Customer Reviews

Choosing Mercy: A Mother of Murder Victims Pleads to End the Death Penalty

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Antoinette Bosco is a well known American Catholic writer and columnist. Very soon Ignatius will publish her study of the founder of the Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis in Connecticut, which still follows the Primitive Observance of the Rule. Amazon is now taking pre-orders, and by the time you read this perhaps it will be out. Meanwhile now and always is an excellent time to pray over this earlier work, so comprehensive and necessary for a full understanding of our womb to tomb pro-life dogma, and the comprehensive, courageous compassion and forgiveness to which Christ calls us every day.

As this book is indeed comprehensive and compassionate. Her own family was touched by murder, and yet Ms. Bosco took this as a chance to grow in our Faith and her own understanding and witness to our full pro-life belief. The other review here is so painful to read, as it obviously does not at all consider her intelligent and Faith-filled work of forgiveness. Ms. Bosco's book Choosing Mercy is a source of strength to all who suffer loss, to all who suffer. It brings meaning and solace to our suffering, and the only "closure" we truly can find, that of forgiveness in Christ.

Whenever we pray with our Lord the Lord's Prayer, the Our Father, we pray that Our Father might forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. We pray that God might use for us the same measurement of forgiveness that we give to those who have hurt us. We pray God might forgive us just as much as we forgive others. We pray for the same mercy we show others.

Ms. Bosco in this book gives us a prayerbook of forgiveness. In this book Ms. Bosco displays infinite and unmeasurable forgiveness and mercy and compassion and understanding, despite every human reason not to. Ms. Bosco thus deserves from Our Lord every full measure of forgiveness, although it is hard to imagine her offending in any way Our Lord and Creation, and it is impossible to imagine Ms. Bosco wrote this book with any measure of self-interest. She here teaches us by her model in this her book of forgiveness how to forgive, and to live.

She completes her work with an excellent listing of resource and support groups, and further recommended reading. She fully documents and footnotes her statements in this very thoughtful and prayerful and sincere work, which considers every aspect of this controversial question, which she finds resolved only in an ever more faithful and complete commitment to total Life. I find it impossible to adequately summarize here the impact and message of this book. We have no right to question her motives and reasoning. She lost two beloved children, a son and a daughter-in-law, to a senseless homicide, and she found the strength in our Faith to produce this sincere plea for an end to capital punishment, in union with our Church in Rome.

Intelligent, sincere, eloquent, comprehensive. This book is necessary for any student of our Church's orthodox moral theology, and for anyone with the power to bring to fruition our Church's comprehensive pro-life position. I find it impossible to quote from the work without disturbing or unbalancing its flow. Please, take and read, this book, the heart and mind of its Catholic author, in worthy and sacred memorial of her lost ones. In it may we find the strength and compassion to forgive, to love and to live as Christ shows us.

Ask yourself just one question: If a convicted murderer serving a life sentence without the chance for parole brutually kills a prison guard, what penalty is given to this miscreant? A life sentence? Justice can only be done by taking this "person's" life in a short and swift time frame. Also have you noticed how many attorneys have a great deal of their income from defending these people and who pays, of course we do. I say shorten the appeal process and make it swift. Make it mandatory at every appeal hearing to show the death pictures if available of all the victims that were brutually killed. Plus limit the testimony based on the upbringing or childhood of the murderer. Who cares? One simple question in this regard, did he/she do the crime?