By Robert Royal.

Yes, even the title of the popular song said it three times. But that's virtually nothing compared to the repetitions of the word, over and over, during and after the papal funeral in Rome these days, by commentators, lay and clerical alike, as if it were a recent and novel discovery by Pope Francis. And as if the day after the funeral (Divine Mercy Sunday) had not been instituted by St. John Paul II in 2000, a full quarter century previously. Or his encyclical Dives in Misericordia ("Rich in Mercy") had not been issued in 1980, two decades before that.

Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re used the term multiple times in his homily for the Requiem Mass

The Cardinal also preemptively canonized the just departed pope by asking him to pray for us: "May you bless the Church, bless Rome, and bless the whole world from heaven." Not even a brief stop in Purgatory.

Of course, discussions are already underway as to what the next pope will need to be and do. Cardinal Pietro Parolin, for instance, the Vatican Secretary of State under Pope Francis - to some observers a strong contender to succeed Francis - is saying, very publicly, that the Church needs to continue Francis' legacy of "mercy." (I myself believe that Cardinal Parolin will have a steep climb to the papacy, though he's trying very hard, after his disastrous, still "secret" accord with Communist China, which has been anything but a mercy to Chinese Catholics.)

Mercy is, of course, a central theme in both the Old and New Testaments, and should remain so, along with truth, justice, and fidelity. Because an overemphasis on a naked mercy, of a somewhat superficial sort, without those other and quite crucial elements of the Faith, accounts for many of the divisions in the Church of recent years:

Communion for the divorced and remarried,

the "blessing" of gay couples,

the overturning of the teaching on the death penalty,

an essentially unrealistic plea to welcome even greater illegal immigration

a shocking lack of urgency about missionary work (and fear of "proselytizing")

a false universalism and indifferentism that views all religions as "valid paths" to God.

Yes, amidst all the talk of mercy, there have also been some words about following Jesus. But when you ignore the Lord's own teachings, sometimes even changing the words he's recorded to have said, and the doctrines of His Church developed over centuries by men and women of great learning and holiness, it's difficult to see what mercy is, other than a kindliness understood in current worldly, not Christian, terms.

The Church in the coming years needs to speak of a more robust mercy that understands, forgives, and expects weakness and sin, but isn't sentimentally indulgent. The Church was founded by a Savior who had to suffer and die a horrible death to redeem us from all that. Because the stakes, not only in this life but in the next are crucially, cosmically, eternally high.

As Monsignor Charles Pope makes clear in his stunning new book The Hell There Is: An Exploration of an Often-Rejected Doctrine of the Church, Jesus spoke often of Hell and even warned us that few find the way that leads to eternal life. The good monsignor recounts, however, what is probably not all that rare a response to that teaching these days:

Some years ago, I was preaching on heaven and hell since the Gospel for that Sunday was of the wide and narrow roads just mentioned. Afterward, a woman approached me, angry that I had mentioned hell at all, and said, "Father, I didn't hear the Jesus I know in your words today." I replied, "But Ma'am, I was quoting Him directly." She didn't miss a beat and simply replied, "Well, we know He never really said that."

If we're looking for a program for the next papacy, we could do worse than reaffirming that, in His love for us, God gave us freedom to choose between Good and Evil. (Without that freedom, our love for Him would be impossible since we'd simply be beings determined by our environment.) The...