Word: pardoners
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Many religious thinkers believe that the pardon has done serious harm. They argue that, because it has halted the due process of law in regard to Nixon's actions in Watergate, the pardon constitutes a grave miscarriage of justice. Americans now will never know the full truth about Watergate, or be assured, as they had a right to be, that there were not other, more fearful skeletons in the White House closets. Richard Nixon may well be suffering, but the American people have also suffered?and at Nixon's hands. Deceived, anguished, still too much in the dark about...
Most churchmen agree that a pardon would have been far more acceptable after a full airing of Watergate in any trials that Nixon would have faced. But that option has been lost. What now? A number of theologians doubt that a categorical pardon for all other Watergate offenders would solve anything. An additional blanket pardon, contends Evangelical Theologian Carl F.H. Henry, would only compound a wrong by moving from "a preferred Individual to a preferred class of individuals...
...healing gesture could come from Richard Nixon himself, suggests Theologian Claude Welch, president of Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union. "An honest admission of real guilt would do a great deal toward making sense out of the pardon." Somewhat optimistically, Welch observes that "a forgiving spirit"?like Ford's pardon of Nixon?"can precede awareness of guilt. Forgiveness is part of the process by which relations that have been destroyed, between two people or between one man and a nation, can be fully restored...
That is a generous assessment of what the pardon might accomplish. Yet the very existence of a lost man?and Richard Nixon, whatever his remaining perquisites or power, is a lost man ?impels a compassionate society to hope that the rift between it and him can somehow be healed. Such a hope stems not from mere pity, but from self-recognition. Each of us is to a degree lost, tied to the rest of humanity?and to God?by fragile strands of grace, strands that fray and break. Pardon is a favor that we may sometimes...
...Pardon Unpardonable...