Catechesis With Saint John Paul Ii

St John Paul II, 21 October 1981: "Christ has taught us to forgive. Forgiveness is also indispensable for God for Him to put questions in the human conscience, to which He awaits a response in all interior truth. At this time, when so many innocent men perish at the hands of other men, a special need appears to impose itself to approach each one of those who kill, to approach with forgiveness in the heart together with the same question that God, Creator and Lord of human life, put to the first man who had made an attempt upon the life of his brother and had taken - had taken that which belongs only to the Creator and Lord of life. Christ taught us to forgive. He taught Peter to forgive "as many as seventy times seven" (Mt 18, 22). God himself forgives when man answers the question put to his conscience and his heart with the whole inner truth of conversion.Leaving to God Himself the judgment and the sentence in their definitive dimension, we do not cease to ask: "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtor