Exhorting to forgive

Abstract

In his homily at the Mass celebrated on the third anniversary of the brutal assassination of the journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, Archbishop Charles J. Scicluna quoted at length from what Pope Francis wrote in his encyclical Fratelli tutti on forgiveness. As I followed his homily, I was wondering whether His Grace was quoting the Pope, because it was hard to find the right way of preaching on forgiveness in front of the members of a family whose memory of what they had suffered must have been still weighing heavily and painfully on their mind and heart. It was not only the memory of a wife and a mother, a daughter and a sister who was burnt alive and her body blown up and torn to pieces by a bomb under her car seat. It was also the memory of a person who was massacred, because she was exposing massive wrongdoing by people in business conspiring with people in politics. Anger and resentment are understandable in those circumstances.