The Justice I Refused to Carry

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — March 21, 2026, 10:05 a.m.

There is a line in Scripture that settled into my bones long before I understood anything else about faith. It shows up in Romans, where Paul writes, “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.” He is echoing Deuteronomy, where the idea is even older and sharper: justice belongs to God, because the path of wrongdoing carries its own consequences. The foot that walks into harm is often stepping there by choice.

That idea did something important for me. It took a weight off my hands.

I grew up with anger, confusion, and more than a few reasons to believe some people deserved to be answered in kind. But I made a decision early, and I held to it even when it was not easy: I would not become the instrument of that answer. Not because I lacked imagination. Not because I didn’t feel it. But because I believed God had already claimed that responsibility.

That became the center of my faith.

Not love in the way most people describe it first. Not comfort. Not even salvation, at least not at the beginning. It was restraint. It was choosing not to strike back. It was trusting that justice exists, even when I am not the one delivering it.

Over time, that foundation led me back to the larger question: if I was going to call myself a Christian, what kind of Christian would I be?

I left the Catholic Church when I was young. I went looking elsewhere. I explored other belief systems, including places most people would avoid. But the further I went, the clearer something became. The God revealed through Jesus Christ was not one option among many. He was the center of the whole structure.

So I came back.

Not casually. Not out of habit. I came back after looking at what remained when you strip Christianity down to its earliest form. And when I did that, I found myself choosing between two branches that still carry that ancient structure: Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism.

For me, the path was already marked. I had been baptized Catholic. I had taken First Communion. What was left was confirmation. And at 65, I completed that step and came home.

I do not pretend the Church is perfect. It never has been. In fact, part of what convinced me I was in the right place is that it does not hide that truth. The institution has stumbled, failed, and sinned across centuries, and yet it endures.

There is an old story about Napoleon Bonaparte threatening to destroy the Church, and being told, in effect, “We have been trying to destroy it ourselves for centuries, and we have not succeeded.” Whether the wording is exact or not, the point stands. Something flawed does not survive that long without something deeper holding it together.

That is where I stand now.

I do not claim to understand all of it. I do not claim to live it perfectly. But I know this much: I will not carry vengeance. That burden does not belong to me.

And if I can hold that line, even on the hard days, then I am at least walking in the direction I was meant to go.