A String Attached

By Michael Pakaluk. But first a note from Robert Royal: We're in our last three days of our mid-year fundraising campaign. So there's a simple question at this point: Do you want to help or not? It's easy - even tax-deductible. Click the button below. It's on you at this point. AND: Be sure to tune in tonight, Thursday, June 6th at 8 PM Eastern to EWTN for a new episode of the Papal Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss the latest developments in the Church in Rome and in the U.S. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel. Now for today's column... Almost nothing speaks to the heart more than an injury done against us. You were raped as a child by someone you trusted. Your husband or wife left you. Your husband or wife was secretly betraying you. Your business partner or a contractor stole money from you. Your parents divorced. That man made you pregnant and then abandoned you; he only wanted one thing anyway. You were canceled. You were passed over, unjustly. You can scroll through social media all day long, accumulate "likes" for narcissistic posts, and follow every diversion under the sun - including impeccable political "causes" - but it continues to gnaw at you: he did this to me. You may not quite have what spiritual writers call "interiority," but you know well that the world is different from how it appears. Aristotle and St. Thomas after him said that we are so designed that when we are treated unjustly, we conceive anger which of itself finds relief only through revenge against the person who wronged us - not any old revenge, but pay-back which makes it clear to that other person that he is only receiving what he did to us. Such anger easily becomes irrational, leading us to harm innocents, and inflict self-harm too. I've mentioned only personal injuries. But whole groups may have harmed us, insidiously. If your skin is black, each day you may find someone treating you with suspicion. Hard workers often gain little or lose much because of the decisions of the powerful. Try raising a large family on a single salary and not feeling resentment at. . .the politicians who made our tax code, DINKS with dogs, and those who seem to conceive of a father's love for his own family as extended selfishness. Resentment and its cousin envy are ways of taking emotional revenge, virtually. Aristotle and St. Thomas say that the anger we feel at classes of persons easily hardens into hatred. So-called "polarization" in America is classes of persons harboring reciprocal hatred. Some false teachers of Christianity say that everyone is saved already and that the only thing that keeps us from joy is not accepting that we are saved. The Catechism teaches the true doctrine. Salvation comes with a string attached: we must forgive those who have harmed us. The outpouring of God's mercy "cannot penetrate our hearts as long as we have not forgiven those who have trespassed against us" (n. 2840). Our petition that our sins be forgiven "will not be heard unless we have first met the strict requirement" of forgiving those who trespass (note the present tense) against us (n. 2838). Already, then, some homework: in prayer (maybe before the Blessed Sacrament) write down in a notebook the names of as many persons as you can think of who have injured you, and case-by-case ask for the grace to forgive them from your heart. But what is forgiveness? Our Lord by a synecdoche likened it to writing off a debt. More generally, the position of equality which we intuitively wish to have with others is disturbed by any transaction in which someone gains something from us, to our loss, without compensating us. This is a harm or injury. An unpaid debt in the market is the clearest case. By the instinct that is called "retributive justice," we want to be restored to equ...