The politics of forgiveness.

Asking one person for forgiveness is difficult enough, so how can a nation begin the process of making right the years of injustice it's done to its own people?

It has often struck me as particularly ironic that Catholic morality, which was largely forged in and around the confessional box, never developed any real ethic of forgiveness. Indeed, the traditional manuals of moral theology offered priests and penitents extensive and detailed directives about nearly every other sort of ethical concern: when we could or could not take someone else's property, keep a secret, speak a falsehood, make war, love, or babies, or withdraw medical treatments from the dying. But these very texts, written to help us celebrate the sacrament of Reconciliation, had little or nothing to say about our duties to forgive one another.

This "sin of omission" seems even more ironic when we recall how central forgiveness was to the life and parables of Jesus, how many times his word and example challenged people to forgive their debtors, love their enemies, and pray for their persecutors, how his very mission was about the forgiveness of sins.

I have also, from time to time, marveled at the way in which the privacy of the confessional box has allowed us to forget the public, even political nature of forgiveness, and left us with a relatively tame, domesticated understanding of this fundamental Christian practice. As a result, we tend to think of forgiveness as a merely private act between two individuals, the cancellation of a bad debt, the forgetting of some private grievance. To make things worse, our popular media has further trivialized this privatized notion of forgiveness by reducing it to a teary-eyed embrace offered to a wayward child or parent at the end of a talk-show segment on "Daddies who don't show up for graduations." Forgiveness then becomes a warm hug.

Yet the forgiveness Jesus offered in the New Testament was neither tame nor private. Rather it was intensely public and political. Time after time the "unauthorized" forgiveness he granted to prostitutes, tax collectors, Samaritans, and convicts sent earthquakes rippling though the stratum of Jewish and Roman society.

It undermined established political and religious authority, breached the gap between the self-righteous and sinners, and cleared a place for all the outcasts and scapegoats exiled beyond the city or temple gates. His forgiveness was and is a critical and unsettling step in the reconciliation of whole communities, an essential element in the healing of all the personal and social divisions created by sin, and the only real hope of breaking the endless spiral of violence and vengeance in which countless generations of humans have been trapped.

As Tina Rosenberg points out in her recent book The Haunted Lands (Random House, 1995), nearly two millennia after Christ forgiveness continues to be a central moral and political problem facing people in dozens of nations around the planet.

In several fragile Latin American democracies struggling to put a heritage of authoritarian rule or civil war behind them, the civilian authorities, courts, and populace have tried to figure out a way to face and acknowledge the injustices and crimes of the past without repeating or provoking even more violence. Meanwhile, the newly liberated citizenry and governments of various Eastern European countries wrestle with the sticky problems of identifying and punishing collaborators, informers, and secret police agents without descending into the same sort of tyranny that characterized these former satellites of the Soviet bloc for half a century.

And in South Africa Nelson Mandela's government seeks to uncover and address the carnage of four decades of apartheid without either letting the guilty go scot-free or mirroring the former regime's state-sponsored murder and torture.

As each of these nations seek to recover from their own "reign of terror" -- or as places like Rwanda, Bosnia, and Cambodia attempt to come to grips with unbelievable crimes of genocide -- their citizens and governments struggle to find a way to address the sins of the past without being swallowed up in their wake. As Rosenberg argues, such countries have two sets of duties. They have an obligation to deal with the past; uncover the truth for those who lost their freedom, their lives, or their relatives; hold tyrants and torturers accountable for the crimes they committed; and make some sort of reparation for the harms inflicted. But they also have a duty to the future to create a just and peaceful society where neither the politicians nor policies of the past have any power. They must somehow negotiate a path that leads to retribution and reconciliation, and deal with the monstrous things that have been done in their midst without becoming monsters themselves.

And that is no easy thing to do. Some countries -- particularly places where the old generals and dictators have not died or faded away but merely stepped into the wings -- have tried to salve things by simply forgetting the past, dishing out forgiveness to murderers and torturers like cheap grace that requires neither accountability nor restitution. Forgive by forgetting, the motto here might be.

After a U.N. truth commission investigating atrocities committed during El Salvador's 12-year civil war found 40 senior military officers guilty of all sorts of crimes and human-rights abuses, the country's right wing National Assembly promptly stepped in and granted a blanket pardon. And when the generals and guerillas of Guatemala ended that country's 36-year civil war, they decided there was no need even for an account of the crimes committed. Instead, they issued the "Law of National Reconciliation," granting themselves complete amnesty and anonymity for killing or kidnapping over 140,000 people.

Given the frailty and corruption of some of these fledgling democracies, it may not be surprising that civilian governments and their "truth commissions" are loath to antagonize the right wing and military forces responsible for so many of these crimes. It may not even shock us when Rosenberg reports that "even when taking into account every single Latin American dictatorship-turned-democracy, the total number of security officials who served or are serving significant terms for torture or murder probably does not reach double digits." But it is a mistake to think the past can be banished by forgetting it or that a just future can be built on the backs of silenced and forgotten victims.

In this century alone, Latin America has seen three progressive waves of democracies collapse back into dictatorships, at least in part because the injustices of the past were never effectively dealt with, because the torturers and murderers were absolved without being accused or disarmed.

And it is also a mistake to call such forgetting "forgiveness." As Donald Shriver argues in An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics (Oxford University Press, 1995), while "popular use of the word forgiveness sometimes implies that to forgive is to forget," the reverse is actually true. "Forgiveness begins with a remembering, and a moral judgment of wrong, injustice, and injury." There may well come a time to let go of such memories, to put them in the past, but not before they have seen the light of day, not before victims have had a chance to learn and proclaim the truth.

The process of forgiveness does not begin with forgetting but with remembering, with naming and acknowledging the wrongs that have been done. And, as a number of feminist and liberation authors have pointed out, the process of genuine forgiveness and reconciliation often needs to include a place for accusation, lament, and the expression of real anger.

At the very least, then, any attempt to deal with the past must remember it correctly. If prudence or political necessity means that there are to be truth commissions instead of actual trials, such commissions cannot be gagged or circumvented like those in Guatemala or El Salvador. They need, like South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to be given genuine authority to provide victims and the larger public with an honest and full account of what happened, to demand some kind of accountability from the perpetrators of these crimes, and to offer some form of reparation.

On the other hand, if, as in the case of Bosnia or Rwanda, there are to be trials for those who commit war crimes, these tribunals cannot be mere farces. There must be a serious effort to identify and charge the real culprits and power brokers behind such atrocities. Rounding up a few low-level soldiers while people such as Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic go free does not resolve anything. Instead it sends a very dangerous message that we punish the weak and forgive the mighty.

Still cheap grace is not the only danger facing nations wrestling with their pasts. There is also the temptation for vengeance. Here, as Rosenberg notes, the problem is not that the new governments are too timid in their prosecution of former collaborators and police informants, but that their tactics and policies are dangerously similar to those of their predecessors.

In places like the former Czechoslovakia, Rosenberg warns that a zeal to punish former communists has all too often justified the same sort of trampling of legal and moral rights that former dissidents found so objectionable when they were on the receiving end of Soviet justice. It is a mistake to treat ex-Stasi agents like they treated others.

In a similar fashion Shriver reminds us that instead of achieving any lasting peace, the human appetite for revenge has all too often simply triggered successive waves of violence and vengeance -- the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda being only the most recent and gruesome examples of this trend.

As L. Gregory Jones argues in Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis (Eerdmans, 1995), the moral and theological problem with vengeance comes down to the fact that revenge is an act of despair. In resorting to vindictive violence "to even the score" with perpetrators, we not only copy the behavior of the original crime but assert a fundamental belief that there is no other way to address evil except to mimic it. Only violence, we say, has any real power to resolve things. Only violence can be trusted in the pinch. This is a strange thing for a Christian to believe.

And, of course, in turning to revenge we also rather conveniently ignore or deny any moral ambiguity about these crimes, any shared responsibility that we or ours might have had for the original injustice. After all, the story of Hitler's murder of 6 million European Jews isn't just a tale about villainous SS squads and collaborating Germans. It's also the story of a U.S. government that refused or turned away Jewish refugees seeking asylum from the coming Holocaust.

And while it's easy enough to get enraged about Pol Pot's genocidal reign of terror in Cambodia, we also need to remember the carnage we left in Southeast Asia. While prosecuting a war our own Secretary of Defense admits was "terribly, terribly wrong," our government dropped more bombs on North Vietnam than had been used by all the parties in World War II. It is a dangerous thing to claim too much innocence. Human history is almost always more complex than that.

In his 1980 encyclical Dives in misericordia ("Rich in mercy"), Pope John Paul II argued that forgiveness was an essential part of justice, a belief he would later embody quite starkly by visiting the prison cell of the man who had tried to kill him. Both Shriver and Jones make the same argument in their texts, noting that for persons and nations there can be no lasting justice or peace without some willingness to forgive, to refrain from vengeance.

But again, offering such forgiveness, however, does not mean overlooking, forgetting, or passively accepting moral evil or injustice. In Poland and elsewhere the pope has encouraged the victims of injustice to struggle for their legitimate rights and to resist every form of injustice and oppression. And when visiting the cell of his would-be assassin, John Paul made no request that this convict be set free.

If forgiveness is an essential part of justice, then revenge can't be. This came to mind when the juries in two very high profile cases voted for the death penalty.

I am not for an instant suggesting that the crimes Timothy McVeigh and Jesse Timmendequas (convicted of the rape and murder of 7-year-old Megan Kanka) committed are not deeply heinous, nor that the victims and families who continue to suffer as a result of these unspeakable acts are not entitled to be profoundly angry, even enraged.

And I am not suggesting that these men do not need to be punished or that we do not have a right and a need to be protected from such persons and their deeds. What I am suggesting is that this killing is not about deterrence, because there has never been any evidence that executions deter capital offenses. And it is certainly not about reform. It is about revenge, a wild kind of justice that has been stripped of mercy.

I can understand the family member who said on CNN that McVeigh was simply an animal and that we kill animals. I can understand the one who said he would like to pull the switch. Who wouldn't feel rage and unspeakable anguish in response to these crimes?

But I can also understand the man who, no longer a husband or a father because of Timothy McVeigh, admitting he had come very close to putting a gun in his own mouth -- and I am deeply grateful he did not. In times of rage, anguish, and depression we are all moved to say and do terrible things. That doesn't mean they are right or the sort of thing we would want our children and grandchildren to do.

What is harder to understand is that in a nation with more Christians and churchgoers than any other on the planet, we should continue to act as if killing murderers would somehow square things, as if executing killers would wipe out killing, as if violence were redemptive. If that were true, wouldn't God have executed Cain instead of putting a mark of protection on him? Wouldn't Joseph have done away with his murderous brothers instead of becoming the instrument of their deliverance? Wouldn't Jesus have let Peter strike down those who came to kill him instead of praying for their forgiveness with his last breath?

As Ted Peters warns in Sin: Radical Evil in Soul and Society (Eerdmans, 1994), any belief in the redemptive power of violence is decidedly unchristian.

In the Gospel of John 11:49-50, it is Caiaphas and not God who demands that Jesus be executed for the good of the nation. And, as the author of Hebrews 9:26 notes, Jesus is to be the last scapegoat, the last sacrifice. His death and resurrection is to put an end to our faith in violence for it reveals a God who wants mercy, not sacrifice.