Justice Alito speaks at the Vatican about justice and mercy

Vatican City, Sep 21, 2025 / 14:24 pm

United States Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. spoke about the role that mercy can play in the legal system during an event at the Vatican on Saturday.

The Sept. 20 discussion at the Vatican’s judicial headquarters was organized by the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See, the U.S. bishops’ conference, and the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization. The event was part of the Jubilee of Justice, part of the Church’s yearlong Jubilee of Hope.

Earlier in the day, Alito, a Catholic, greeted Pope Leo XIV following an audience for the Jubilee of Workers of Justice in St. Peter’s Square.

During a one-hour afternoon conversation with Monsignor Laurence Spiteri, an American priest and retired judge on the Vatican’s appeals court for marriage cases, Alito shared his perspective on how a legal system can provide for mercy.

“Justice is what everyone has a right to, it is what they are due … Mercy is something that we don’t necessarily merit,” Alito said. “The complete reconciliation of those two things, I think, is a mystery that we can only dimly, perhaps, perceive in this world.”

The 75-year-old Alito, who has served on the Supreme Court since 2006, said: “Mercy should be built into the laws … the authority to make the laws rests with Congress and Congress should build in mercy when it enacts laws.”

“The responsibility of the executive [branch], headed by the president, is to enforce the law,” he continued. “But the enforcement of the law often involves a measure of discretion and someone who has discretion to enforce the law should enforce the law with mercy. Judges have to follow the law. Sometimes the law is framed in a way that allows the judge to exercise mercy,” for example, in criminal sentencing.

“A legal system, of course, is supposed to promote justice, and in human terms, completely reconciling mercy with justice is probably impossible. I think probably only God can do that,” he said.

The audience at Alito’s talk included Vatican officials, including Cardinal Raymond Burke, former prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, and Bishop Juan Ignacio Arrieta, secretary of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Legislative Texts.

Catholic lawyers on pilgrimage to Rome for the Jubilee of Justice were also in attendance for the discussion, held in a chamber of the Cancelleria, a 16th-century building in the center of Rome that is home to the Holy See’s three tribunals: the Apostolic Penitentiary, the Apostolic Signatura, and the Roman Rota.