Forgiveness: The Way to Peace

By Russell Shaw
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 9/23/04)

One of the conversation starters around our house is a set of brightly colored coasters bearing the smiling face of Nelson Mandela. They're a memento of the time our youngest daughter spent in South Africa several years ago, teaching as a volunteer in a mission school in the country's northern hinterland.

Colored coasters may not be the loftiest imaginable tribute to a statesman or even an appropriate one, but I'm glad to have these. If any government figure of our day deserves all the recognition he gets, it's Nelson Mandela, South Africa's former president — and "Uncle" Nelson to his adoring people.

When my daughter was in South Africa, I spent some time there traveling and talking to people. My overwhelming impression of this big, strikingly beautiful country was of enormous human and natural resources alongside enormous problems, including gross poverty and widespread AIDS.

I also learned something else: that the nation's greatest human resource was Mandela, who was president when I was there. He'd spent long years in jail under the apartheid regime (his prison, far out in Cape Town's gorgeous bay, was and is a popular tourist site). After being released, instead of preaching vengeance as many others would have done, he preached reconciliation instead. If his country ever realizes its potential as a richly endowed multiracial society, that will largely be his legacy.

I was reminded of these things while reading two books. One is the well-known Clash of Civilizations by Harvard's Samuel Huntington, a volume possibly more persuasive now than when it appeared in 1996. The other is a slim book called Forgiveness in International Politics, published earlier this year by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. It's the work of journalist William Bole, Father Drew Christiansen, S.J., a specialist in international affairs, and Robert T. Hennemeyer, a former U.S. ambassador. (To order copies call 1-800-235-8722.)

Huntington's thesis is familiar: The world may be in for serious trouble as fundamentally opposed civilizations compete and clash. Something like that arguably is happening now in the Middle East, where the American dream of selling liberal democracy to countries that are part of an increasingly hostile Islamic civilization looks highly chancy at best.

"In the emerging era," Huntington writes, "clashing civilizations are the greatest threat to world peace, and an international order based on civilizations is the surest safeguard against world war."

By contrast, the thesis of Forgiveness in International Politics is hardly known at all, much less accepted. It is that, with the right actors doing the right things, forgiveness and reconciliation are a viable formula for conflict resolution without violence.

It's no mystery why South Africa is the chief real-life example in the Bole-Christiansen-Hennemeyer book. There aren't that many others. Northern Ireland, perhaps, which has been creeping toward Protestant-Catholic peace for years but isn't there yet. A handful of other places — possibly. Pickings otherwise are slim.

Why did the formula work in South Africa? Exceptional leaders had everything to do with it: Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, certain white politicians who, whatever their faults, recognized that apartheid's day had passed. These people had the moral imagination to make reconciliation work.

This approach won't work everywhere. Try forgiving a terrorist, and see what it gets you. But given favorable conditions and people willing to try, forgiveness and reconciliation do stand a chance. In a blurb for the book, Mary Ann Glendon, Harvard law professor and president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, hopes many will have "the courage to set out upon that path." Amen to that.

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