How painful to witness the tears of the widow of an assassinated hero, especially thinking of two small children robbed of their famed father by a “young man,” to use the gracious widow’s phrase, who was a member of the generation her husband dedicated his life to reaching, a young man who instead embraced the radical left and the bullet.

As Erika Kirk accepted the Medal of Freedom that President Trump awarded Charlie Kirk posthumously on what would have been his 32nd birthday, she recalled how he would prepare for his Turning Point USA campus rallies. “He put on his cross necklace … and the boldness in his demeanor was always fearlessness … That was his creed. 
That is how he lived out every single day. He didn’t fear being slandered. He did not. He didn’t fear losing friends … He stood for truth, and stood for freedom … everything else was just noise to him. And it’s because his confidence in Christ was absolute.”

Just days after her husband’s killing, she vowed boldly that his mission, far from ending, would thrive and expand. “The evildoers responsible for my husband’s assassination have no idea what they have done … If you thought that my husband’s mission was powerful before, you have no idea. You have no idea what you just have unleashed across this entire country and this world … the movement my husband built will not die … No one will ever forget my husband’s name, and I will make sure of it. It will become stronger, bolder, louder, and greater than ever. My husband’s mission will not end, not even for a moment.”

But for the late Charlie Kirk’s mission to reach its full potential, Erika must carry the heavy cross she wears even farther, in the manner Christians have done in reaction to previous acts of violence. In 1983, Pope John Paul II visited and embraced Mehmet Ali Agca in prison, the Muslim terrorist who in 1981 shot two bullets into him, one of which barely missed his vital organs. Shortly after the shooting, he asked the faithful to pray for Agca, calling him “my brother.” In 1902, Maria Goretti forgave her would-be rapist after he stabbed her 14 times. At her canonization as a child martyr in 1950 at the Vatican, her murderer, Alessandro Serenelli, attended, having converted and served 27 years as a model prisoner. On Christmas Night 1934, Serenelli had begged on his knees for Maria’s mother to forgive him, which she did. Today, there is a movement within the Catholic Church for this penitent’s own canonization.

Again and again, accepting a cross plants the seeds of unexpected, seemingly impossible miracles.

A quarter of the way into a 21^st century, immersed in self-absorption and the online shaming of one’s enemies, Erika astounded many by forgiving her husband’s killer immediately. Charlie Kirk “wanted to save young men just like the one who took his life,” she pointed out. “That young man, I forgive him … I forgive him because it was what Christ did and is what Charlie would do. The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the Gospel is love and always love.”

Still more, she courageously rejected the path so many family members of murder victims take: seeking the death penalty for the murderer, often in a spirit of revenge. “I told our lawyer, I want the government to decide this,” she told the New York Times the week after the assassination. “I do not want that man’s blood on my ledger. Because when I get to heaven, and Jesus is like: ‘Uh, eye for an eye? Is that how we do it?’ And that keeps me from being in heaven, from being with Charlie?”

Of course, capital punishment actually saves innocent lives by preventing or deterring future homicides; life imprisonment might not prevent the killing by the convict of prison guards or fellow inmates. And the death penalty would save even more innocent lives were it carried out frequently. Traditionally, the Catholic Church has embraced the death penalty. St. Thomas Aquinas stated that “it is lawful to kill an evildoer in so far as it is directed to the welfare of the whole community” and carried out by public authority, comparing it to a physician cutting off a decayed limb for the sake of the whole body.

So Erika Kirk’s opposition to the execution of assassin Tyler Robinson need not be a rejection of capital punishment as just law. This is a high-profile, politically charged case with immense symbolic value. If she is to show the world – especially Charlie’s and his movement’s enemies – that she and he are not like them, then letting the government decide is not enough; she must exercise fully the heroic virtue practiced by Pope John Paul and St. Maria Goretti’s long-suffering mother. This means actively fighting against the death penalty in the Robinson case; because prosecutors may still seek death for Robinson despite Erika’s wishes. It means doing something that may be excruciating for her — meeting and befriending Robinson’s mother and father and family members, and working with them on the case. And perhaps eventually even meeting Robinson himself.

“You have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thy enemy,” said Christ. “But I say to you, Love your enemies. Do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you, that you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven … Be you therefore perfect, as also your heavenly Father is perfect.”

This example of sacrificial goodness from a devastated widow and mother will amaze a world gone astray. And because God is never outdone in generosity, it will spawn miracles that today we can’t imagine. Not least among them will be the multitudes of college students touched and motivated by an organization founded by an extraordinarily gifted talent who became a Christian martyr. A movement now headed by his wife, who not only wears a cross on her neck but carries the heavy cross of one who has forgiven her enemies to the fullest extent.

There is so much at stake. As Erika Kirk said, “Our world is filled with evil.” Government in supposedly free countries grows in size and in oppressive power, bent on contracting freedom — the word that adorned the shirt stained with Charlie Kirk’s blood — to the extent that today parents are kept by government from protecting their children from sex change chemical regimens and procedures at the hands of school officials, to cite just one appalling example. In  Britain, a 75-year-old lady is incarcerated for wearing a sign outside an abortion clinic offering to speak with expectant mothers, but only if they chose to.  Filled with evil indeed.

Only the cross could defeat sin. If the evil that fills the world is to be diminished, it will take miraculous, supernatural weapons. This widow’s sacrificial cross of fully loving her enemies will be one of the most powerful of them.