JUSTICE AND FORGIVENESS

Deeply embedded in the human psyche is the longing for justice. When wronged, human beings yearn for justice, even after the passage of many years.

There are many examples of this longing, and the following are two examples from the press out of many that could be picked. On 21 June 2005, an eighty-year-old former member of the Ku Klux Klan was convicted of the manslaughter of three civil rights workers in 1964. In reported comments after the conviction, some said that they had been ‘hoping’ for forty years that the arrest and conviction would take place; and others said that the conviction signified that the United States was ‘ready to move on to the future’. A month later and in another report, ten former Nazi officers from the 16th Panzer Grandier Division of the Waffen SS were given life sentences of imprisonment by an Italian court for killing 560 people in Saint'Anna di Stazzema, a Tuscan village, in 1944. The massacre was one of Italy's worst civilian wartime massacres. One survivor said that the trial had served to establish ‘justice and truth’ and that the survivors had ‘waited sixty years for this’.

What makes forgiveness difficult to practise comes from the fact that forgiveness is both a moral and a relational issue. It is also one that concerns justice. With forgiveness, it is necessary, on the one hand, to hold to the fact that wrongdoing is wrongdoing for which the wrongdoer is morally culpable and accountable.