Removing Lady Justice’s blindfold

By Fr. ROY CIMAGALA, roycimagala@gmail.com
March 8, 2012

“…Lady Justice also has to learn to remove the blindfold, so she can see, hear and talk to God and the parties involved.”

I can understand why Lady Justice is depicted as blindfolded, holding a balance scale and a sword. The idea is to portray justice as objective and impartial (blindfold), able to weigh the arguments and pieces of evidence from both parties (scale), always using reason and sense of justice to carry out her duty (double-edged sword).

For all those reasons, I am for Lady Justice blindfolded and all. They all have a place in the sun. We always have to respect, protect and defend these reasons.

But we also have to understand that those reasons are in constant need of rectification and improvement, of refinement and growing conformity to the ultimate basis of justice who is God. Though embodied in some system, they cannot be considered as frozen and rigid. They have to be in vital sync with God’s providence.

The balance scale can only weigh things mechanically. It can miss many subtle things, let alone the spiritual requirements of justice and charity. Our reason and a certain sense of justice are always in need of its ultimate grounding and orientation. They cannot really take off unless inspired by God. Without God they will just go in circles and are prone to be taken advantage of.

Justice cannot be real justice if it just gets stuck with our own idea alone of what is right and wrong, good and bad, true and false. No matter how wide a consensus we may have about what is just and unjust, if our idea and sense of justice is not vitally linked to God, we would just be making our own brand of justice, open to all kinds of manipulations and the subtle workings of self-righteousness.

Apart from God, the Creator and Author of all reality, we would be at sea as to what is right and fair. We would put ourselves prone to distortions and abuses that can come from our passions and many other factors, like some privileged position we may have over others. Our sense of justice has to flow with God’s mind, will and ways.

Obviously, we need structures and systems to carry out justice. But those structures and systems should be such that they remain open to God’s promptings and to the flowing developments of the case that can change the picture drastically. They have to be animated by a proper spirit of truth, justice and charity, not inert or dead.

This means that those in charge of dispensing justice should be spiritually alive and connected with God. Otherwise, they would be unhinged and can become like a floating mine, dangerous to any passing ship.

It’s for this reason that Lady Justice also has to learn to remove the blindfold, so she can see, hear and talk to God and the parties involved. It’s important that she has a running conversation with the all the parties involved. She should not get stuck with a fact in the past. She has to flow with life in its variety of possibilities.

What we have to avoid is to dispense justice indiscriminately, relying only on a blind conformity to the letter of the law without discerning its true spirit. We have to be wary of this tendency because there seems to be a strong drift toward it, a growing bias for it.

With the eyes of Lady Justice wide open, those in charge of dispensing justice can serve as instruments of God’s justice, and not just human justice, that aside from being imperfect, is vulnerable to be easily manipulated by those with more power, more money, more talents.

We cannot really guarantee the objectivity and impartiality of justice by having Lady Justice blindfolded and using only a balance scale and a double-edge sword. A lot more are needed.

There is need for Lady Justice to know how to dispense justice with charity and mercy and with healing qualities, and to protect justice from becoming merely an instrument for anger and revenge. Lady Justice has to expand the understanding of justice by going beyond her distributive, commutative, legal and social aspects.

Justice has to be the justice of God, because that in the end is what is proper to us who are God’s image and likeness, and made children of his. That may not be easy to achieve, but we can always try. We should use everything we have to reach it.