Forgiveness has been addressed. The contemporaneous record has been set out. The remaining question is why accountability still matters in a free society committed to truth, justice, and the common good.
The answer is not found in the desire for private vengeance. It is found in the forward-looking purpose of justice itself. Accountability is the practical condition for reducing the likelihood and severity of the next iteration of the same methods. A society that refuses to name and restrain large-scale institutional failure teaches the next cohort of officials that the costs of overreach can be socialized while the benefits of prestige, funding, and power remain private. Justice exists to restore moral order, protect future victims, preserve truthful public memory, deter repetition, and renew the habits of reason.
Authority Exists for the Common Good
Catholic social teaching begins with a simple claim: political authority is not self-justifying. It exists to serve the common good. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that authority is necessary because human society requires coordination toward the good of all, yet its moral legitimacy depends upon conformity to the moral order and service to persons rather than to itself.¹ Gaudium et Spes reinforces the same principle: the political community exists for the common good, and its exercise of power must remain within the moral order, directed toward the welfare of the whole rather than the interests of a governing faction.²
The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church gathers these teachings into a coherent vision of authority as moral power subject to law, transparency, and the duty to serve rather than dominate.³ Officials hold power in trust. When that trust is used in ways that inflict widespread and foreseeable harm, the common good itself requires truthful acknowledgment, proportionate consequences, and institutional correction. Subsidiarity further limits higher authority: it must not absorb functions that persons, families, physicians, churches, and local communities can perform.⁴ Centralization that displaces legitimate competence is not neutral administration; it is a distortion of the proper order of society.
These principles are not abstract. They establish that public power is fiduciary. It increases accountability precisely because it is held for others rather than possessed as private property.
Justice Is Prospective
Justice is not primarily retrospective satisfaction. Catholic teaching on legitimate punishment identifies several purposes: redressing the disorder introduced by the offense, defending public order, protecting the safety of persons, and contributing to the correction of the guilty.⁵ These purposes are forward-looking. They aim to restore conditions in which persons can live and reason freely.
Classical and modern political philosophy converge on the same insight. Aristotle insisted that we do not allow a man to rule, but rational principle, and that the magistrate is a guardian of justice rather than the owner of public power.⁶ Aquinas defined law as an ordinance of reason for the common good, promulgated by one who has care of the community; a rule serving private interest rather than the common good is a perversion of law.⁷ Locke treated political power as held in trust for specified public purposes. When rulers use entrusted power contrary to that trust, they place themselves in conflict with the political community.⁸ Madison’s realism remains enduring: ambition must be made to counteract ambition, because the constitutional structure cannot rely solely upon the virtue or goodwill of officials.⁹
The common thread is the recognition that human beings are fallen. Power requires limits because goodwill is insufficient. Checks, transparency, divided authority, and consequences for misconduct exist to protect the community from the predictable results of concentrated and unaccountable power. Justice is therefore not primarily about settling accounts with the past. It is about shaping the future. A society that remembers truthfully, judges justly, and reforms prudently becomes more resistant to the next abuse of power.
The Cost of Impunity
The COVID period did not create these principles; it revealed why they matter. Emergency powers, restrictions on worship, conflicts over medical judgment, censorship of dissent, and the normalization of extraordinary executive authority all raised enduring questions about the relationship between public power and the common good. Whether one agrees with every conclusion reached in the previous essay is not the decisive point. The larger lesson is that crises expose the strengths and weaknesses of a society’s moral and constitutional architecture.
Unpunished institutional failure does not remain static. It teaches. It shapes incentives. It preserves the personnel, funding streams, and administrative structures through which the same methods can be repeated more efficiently. Compassion that refuses to name or restrain the guilty becomes active harm to the next set of victims. As Adam Smith observed in a different context, mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.¹⁰ The observation aligns with the Catholic insistence that legitimate authority must protect public order and the safety of persons.
The deeper subject remains the formation of the Christian mind. Justice is one means by which a free society preserves the conditions in which faith and reason can continue to flourish. When evidence is subordinated to institutional loyalty, the habits required by fides et ratio—preference for primary sources, comparison of claims against available data, distinction between authority and evidence—become acts of resistance rather than ordinary intellectual procedure. Accountability serves the recovery of those habits by reaffirming that public authority remains answerable to truth rather than exempt from it. Recovering the habit of independent judgment is ultimately more important than any single prosecution, though lawful prosecution and institutional correction remain indispensable instruments of that recovery.
Conclusion
Personal forgiveness of those involved remains obligatory. Public amnesia is not. The Christian is required to forgive the person. The citizen is still required to insist that justice be done so that the next generation is not asked to pay the same price.
Forgiveness releases the soul from the bondage of resentment. Memory preserves the truth so that history is not rewritten by those who benefited from the falsehood. Justice protects the community and discourages repetition. Prudence determines the lawful and proportionate means. None of these can safely replace the others.
The trilogy ends where it began: with the dual obligation that neither cancels the other. The soul must forgive. The community must still pursue justice. That is how a free society committed to truth, the common good, and the proper relation of faith and reason remains free.
Notes
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), nos. 1897-1904, 2238-43.
- Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes [Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World], 7 December 1965, nos. 73-76.
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), nos. 393-420.
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 1883-85; Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, 15 May 1931, nos. 79-80.
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2266; Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2005), no. 468.
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 5, chap. 6; Politics, bk. 3, chaps. 6-12.
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 90, a. 4; I-II, q. 96, a. 4.
- John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, secs. 149, 171, 222-26, in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
- James Madison, The Federalist, no. 51, 6 February 1788.
- Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 2nd ed. (London: A. Millar, 1761), pt. 2, sec. 2, chap. 3.