Has anything (that matters, in the end) changed?

Given (as it must be) that the coercive power of law will be used, even as I write (and in future), to punish men, women, and perhaps even children because they have been convicted of crimes, I wonder how those who will read and popularize Pope Francis's "Bull of Indiction of the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy" (here) will alter their own conduct and its authoritative effect.  I don't conflate or confuse divine law with human law.  The perpetrators of crimes matter, but so do the victims.  How should the higher law of "mercy" inform reasonable judgments concerning the operation of human law?  Should anyone think that God's mercy has recently been enlarged by the actions and/or words of a Pope?  I doubt it.  But, if I am incorrect, on what basis?  Is the divine law still authoritative?  Of course it is.  Nothing has changed, except the changeable.  The changeable is how the Church should minister to the modern world, but of course the Church's task has always been to serve the world she is given to save.  It's possible that the "Jubilee of Mercy" will turn out, sub specie etc., to have been the better or even best way to assist souls to get to Heaven.  Charity, however, requires that we never allow easy rhetoric in favor of "mercy" to occlude what makes it exigent in the first place, the divine judgment.  I simply don't understand the rhetorician who today claims that the Church "closes the door to mercy."  Two cheers for mercy, but mercy does, by all credible accounts, correct or complement what it presupposes.