website, made a brave venture into theology by reminding us that Christians “are asked not to judge.” In the background to these events are deeper and more speculative questions raised by the recently-concluded Synod on Synodality, which asked in its 2023 synthesis report how bishops can “reconcile the role of father with that of judge,” and regional clerical abuse reports such as that of the Catholic Church in Switzerland, which suggest that the bishops’ role as “compassionate and forgiving ‘fathers’” is a “stark contrast to their role as a judicial—and therefore punitive—authority.”

The Church, it seems, does not yet fully possess the confidence to consistently hold together just judgement and compassionate mercy in penal governance. But if we want some guidance on how to do so, I think that Philippe and his own just judge, our Papa, might have something to tell us. After all, when Papa gave Philippe both punishment and friendship, he was acting according to a solidly Catholic understanding of justice and mercy. Both justice and mercy ask the same question: What is this person due? Justice provides the answer and mercy goes beyond it. What connects the two is truth: the truth of what and who that person is, which then determines what, precisely, he or she is due.

I do not think the Archbishop of Toulouse or anybody in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State would disagree with me or Papa that justice is giving what a person is due and mercy is going beyond it. The disagreement, it seems to me, lies on the level of that more fundamental truth: what or who a person is. Who exactly are we helping, and what are we rehabilitating, when we attempt to show mercy to a priest–offender? In other words, how are we defining these men? Is it in terms of their functions and responsibilities as clerics, or instead in terms of something deeper, their identity as baptized members of the People of God, called to holiness?

When Papa judged Philippe’s actions, he did not consider Philippe in terms of any function or status. That, Papa knew, is not the absolute truth of who he is. Of course, if it were true that Philippe’s value is functional, then Papa acted entirely mercilessly; he ruined Philippe’s life. After all, since his sentencing Philippe has never progressed in a career, owned a house, or had a flourishing social life. He’s certainly never run a diocesan chancery or worked for the Vatican. But Papa understood that Philippe’s value is found in something else. It is found in his creation in God’s image and likeness and redemption in His Son’s blood; it is found in his capacity to know and desire what is good, to enter into loving relationships with others and, ultimately, to be made a saint. And it is this freedom to pursue his call to holiness which Philippe, in his quiet and unremarkable and seemingly failed life, now possesses in a lavish, merciful excess of all that he is due.

In the Church, we have a word for treating priests according to the logic of function: clericalism. Usually it suggests an excessive deference towards men in Holy Orders. But from recent events in Toulouse and the Vatican we can see that clericalism is, in fact, a kind of neglect of ordained ministers, one that cuts them off from authentic justice and mercy by entirely misunderstanding their identity. To understand why, it is worth revisiting what Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis have to say about clericalism in their various speeches, letters and addresses on the clerical abuse crisis. Both popes defined clericalism not so much as an exaltation of the clerical state but as a denigration of baptismal dignity.

In their understanding, clericalism is what results when we have not fully accepted the Church’s teaching on baptism and its resulting call to holiness. All of us within the Church—including those in Holy Orders—are called to holiness before we are called to usefulness, to sanctity before efficiency. Having one’s own desk and job title and headed letter paper could, I imagine, certainly give one a warm fuzzy sense of being accepted and included; but I’m not sure that in and of itself it does much to increase one’s capacity for contrition, for self-knowledge, or moral conduct towards others.

When we put those who have received the grace of Holy Orders on a pedestal, we obscure the power of the grace that all of us have received through the sacrament of sainthood: our baptism. A just and merciful spiritual father will remember what exactly it is that makes priests into spiritual sons in the first place. It is with reference to this baptismal calling as children of God, and not to ecclesiastical function as His ministers, that justice and mercy should be meted out.