Among the pardons that the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella granted in the days leading up to this Christmas, what concerns Franco Cioni evokes in us a profound emotion of pity for a story that saw life and death intertwined, care and perhaps overflowing desperation. Franco Cioni was 73 years old when he killed his wife by suffocating her in her sleep with a pillow. The woman had a serious and progressive disease and Cioni took care of her for about five years. Then the tragic gesture, the trial and the conviction. A mild sentence compared to the prescribed sentence, but inevitable. Now, after a partial atonement, there will be no more detention for the pardoned man.
What does this grace mean? Does he perhaps say that that death is no longer murder, that that sentence is revoked, that the merciful epilogue redeems man from the broken norm, that the merciful death of love can no longer be called a crime? No, he doesn’t say that, none of this happens. Grace only acts on the punishment it causes to cease, and does not change the rest. However, the questions that question law and ethics, emotion and reason, truth and charity remain in our hearts.
According to the law, the pardon granted does not mean that the conduct was right. He says the punishment is now no longer considered necessary or proportionate. It does not legitimize the murder, it does not absolve it, it does not requalify it. It reminds us that we can feel pity for a human situation without approving the action that kills. Grace seeks a solution other than punishment, but does not deny the norm that keeps it just and firm.
On the level of ethical judgment, pity can cover emotional lacerations, fragility and human limits. However, the objective truth of the act that takes life remains, its intrinsic injustice: it’s killing, killing that isn’t right. And the fact that the gesture is moved by compassionate intention is not enough to transform an evil into a good.
The pardon for this man who killed is therefore not the ratification of a tragic and unjust gesture in itself, almost brought back to a place of permission. Instead, charity can make its way through grace as sometimes he asks for justice that wants to be called restorative, without betraying the truth. Among the reasons for pardoning Ciani is, for example, the forgiveness given to him by the victim’s sister.
And finally the echoes of pain, the echoes of pity that last in our hearts move us to travel backwards through history, or rather the stories, the many stories of painful lives entrusted to the care, to the labor of love, sometimes to the loneliness of caregivers. What do we know about these solitudes? What do we know about love that asks for help? We want to convert pity into help. Perhaps we all dream of a society capable of mercy, that is, the opposite of a moral relativism that masks the abandonment of the needy. Justice requires a network of social charity, to take care of life. The constitution wants it (art. 2), the Gospel wants it.
