The King's oath and the sweet medicine of mercy

National Post, 30 April 2023

Mercy is above the sceptre of power. Mercy is more glorious than the crown. May it season the reign of the King, and all who govern in his name

Buckingham Palace has not yet released the precise order of service for the coronation of King Charles, but has generally advised that he has updated the ceremony to be forward-looking. That sounds uncomfortably close to the foolishness of couples writing their own wedding vows.

Such vows usually become mutual professions of the wonderfulness of the other, and often do not actually promise anything. There is plenty about the “for better,” and not much about the “for worse.”

King Charles is no fool, and no sensible sovereign wishes to treat the monarchy as something wholly malleable; the service it offers is precisely as a witness to those things that endure. So the coronation vows themselves are expected to hold constant from the late Queen’s coronation in 1953.

One does not hold to the past uncritically. The coronation oaths used to include deprecations of the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist. The explicitly anti-Catholic elements were dropped well before Elizabeth II, which was a wise decision.

Elizabeth did vow to “preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline and government thereof,” and Charles will do the same, according to the “law established in England.”

The coronation oaths make clear that he who is crowned is not an absolute monarch, but a constitutional one. The promise “to govern” is explicitly “according to (the) respective laws and customs” of the King’s various realms. The principle of Crown-in-Parliament at the heart of Canadian Constitution is made clear.

The shortest of the oaths that the Archbishop of Canterbury will put to the King is the most profound, both politically and theologically. He will ask: “Will you to your power cause law and justice, in mercy, to be executed in all your judgments?”

The state makes laws, and must do so in accord with justice. After all, the ancient warning of Augustine remains perennially relevant: “Without justice, what is the state but a great band of robbers?”

The coronation oath adds “in mercy.” That is part of the Judeo-Christian tradition to be sure, for the many gods of the ancient world were not merciful. They were strong, sometimes capricious, and to show mercy was to be weak.

The children of Israel, contrariwise, cried out to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob for mercy, and divine mercy was poured forth. As the future Pope Benedict XVI said in his funeral homily for St. John Paul II, the death and resurrection of Christ is a “mystery of mercy.” Pope Francis said it more simply: “The name of God is mercy.”

We all beg for mercy before the judgment of God, but mercy is also essential in the administration of nations. We live a rather merciless time, where our public discourse tends toward denunciation and discord. The kind word, let alone the merciful act, is too often absent in our common life.

Thus the King promises to do the work of civil rule “in mercy.” Justice is necessary, but not sufficient by itself for the common good. We need not only the good order of justice, but the sweet medicine of mercy. The coronation oath will resound in families, in communities, in nations and between nations, and in churches where mercy is so sorely lacking.

Without mercy, the world may be just, but cold. And without mercy, we often fail at justice, too.

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