'Tis the Season for Retribution
Unity in Christ; Justice on Earth
From every corner of the nation (save for two) arises the chant: “Unity now! Unity now!”
The chant—the sentiment—comes in response to Donald J. Trump’s historical (and I mean that in its most dramatic sense) victory on November 5. No man in modern history has come back from so low a point as Trump found himself on 21 January 2021. And not a single political figure in history has ascended such a sheer cliff against powerful opposition throwing rocks.
Countless fraudulent indictments, raids on his residence, assassination attempts, vilification, abandonment by his own party. The 9-year assault against Donald Trump has been something few humans, living or dead, could have withstood without losing their minds. Trump not only maintained his faculties, he committed himself to helping the very human detritus that assaults him.
I do not think of retribution as necessarily or properly vengeful. I think of it merely as a hostile response to wrongdoing.
—Nigel Biggar
And part of Trump’s mission is to deliver retributive justice upon those who destroyed the institutions and fabric of American society in their bloodlust to “get Trump.” It is that promise—to be our retribution—that ultimately motivates his enemies—the just targets of retribution— to cry out for unity.
I have seen numerous misguided Christians join their calls for unity, rejecting the notion of retributive justice. I say, “misguided,” because Christian doctrine demands punishment for wrongdoers. A century of nonsense from self-proclaimed theologians, ethicists, and moralists has diluted Western understanding of justice, replacing justice almost uniformly with a misguided sense of “mercy.” So let’s review that moral history, reject modernist revisions, and pursue justice, no matter how unpleasant that might be.
Fr. James Schall, SJ, writing for That Catholic Thing, tells us:
In his In Defence of War, Nigel Biggar wrote: “As I believe in the gross and intractable wickedness, so I believe that punishment is necessary and that it has a basic, broadly retributive dimension. . . .I do not think of retribution as necessarily or properly vengeful. I think of it merely as a hostile response to wrongdoing, which might be and should be proportionate.
We might add here that vengeance is not retribution. Vengeance is the desire to repay injury with equal or greater injury. While retribution may be injurious to the wrongdoer, injury is not the objective of retribution: restoration is. Retributive justice restores, to the best of our ability, the status quo ante. Retribution also expresses the community’s standards and clearly demonstrates the consequences for violating those standards. Third, retribution satisfies the wrongdoer’s need to atone for his sins.
Father Schall uses Plato’s Gorgias to illustrate this last point:
Callicles, in the Gorgias, was dumbfounded when he heard Socrates suggesting that the one who commits a crime or sin should not only repent, but he also should willingly suffer punishment. The man who puts evil things in the world can best let the world know that he has changed, that he accepts proper order, by himself undergoing a suitable punishment. This penance is not just vengeance. It is what is due. It restores the order of things in the best way open to us.
Chesterton observed that sin is not the absence of virtue but, rather, a single virtue operating in isolation. Thus, mercy, untempered by justice, becomes a sin itself. Fr. Schall agrees:
We live in a world transfixed with a type of mercy/compassion that seeks to bypass justice. But the one who is treated mercifully, who is forgiven, does not escape the consequences of his disordered act. Forgiveness is something given by the one we have injured.
Mercy cannot be seen as a step in mitigating the consequences of evil acts. The one who is shown mercy must restore what he caused to be disordered. This acknowledgment of one’s sins is not yet punishment. Paying a fine, spending time in jail, being restricted in travel or work, these are punishments inflicted precisely as due retribution.
When we combine Plato, Chesterton, and Schall, we might conclude that theological mercy demands retribution, for only retribution can partially satisfy victims, reinforce the community’s standards, and provide the penitent wrongdoer a means of proving his remorse, thus allowing his return to the community. To withhold punishment denies all three—victim, community, and sinner—of something owed them, something without which all are left wanting.
The only thing I ever shoplifted was a cork ball from the old Venture store on South Kingshighway in St. Louis. I was nine or ten, the summer between 4th and 5th grades. I was with my sister who was busy looking at clothes or some girly nonsense, leaving me alone in the sporting goods. I had just begun playing “fuzz ball,” a variation of cork ball that used worn tennis balls. I put the ball in my pocket, found my sister, and played nonchalant the rest of the trip.
I never got caught. No one asked me where I got a pristine cork ball, and the ball remained pristine until I threw it away several years later. I never used it. I never tried to use it. I never desired to use it. It weighed on me until, when school began in August with confessions and Mass, I confessed to Father Bernell. My penance was a decade of the Rosary, but my punishment was to give at least the price of the ball to the missions from my own allowance. The ball was $2.50, which was half of my weekly allowance for cutting the grass and taking out the trash.
Like any miscreant 5th grader, I stalled. I didn’t put the $2.50 in the missions the first chance I got. Nor the second. I don’t remember exactly when I served my sentence, but I eventually did sometime before Christmas. And my memory of that cork ball ends with slipping three dollar bills into the little lunch bag that Sister Catherine Marie placed on her desk each Monday. (I didn’t ask for change only because I was afraid to draw attention to my “generous” gift to the orphans which might require an explanation of my sharp break in character.)
I forgot about the ball after that because, finally, I was somewhat whole. The confession did not cure me; only the punishment could.
Pop psychology tells us criminals want their crimes to be known out of vainglory. Perhaps. If criminals do want their crimes known—and to receive due credit for them—the motivation could be a desire for punishment. If the conscience serves any purpose, this is surely it.
The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.
—G.K. Chesterton
Back to Trump.
Beginning with the Russia hoax, a cabal of government and media have conspired to “get Trump” and to demoralize his base of support. In the process, they broke every bond of trust our society placed in police forces, law, the military, science, medicine, and journalism. The Departments of Justice, Defense, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, and more conspired to use, not the law itself, but the power lent to government in order to destroy the duly elected President of the United State, in office and out. Elected officials and bureaucrats committed the ultimate breaches of trust, shredding the Constitutional limitations of powers, and destroying public faith in the most important institutions our society built through centuries. Their crimes were epic.
Epic crimes demand epic retribution. Thousands of individuals knowingly and willing participated in these crimes. Thousands more looked the other way, begrudgingly followed unlawful orders, or simply pretended to approve, fearful of the consequences of speaking the truth. Each of these wrongdoers deserves the sense of release and wholeness I felt by dropping three dollars into a paper bag.
Further, our entire society deserves to have its standards reaffirmed—standards have been developed since Abraham.
Finally, the victims deserve to know our country recognizes their loss by making some attempt to right the wrong. As the survivors of murder say, punishing the murderer can’t bring their loved one back, but it can bring dramatic closure to their suffering and pave the way for a more satisfying denouement.
Thus, we have entered the season for retribution, which, if properly executed, will pave the way to making America great again with a clear national conscience and better understanding of right and wrong.
P.S. Those two groups who are not clamoring for “unity?” First, the direct victims of the crimes: Trump, his family, his associates who were jailed, indicted, disbarred, fired, banned, and sued, plus the larger base of support that was cancelled, calumniated, ostracized, and ridiculed as racists, fascists, and trash. Second, the main criminals who committed those crimes, the ones vowing still to “get Trump” and destroy MAGA. In other words, the two groups who want and need retribution the most.