On page 46 inside [the printed edition] you'll read one of the most remarkable stories we've ever published. It consists almost entirely of a conversation between two women: the mother of Jason Lang, the 17-year-old student who was murdered last April in Taber, Alta., and the mother of the 14-year-old young offender who shot him.

Most of us will have a hard time imagining what either of these parents has been put through. The mind rebels at the attempt: one child randomly slain on the threshold of adulthood, the other burdened for life with the guilt of Cain. Two families ravaged by one unexplained outburst of homicidal rage, and a whole town left stunned in the aftermath. Every honest parent knows either of those boys could have been ours. What would we do? What would we say? How would we feel? We try, briefly, to imagine, but find we can't. Moreover, the effort itself seems not only fruitless but downright dangerous. For our choice would be starkly simple: to forgive the perpetrator or succumb to a poisonous thirst for vindication and revenge. Neither seems very attractive.

But we know from media coverage which course most victimized families appear to take. Usually they leave court in rage or in tears protesting that the scales of justice have not been balanced, that the offence still far outweighs the penalty. And there's always some annoying liberal nearby chirping, "But punishment won't bring the victim back." Which is doubly galling, because it's fatuously true and totally off the point. What he's really saying is that there are no scales and there is no justice; the past does not exist, memories of love and fealty count for nothing, there's no such thing as tragedy, only a kind of mindless faith in professional counselling. At moments like this the thirst for vengeance seems altogether reasonable.

Sane people know the scales of justice really do exist and demand balance. Justice is one of the four great "cardinal" virtues recognized by virtually every tribe and nation that has ever existed. Even the smallest, most innocent children feel properly satisfied when the story-book villain get his "just desserts," up to and including death. The young bring a calmness and clarity of conscience to it that can be frightening.

Then along come Dale and Diane Lang, forgiving everyone for everything. God lost a Son to a cruel and unjust death too, says Mrs. Lang, and He forgave everyone involved—which meant forgiving the whole rebellious human race, because we have all offended Him. In forgiving their son's murderer, the Langs in their meekness have decided to become public examples of the ancient prayer Christians still pray daily and weekly, "Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on us. Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, grant us peace." Though their lives are ruptured and their hearts broken, they are strangely at peace—the peace of God which the apostle tells us is "beyond all understanding."

So how do we reconcile these two contradictory commands: to balance the scales of justice and at the same time forgive others as God has forgiven us?

It's actually not hard, and for the question to have arisen at all shows how muddled we have got. The virtue of justice, in matters of criminal and civil law, falls upon the state to administer. The sterner duty of forgiveness falls to the individual. The state, being a system rather than a human being, has no universal duty to forgive anything and should be careful if it feels inclined to try; its main task is to even legal scores as far as the clumsy instruments of law allow. Likewise, the injured person in a crime had better be careful about trying to exact his own private justice. His foremost duty, to God and the state, is to minimize his loss as best he can and leave justice to the courts.

In short, the virtues of justice and mercy operate at two distinct moral levels. Justice is impersonal and "natural"—all men have a sense of it, even if they don't define it exactly the same way and regardless of whether they obey it. Mercy is different. It flows from the "divine" virtue of charity, which some people don't recognize at all and none of us understands perfectly. I know many good men and women who will regard the discussion between the two mothers on page 46 as cloying liberal poppycock—a mere coping mechanism for the psychologically shattered.

I think they would be mistaken. As St. Francis said in his great prayer, and Jesus said before him, it's in forgiving that we are forgiven and in dying to ourselves that we are born. We should give thanks for people like the Langs, for they point the way to paradise. But we should not confuse what they are telling us about that world to come with what the secular law does in this one. We should not confuse God and government. If we want the best of both worlds—and we should—we must remember the two are not the same. BCR

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