St. Gregory was an 8th-century priest in Utrecht, in an area today found in the Netherlands. Not a great deal is known about him beyond this one vignette, preserved by Butler:
When the murderers of his two brothers were sent to him by the civil magistrates to be put to what death he should think fit, according to the barbarous custom of the country in that age, which left the punishment of the assassins to the direction of the relations of the deceased person; the saint gave every one of them a suit of clothes with an alms, and dismissed them with good advice.
Butler describes the “country in that age” as having the “barbarous custom” of allowing the family to decide how to handle the treatment of assassins. I’m left to wonder if, at least in the case of the murder of Mollie Tibbetts in July of this year, we in the United States could learn a great deal from this vignette. According to news reports, Ms. Tibbetts, who was a white American, had gone jogging in her home area in Iowa and ended up brutally slain; the prime suspect is a male from Mexico who is reportedly (but this is disputed by his attorney) undocumented.
The family, unlike St. Gregory, have had their explicit wishes disregarded. First, they wished to be allowed privacy and the opportunity to grieve. Secondly, an aunt of the victim publicly requested that Ms. Tibbetts’ death not be used as political fodder, posting on Facebook:
Please remember, Evil comes in EVERY color.
The aunt also shared another Facebook user’s post to drive this point home when Republicans, led by the President himself, immediately began using this violent tragedy as evidence of the murderous intentions of (undifferentiated) undocumented Mexicans (apparently forgetting that whole American thing about waiting for the facts and presuming someone innocent until proven guilty). The post the aunt reposted:
Please do not compound the atrocity of what happened to her by adding hate and racism to the equation. . . . Do not turn #molliesmovement into something ugly.
“A person came in from Mexico illegally and killed her,” said Mr. Trump, speaking about Ms. Tibbetts in a video he posted to Twitter. “We need the wall, we need our immigration laws changed, we need our border laws changed.”
Then, framing the matter as a choice between the two parties in the upcoming elections, he added, “We need Republicans to do it because the Democrats aren’t going to do it.”
Now, unlike Gregory and the family of Mollie Tibbetts, Mr. Trump is not related to a specific murder victim. Further, it has not been proven who has killed Ms. Tibbetts.
Not everyone aggrieved family member would, of course, choose to respond as Gregory did, or as Ms.Tibbetts’ family have. Yet what about the alternative of, say, an impartial investigation and the administration of proportionate justice? In this circumstance, at least, it appears that the United States could use with at least a little of that “ol’ time barbarism” of which Butler writes, and which permitted Gregory to choose mercy, unimpeded by government, in response to grief and loss.