Offering a precious stone: the communication of Pope Francis’s Jubilee of Mercy

The Jubilee of Mercy (8 December 2015–21 November 2016) was a bold attempt by Pope Francis to place God’s mercy at the heart of the Catholic Church’s offer to contemporary society. Discerning that the Catholic message is too often seen as Pharisaism – defending the law while not caring for the sufferer – he set out to demonstrate that mercy is what defines God, and that the Church exists, essentially, to bring humanity into an encounter with that mercy. This reset, which is key to the ‘pastoral conversion’ the Latin-American bishops called for in their May 2007 meeting in Aparecida, Brazil, is possibly the most ambitious attempt to reframe the Catholic offer since the Second Vatican Council, and is in many ways a return to that Council’s key messages, while building on the growing awareness of mercy in the pontificates since then. This paper narrates the background to the Jubilee and suggests reasons for Francis’s diagnosis. It looks at the way Francis sought to frame the Jubilee in the year running up to it, and the instruments he deployed in the course of the year to help effect that reframe, in words and concrete actions