Christianity, perhaps more than any other religion, places forgiveness at the front and center of its religious identity. After all, Christianity calls us to love even our enemies. Recently, however, these pages, as well as the Post-Dispatch, have printed commentary suggesting that the faculty forgive Father President. This application of forgiveness is misguided and manipulating.

Forgiveness is about the restoration of relationships that have been breached by sin. Let us walk through a few different scenarios: siblings get into a spat and say hurtful things; a patron is verbally abusive to a barista at a coffee shop; a spouse consistently comes home hours later than planned; a high school teacher sexually abuses students for years.

Now imagine that all of these people ask for forgiveness. Isn’t it imperative that those against whom they’ve sinned forgive them? If one thinks about what this means, especially for the final scenario, it is easy to realize how quickly “forgiveness” avoids rather than addresses the erosion and even destruction of relationships.

Forgiveness is so difficult because transgression violates the terms of the relationship. Because I like to read at coffee shops, I know several baristas. Although I am friendly with them, a show of bad manners is deeply harmful because it destroys the terms of a relationship based on civility. I cannot talk to a relative stranger with the sharpness and impatience that I sometimes use with family members because I don’t have the same level of trust and shared history. After a breach of civility, suppose I were to say, “Why can’t you just forgive me?” Such a request would miss the point that I “broke” the terms of the relationship. The real question is not: “When will your hard heart soften?” but rather, “What kind of relationship do each of us think that we’re in?” The hesitancy on the part of the barista comes from no longer knowing what kind of relationship we’re in. He imagined it as one in which civility is paramount, and clearly I did not.

Likewise, if I come home late to my wife every Friday, having spent several hours at a bar, without telling her of my plans, I cannot simply expect her to forgive me, even after numerous requests, because that’s not the relationship that she signed up for. Continual patterns of deception and irresponsibility destroy the covenant. The real question is: How would I need to change so that she could imagine recommitting to a relationship worth having?

President Lawrence Biondi, S.J. has never done anything to me personally and I’ve found him cordial in our brief encounters. Yet I am convinced that he is incapable of leading this university or of changing in a way that corresponds to how a university president should behave. I am not mad at him, so much as resigned to the fact that he cannot run this university according to the Jesuit values upon which it was founded. I teach in the theology department. If I berated my colleagues, failed to teach my classes, behaved improperly toward students and performed no research, I would be fired for failing to do my job. The faculty who oppose Biondi have arrived at a judgment that he is unfit to be a university president; nothing more need or should be implied.

I heard James Veltrie, S.J. say mass yesterday. Imagine if I had greeted him afterward with a string of profanities, and told him he was a worthless excuse for a priest. And then called him the next day and asked his forgiveness? And the following Sunday had changed my mind and proceeded to interrupt his homily with shouts from the pew that he is an enemy to the University? And then asked him for forgiveness? At what point would Veltrie “wise up?” Certainly in such extreme examples one can see how forgiveness can serve as a category of manipulation. And certainly Veltrie would begin to balk at forgiving me after repeated transgressions. The astute psychologist Friedrich Nietzsche saw how forgiveness could be reduced to a lever of power.

I’ve read numerous defenses of and apologies for Biondi. What they all share in common is a silence over what he’s done. They prefer his victims remain nameless so as to make the transgressor into the real victim. If this mechanism is unknown to people like Joe Adorjan and Veltrie, then they should be corrected. If it is being applied in a manipulating manner, then they should be ashamed.