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Hate, an intense hostility and aversion usually
deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury is
a feeling we cannot know unless we personally
experience the event or know people involved in
it. In new-age psycho-babble it is easy to say
to those afflicted by hatred to forgive those
who have caused their sense of personal injury.
But how do you forgive those who are not
remorseful of, but instead celebrating, their
actions? How do you comfort those who have lost
loved ones in these attacks? How can we ask them
to forgive the acts of evil when in the back of
their minds they hear the pleadings of innocent
children being stabbed, or the screams of those
who chose to jump from the top floors of one of
the Towers of the World Trade Center in New York
instead of being burned alive?
While dying on the Cross
Jesus pleaded "Father, forgive them, for they do
not know what they are doing"
(Lk 23:34).
I believe this neither
give us permission nor a command to forgive
those who knowingly committed these acts of
evil.
I
can understand their hatred, but I do pray that
they find peace within themselves by the mere
fact that they have survived in God’s presence.
And for the rest of us believers we must pray
for resolve to recognize the fact that there is
absolute evil. And to pray for those who are
wavering God’s wisdom and recognition that once
they embrace evil, hatred is not enough. They
and their cause will become subverted by and
becomes one of evil and malevolence becoming in
and of itself, evil. Once hatred is not enough,
they begin to destroy themselves, and more
importantly, their cause.
Speaking for myself I do not find brotherhood or
sisterhood among those who murder just because
we believe in a different God, or look
different. But I suspect, or at least I pray, I
speak for all of us brothers and sisters who
believe in one God, one Church and one Catholic
Tradition.
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