Amid global strife surrounding issues of climate change, terror, political destabilization, refugees, and dire poverty, Pope Francis has placed the mission of the Church as extending the mercy of God at the center of his pontificate. In Pope Francis and Mercy: A Dynamic Theological Hermeneutic, author Gill Goulding, CJ, provides for the first time a compelling study on the critical and determinative role of mercy in Francis’s papacy. Examining his homilies, allocution, encyclicals and addresses, Goulding traces the themes of mercy in Francis’s thought, highlighting its Ignatian foundations, and the crucial work of Pope Francis’s reappropriation and elevation of the discourse of mercy in the modern Church.
Entering into dialogue with other theologians, including Romano Guardini, Walter Kapser, and Hans Urs von Balthasar, Goulding delivers what the Heythrop Journal describes as “a thorough, concisely-argued elucidation of the theological concept of mercy under Francis.” Suggesting a wider appreciation of the necessary tools to enable an engagement of mercy in our contemporary world, Goulding’s Pope Francis and Mercy lays the foundation for future research.
The new paperback edition is available for purchase on our website.
Gill K. Goulding, CJ, is professor of systematic theology at Regis College, University of Toronto, and senior research associate at the Von Hügel Institute, University of Cambridge. She is the author of A Church of Passion and Hope: The Formation of an Ecclesial Disposition from Ignatius Loyola to Pope Francis and the New Evangelization.
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• An Excerpt from ‘Pope Francis and Mercy’ by Gill K. Goulding, CJ