Most of the world, most of the time, is hungry for justice. And most of the world, most of the time, goes after it with a gun. That's how the world works. And that's how individual people work — usually not with a gun, but with an angry heart. If people hurt us, we want to hurt them back just as hard, or maybe a little harder, to teach them a lesson. To even the score.

Reconciliation is hard. When we're hurt and angry, reconciliation feels wrong. And yet God said to the Prophet Isaiah, "My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts (higher) than your thoughts" (Is 55:8-9).

We call God "holy" because He's different from us. That's what the word "holy" means. It means different from. God's ways are different from our ways. They're higher and better than our ways, and when God calls you and me to holiness, He calls us to be more like Him and less like the sins and instincts of this world. The God who is all-just and all-powerful bases His relationship with us sinners on forgiveness and mercy. And that's embodied in His son, Jesus Christ. Jesus is God's forgiveness and mercy made flesh.

Jesus came to reconcile us to His Father and to each other. If we call ourselves His disciples, we share in that work. The paradox of God's plan for the world is that we can really only achieve justice through the practice of mercy. We need to forgive and seek forgiveness, because mercy changes both the giver and the receiver. It creates new possibilities and brings new life, which is why Scripture so often likens mercy to water in a desert. It encourages conversion and love, which breed acts of justice, which then builds peace. So if we want justice for ourselves and others, we need to forgive. If we put mercy first, justice always follows.

Of course, that's easy to say and hard to do — even in the Church. Or maybe especially in the Church. Catholics around the country have had to face some terrible and ugly facts about some of the men who served them as priests and bishops. And that's where all the piety in the world about "reconciliation" begins to sound hollow. How can we forgive people in positions of trust who betrayed that trust? Why should we want to be reconciled to priests who abused children, or bishops who seemed indifferent to the suffering of their own people?

The answer is that sin always requires punishment, and the clergy don't get a free pass when it comes to the demands of justice — civil or divine. It's right to be upset about sexual misconduct in the Church, and it's vital to do everything we can to prevent it in the future. But unless we also make ourselves forgive, unless we also temper our hearts with mercy, we infect ourselves with vengeance — and there's a reason Scripture says, "Vengeance is mine, says the Lord." Vengeance is a cancer. It masquerades as justice, and it poisons not just individual hearts but families, communities and entire cultures. And it also perpetuates itself.

This is why Pope John Paul II said after the terrible events of Sept. 11, "There is no peace without forgiveness." Forgiveness renounces revenge and responds with love even when we know the other person really wanted to do us evil.

This is what the Holy Father meant when he wrote that "human justice is always fragile and imperfect, subject as it is to the limitations and egoism of individuals and groups," and therefore it must be completed by the "forgiveness which heals and rebuilds troubled human relations from their foundations."

This is what John Paul meant when he said:

"Forgiveness is not a proposal that can be immediately understood or easily accepted; in many ways it is a paradoxical message. Forgiveness in fact always involves an apparent short-term loss for a real long-term gain. . . . (It) may seem like weakness, but it demands great spiritual strength and moral courage, both in granting it and in accepting it. (Forgiveness) may seem in some way to diminish us, but in fact it leads us to a fuller and richer humanity, more radiant with the splendor of the Creator."

Whether we like it or not, if Jesus forgave His betrayers and murderers, and if we call ourselves His disciples, then how can we not forgive?

One of the lessons in this terrible misconduct tragedy is that no renewal of the Church is ever possible without it beginning first in your heart and in mine. It begins in personal repentance, personal conversion and personal renewal that lead each of us to become an agent of conversion for others.

If our sins divide us and cripple us and silence us, the devil wins. God is inviting each of us today to be reconciled to Him and to each other — and in being reconciled, to become the leaven of His reconciliation and peace to the world.