This article is not about mercy, but about ‘mercy', the English word. This word is the stock translation in religious texts of the Latin word misericordia. My contention is going to be that the quality of ‘mercy’ is far too strained to stand for misericordia; that not only is it an inadequate word to translate the Latin word, it is – more seriously – an insufficient word to convey the full Christian, religious thing. And as this thing, as this value is practically at the heart of the Christian gospel, the good news of God to man, the use of an insufficient and hence misleading word to represent it can have very unfortunate consequences indeed. But with these I am not here concerned. My interest is in finding the best English word or words for translating misericordia in liturgical texts. And my way of doing this is going to be by putting ‘mercy’ on trial.

Misericordia, it scarcely needs saying, appears so often in liturgical texts because it appears so often in the Bible. Two other Latin words appear frequently in its company, the related noun miseratio, usually in the plural miserationes, and the related verb misereor. The first weakness of the English ‘mercy’ is shown by the fact that it does duty, either by itself or in a phrase like ‘have mercy', for all three of these Latin words.