Reconciliation: Healing Hearts | C21 Resources Fall 2025
The Church in the 21st Century Center is a catalyst and a resource for renewal of the Catholic Church.
C21 Resources, a compilation of the best analyses and essays on key challenges facing the Church today, is published by The Church in the 21st Century Center at Boston College, in partnership with publications from which the featured articles have been selected.
c 21 resources editorial board
Dominic F. Doyle
Karen K. Kiefer
Peter G. Martin
Michael Serazio
Melodie Wyttenbach
guest editor
Joshua R. Snyder
managing editor
Lynn M. Berardelli
assistant editors Frances Adjorlolo
Justin Conway
the church in the 21 st century center Boston College 110 College Road, Heffernan House Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts 02467
Mmother teresa shared , “To forgive takes love, to forget takes humility.” Her words remind us that forgiveness changes us. It can heal us, comfort us, free us, and it can move us, with God’s grace, toward reconciliation and the chance to heal hearts and love and live more fully.
Back in 2020, the C21 Center launched the Student Voices Project, asking young people their thoughts about their faith life and the Catholic Church. Now, after connecting with over 7,000 high school and college-aged students across the country, it is clear that the weight of their world is heavy. They carry smartphones, insecurities, shame, regret, broken hearts, and feelings of unworthiness. The Sacrament of Reconciliation was cited often as one of their best experiences in their Catholic faith life. They desired the sacred opportunity to ask for forgiveness and to be forgiven and unconditionally loved by God. Sacramental forgiveness changed them, opening their hearts.
In this issue of C21 Resources, Professor Joshua Snyder has orchestrated a collection of articles that take a closer look at forgiveness and reconciliation through the lens of faith. Many of the articles are newly commissioned, and for the first time, we are offering an expanded digital version with more content to explore.
May the wisdom shared on the following pages remind us that we are a sacramental people, called to let forgiveness and love change us and others.
Karen K. Kiefer
Director, The Church in the 21st Century Center karen.kiefer@bc.edu
on the cover Prayer intentions shared on ribbons lining the Bapst Library fence during Commencement and Reunion seasons.
on the back cover
The Holy Family sculpture was carved into the trunk of a 200-yearold ailing oak tree at the edge of BC’s Brighton Campus to give it new life as transformative and meaningful artwork.
Learn more about the Boston College Prayer Ribbon Project.
For more information on the C21 Center.
photo credit: Andrew Craig '17, MATM '19
EXCLUSIVE DIGITAL CONTENTS
The contents below are exclusive to this digital edition of C21 Resources. To download and share the issue, visit: bc.edu/c21reconciliation
38 Jesuits' Mission in a Challenging World
Marcel Uwineza, S.J.
40 Grace through Dialogue: Insights from Fratelli Tutti on Infertility
Kristen
Peter
Kate
Robert J. Schreiter, C.PP.S.
Rev. Emmanuel Katongole & Chris Rice
Emma McDonald Kennedy 42 Nonviolence: A Style of Politics for Peace
Pope Francis
Conor Richards, Nelson Teixeira Da Pedra, Grace Snell, and Julia Franco
RECONCILIATION A Pathway Forward
Joshua R. Snyder
Iis it possible to reestablish a relationship that has been fractured by wrongdoing? The answer to this question might depend on who the involved parties are, the nature of their relationship, the magnitude of the harm inflicted, and whether there has been some form of redress to the wrongdoing. Reconciliation seems to be conditioned by a host of factors. Additionally, under certain circumstances reconciliation may not be attainable or even commendable. This edition of C21 Resources grapples with the complex nature of reconciliation and tries to offer readers some theological wisdom and prudential insights into its moral challenges. At the most basic level, reconciliation implies restoring relationships between people who have been alienated from each other. The parties involved in reconciliation are multitudinous. We can think of reconciliation collectively between God and humanity, personally between God and the believer through the Sacrament of Reconciliation, interpersonally between individuals that may or may not be well known to each other, socially between different groups within society, and politically between contentious political parties or adversarial regimes. Reconciliation can be understood as both a process and a goal. As a process, it is not a stand-alone concept. It is intimately connected to concerns for truth, justice, and forgiveness. As a goal, it is not merely conciliation, which occurs when former adversaries are willing to coexist without recourse to violence. The fullness of reconciliation is the
Pope Francis (1936–2025) greeting refugees traveling to Rome with him at the international airport in Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, Greece, April 16, 2016.
reestablishment of right relationship with God, oneself, one’s neighbor, and all of created reality. Reconciliation is a willful process whereby the parties involved envision the hope of a shared future, rooted in trust, and a commitment to mutual well-being.
As the editorial board finalized this issue, the universal Church lost her Shepherd. Pope Francis died on Easter Monday, April 21, 2025. He lived up to the reputation of his namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, embodying the ministry of reconciliation as an instrument of peace. Through his outreach to those on the margins, whether it was visiting migrants in Lampedusa, washing the feet of incarcerated women and Muslim refugees, or calling for the end of violence in war-torn regions of the world, Francis demonstrated what reconciliation entailed. He desired a Church that included everyone, “todos, todos, todos!” This inclusive Church is a listening Church, a synodal Church.
Dialogue was essential to Francis’ understanding of reconciliation. In his Angelus on July 20, 2014, the pope pleaded, “May the God of peace arouse in all an authentic desire for dialogue and reconciliation. Violence cannot be overcome with violence. Violence is overcome with peace!” Again, Francis commended us to “respond to violence, to conflict and to war, with the power of dialogue, reconciliation and love” (Angelus, September 1, 2013). For Francis, open and honest dialogue, acknowledgment of wrongdoing, and a willingness to amend past injustices are the pathways to reconciliation.
photo credit
: CNS photo/Paul Haring
The work of reconciliation is not merely a human endeavor, but a divine gift flowing from the crucified Christ. According to Francis, it is in the silence of the cross that “the uproar of weapons ceases and the language of reconciliation, forgiveness, dialogue and peace is spoken” (Homily, September 7, 2013). Furthermore, “if we want to be reconciled with one another and with ourselves, to be reconciled with the past, with wrongs endured and memories wounded, with traumatic experiences that no human consolation can ever heal, our eyes must be lifted to the crucified Jesus; peace must be attained at the altar of his cross” (Homily, July 25, 2022). Reconciliation is a grace that radiates from the love of God embodied on the cross. Through the grace of reconciliation, hatred is transformed into love and division is overcome through unity.
Following nine days of mourning, the world waited and wondered who would emerge from the conclave as the new pope, and whether he would continue the legacy of Francis. Most of the world was surprised when Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, a Chicago native and former Bishop of Chiclayo, Peru, was named the two hundred and sixty-seventh head of the Catholic Church. In choosing the name Leo XIV, was the new pope shedding light on what direction his pontificate might take? Would he be like Leo XIII who, in writing the encyclical Rerum novarum , ushered in the era of Catholic social teaching? Or would he be a peacebuilder like Leo the Great, who convinced Attila to spare Rome in 452?
On May 8, 2025, the first Augustinian and U.S.-born pontiff, Pope Leo XIV, addressed the faithful with these words: “Peace be with you all… It is the peace of the risen Christ. A peace that is unarmed and disarming, humble and persevering. A peace that comes from God, the God who loves us all, unconditionally… Help us, one and all, to build bridges through dialogue and encounter, joining as one people, always at peace.” With this statement, Pope Leo XIV declared the need to continue the ministry of reconciliation through dialogue
and the promotion of peace. As an Augustinian, Pope Leo XIV knows that peace is not merely the absence of conflict, but the comprehensive answer to our greatest social needs.
In The City of God , St. Augustine defined the peace of all things as “the tranquility of order.” Peace begins with an internalized transformation of the heart that results in harmony and order within oneself. It is the grace of the risen Christ that transforms the inner depths of the human soul.
Augustinian peace is not simply contemplative, but an internal disposition that must be possessed in the heart, loved in action, and lived through justice. Peace is gradually realized in the outward movement of the individual into broader levels of interpersonal, social, and political right relationship. Right relationships are constituted by harmonious c oncord achieved through charity and justice. Peace is pluralistic and dynamic, involves multiple relationships, and entails human flourishing within a communal context, having religious, social, economic, and political dimensions.
T he Church has a unique responsibility to promote peace through reconciliation. As the people of God, the Church is a community reconciled with God through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and called to be ministers of forgiveness and reconciliation. It is a sacramental community mediating peace and reconciliation. Reconciliation requires people of
GUEST EDITOR
goodwill to constructively engage conflicts in order to move beyond polarization and division. In the Fall 2023 issue of C21 Resources , guest editor Brian Robinette curated a collection of articles that diagnosed the dynamics of polarization and offered practical guidance for addressing it. The current issue builds on this foundation by exploring the complex reality of reconciliation as a response to conflicts and division.
The articles featured offer a diversity of perspectives ranging from theologians, academics, public intellectuals, and peacebuilders to students and alumni. They offer collective wisdom about what reconciliation means and the processes it entails. They challenge us to critically reflect upon where reconciliation is needed most: relationships strained by abuse, betrayal, mental illness, or infertility; division over the global migrant crisis; lives devastated by mass incarceration; and countries torn apart by war. Moreover, they offer prudential guidance for when reconciliation is appropriate and what practical steps can be taken to achieve it. After examining this issue, perhaps our readers might feel inspired to return to the Sacrament of Reconciliation, call an estranged friend or family member, get involved with their local parish to promote peace and justice, or petition their political representatives to bring an end to areas of conflict throughout the world. ■
Joshua R. Snyder is associate professor of the practice in theological ethics at Boston College. He also is the director of the Faith, Peace, and Justice minor. Joshua earned his Ph.D. in theological ethics from Boston College in 2015. His dissertation, Love Promoting Justice: An Augustinian Ethic for Transitional Justice from the Context of Guatemala, explored how charity as a civic virtue can bring about social reconciliation in a divided society. Joshua’s research focuses on transitional justice and Catholic peace-building with an emphasis on the Guatemalan Catholic Church and human rights.
For more information on this issue and additional resources, please visit: bc.edu/c21reconciliation.
How the Irish Changed Penance
The History of a Sacrament
John Rodden
Mmost catholics are probably unaware that what we today call the Sacrament of Reconciliation existed in a completely different form during the early Christian era. Even those who are aware of this fact may not know that it was a group of Irish monks who were largely responsible for transforming this sacrament into the version with which we’re familiar. It is all too easy to imagine that the seven sacraments have existed in something like their present form from the moment they were instituted. In truth, all of them have changed in important ways over the course of the Church’s history, and none has changed more than the Sacrament of Penance.
For the Church’s first seven centuries, penance could be received no more than once in a lifetime. That policy dated back to the time of St. Peter. The New Testament tells us that Jesus gave the power of forgiveness to his disciples, but it says almost nothing about how they were to exercise it. In the early Church, the prevailing belief was that baptism was the celebration of the forgiveness of sin, and that the baptized, having turned away from sin, would not need to be forgiven again.
Nevertheless, the Church Fathers soon realized that they needed a way to deal with post-baptismal sin because many baptized Christians were slipping back into their old way of life. A formal system of public penance was devised to handle such setbacks. Typically, after penitents confessed to the local bishop, they were assigned an onerous penance that lasted several years. During this time, they wore sackcloth and garments that scratched or tore the skin as a modest reminder of Christ’s scourging. They were also required to leave Mass immediately after the homily and forbidden to receive the Eucharist. At least part of their penance consisted of long hours of prayer and fasting. Not until they had completed this long and arduous penitential period were they “reconciled” with the Church and welcomed back into full communion.
By the seventh century, it had become obvious to many that the Church’s rules for penance were not working as they were intended to, but there were still no plans in Rome to reform them. It was precisely at this time that Irish monks began to travel to the European continent to proselytize the heathen Franco-German tribes. At least a century earlier, these monks had developed a different practice of penance within their own communities,
adapting a little-known tradition traceable to the first monastic communities in the Egyptian desert. Like the monks in Ireland after them, they were struggling to overcome venial “faults” in their quest for saintliness, not seeking reconciliation after committing grave offenses such as murder, adultery, and apostasy. The Irish monks refined the work of Cassian, developing a system of confession in which the private recitation of sins was followed by the private performance of penance. Crucially, they not only adopted this practice themselves, but introduced it to the faithful outside the monastery, making it applicable to all sins and available to all sinners.
As the Catechism of the Catholic Church summarizes it: “During the seventh century, Irish missionaries, inspired by the Eastern monastic tradition, took to continental Europe the ‘private’ practice of penance, which does not require public and prolonged completion of penitential works before reconciliation with the Church. From that time on, the sacrament has been performed in secret between penitent and priest.” This was a radical change in the history of the sacrament. Gradually, confession went from being public to private, and from a once-in-a-lifetime rite to an as-often-as-needed practice. The “order of penitents,” segregated from the rest of the community, disappeared.
Although the Irish monks practiced frequent confession of their “faults”—and recommended that fellow Catholics do the same—they also continued for some time to impose severe penances on those who committed serious sins. As Hugh Connolly notes in The Irish Penitentials , the monk-missionaries brought handbooks known as “penitentials” with them on their travels. The handbooks suggested a suitable “tariff” or penance to “pay” according to the rank of the sinner, the rank of the person offended against, and the objective seriousness of the sin. Abuses were not unknown: wealthy penitents were sometimes able to negotiate a reduction in the tariff—or hire a substitute or “assistant” to carry out part or all of a severe penance. But over time, the penitentials fostered consensus about the comparative seriousness of various sins and thus made assessments of the appropriate penance more uniform and less arbitrary.
As the Irish monks made converts and founded new communities on the continent, they promoted a conception of penance aimed at restoring the sinner to
“Those who associate Irish Catholicism with fire and brimstone may be surprised to learn that it was Irish monks who made penance more private and less exacting.”
Stained glass in the Irish Hall of Gasson Hall at Boston College depicting the Catholic missionary bishop St. Patrick meeting with the pagan king of Ireland, Laoghaire, at Tara on Easter Sunday, 433. According to legend, the king granted Patrick the right to preach throughout the kingdom, marking the beginning of the Christianization of Ireland.
a full relationship with God rather than reconciliation with the community. They also shifted the focus from performing penances to making sincere and sorrowful confessions. In this new conception, the anamchara became a soul “doctor,” empowered
by God to help rescue the sinner from grave sickness of the soul, with confession serving as a kind of spiritual emetic. As one penitential handbook put it: “As the wounds of the body are shown to a physician, so too the sores of the soul must be
exposed. As he who takes poison is saved by a vomit, so, too, the soul is healed by confession and declaration of his sins with sorrow.”
As P. Biller and A. J. Minnis explain in Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages , it was this milder form of penance promoted by the Irish missionaries that had gained wide acceptance throughout the Christian world by the early Middle Ages. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council established that penance would involve private confession and that all Christians in the Latin Church would be obligated to confess their sins at least once a year. It was also at this time that penance officially became a sacrament. (The “dark box”—the confessional booth located in the rear of most churches—wasn’t invented until the sixteenth century, during the Counter-Reformation.)
Those who associate Irish Catholicism with fire and brimstone may be surprised to learn that it was Irish monks who made penance more private and less exacting. In fact, as Lawrence Mick stresses in Understanding the Sacraments: Penance , it was the bishops and clergy on the continent who regarded the penitential practices of the Irish as a dangerous departure from tradition that would make reconciliation too easy. After centuries of debate, however, Rome finally sided with the Irish. Reconciliation, the Church decided, was not to be a one-time offer. A sacrament that claimed to offer God’s mercy should not also try to ration it. ■
John Rodden has taught at the University of Virginia and the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of numerous books and articles about British intellectuals.
This is an excerpt from an article that was originally published February 14, 2022. Reprinted with permission. Copyright Commonweal magazine. commonwealmagazine.org
photo credits : Courtesy of Gary Wayne Gilbert, Boston College.
Encountering Divine MERCY
Msgr. Liam Bergin
Wwe live in a graced world but it is often marred by failure and sin. Relationships are broken, terrible things are said and done, and hatred and vengeance can take hold of people’s hearts. Human efforts to resolve these issues are inevitably fragile and incomplete. Just think of the efforts to achieve reconciliation in situations from family conflicts to international disputes. Nothing in life is more significant than reconciliation. The story of salvation is the good news of God’s intervention in human life to offer healing and forgiveness.
Forgiveness is a divine gift that is readily offered to those who yearn to be reconciled with God and with others. It is a gift offered to women and men, Christian, non-Christian, non-believer alike, who desire to live in harmony, justice, and peace. This gift is never earned or merited but freely given to all. It may be experienced in many ways: an apology made and accepted; the letting go of a grudge or hurt; an act of service to another; a humble prayer offered; a spirit awed by the goodness of a stranger; a heart rejoicing with gratitude as a new day dawns.
The Bible is replete with images and stories of a gracious God and Father who ingeniously calls repentant daughters and sons to know the depth of divine mercy. In baptism, Christians first encounter this mystery of reconciliation and forgiveness. We are immersed in the new life of Christ; we receive the gift of the Holy Spirit and we become members of the Church. Despite the great dignity to which we are called as daughters and sons of God, the sad fact is that Christians do sin even after they have passed through the waters of rebirth. That is something we acknowledge in the penitential act at the beginning of every Mass. Believers are constantly challenged to configure their lives to the person of Christ, to encounter again and again the saving power of God’s healing love. Tertullian (c. 240 AD) referred to penance as “the second plank following the shipwreck.” The Council of Trent took up this phrase to emphasize the connection between the sacraments of baptism and penance.
Pope Francis also emphasized this link: “The Sacrament of Penance or Confession is, in fact, like a ‘second baptism’ that refers back always to the first to strengthen and renew it. In this sense, the day of our Baptism is the point of departure for this most beautiful journey, a journey towards God that lasts a lifetime, a journey of conversion that is continually sustained by the Sacrament of Penance. Think about this: when we go to
“True wholeness comes after an honest acknowledgment of brokenness that is made explicitly to another.”
confess our weaknesses, our sins, we go to ask the pardon of Jesus, but we also go to renew our Baptism through his forgiveness. And this is beautiful, it is like celebrating the day of Baptism in every Confession” (General Audience, 13 November 2013). Indeed, the prayer of absolution said by the priest during the celebration of the sacrament begins by acknowledging the renewed gift of the Holy Spirit first given at Baptism: “God the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of his Son, has reconciled the world to himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins.”
When serious sin ruptures the relationship of individual believers with Christ and the Church, two things are required. First of all, confident of the boundless love of God, repentant sinners must reflect honestly on the situation in which they find themselves. The focus is on the goodness of God, not on the fallen nature
of humanity and on the punishment due to sin. Each penitent articulates the sin to a confessor, not to demean or to degrade, but to raise up and to restore.
The individual confession of sins by the penitent in the Sacrament of Penance has its origins in early medieval Irish monasticism. It makes good pastoral and theological sense. One of the great temptations of our time is the denial of responsibility. In this sense, individual confession goes against many of the dominant values in our world in its embrace of the need to face the truth to express sorrow, make amends, and seek forgiveness. In encouraging individual penitents to articulate their faults, express sorrow, and take responsibility for their words and actions, the Church is revealing what even ordinary experience suggests; namely, that anything less will fail to achieve true reconciliation. This is borne out in varied human contexts where individuals have to face up to the reality of their lives. This is an insight that is central to Twelve Step programs. True wholeness comes after an honest acknowledgment of brokenness that is made explicitly to another.
Words of truth, of sorrow, of making amends, and of forgiveness are most profound and efficacious when spoken by one person to another. When individual penitents confess their sins to a priest, they are encountering the mystery of Christ. He addresses each sinner with a word of forgiveness. He is the word of healing and hope for a sinful world. No other situation of reconciliation offers such a firm guarantee of forgiveness and healing. To this end, Pope Francis reminded priests “that the
During Boston College's annual Espresso Your Faith Week (EYFW), the Jesuits offer Moonlight Mercy, outdoor evening Confession on St. Mary's Lawn for the community. Learn more about EYFW: bc.edu/EYFW
confessional must not be a torture chamber but rather an encounter with the Lord’s mercy which spurs us on to do our best” (Evangelii gaudium , 14).
Then, secondly, drawn by the prodigal love of the Father, each penitent needs to hear the infallible word of forgiveness pronounced on his or her behalf. Without the honest reflection and true repentance, the explicit words of forgiveness can sound hollow; without the guaranteed gift of forgiveness, the sincere confession will only give rise to scruple and guilt. But when true conversion is sealed by divine forgiveness, the mystery of Christ is encountered anew and the sinner is assured of God’s mercy and forgiveness.
Penance, then, is primarily about restoring lost dignity. It is about growing and maturing in union with Christ as daughters and sons of the Father who are graced by the Holy Spirit. ■
Msgr. Liam Bergin is a priest of the Diocese of Ossory, Ireland. He is professor of the practice in sacramental theology at Boston College.
PRAYER OF ST. FRANCIS
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy.
O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Craig '17, MATM '19.
Biblical Reconciliation
Pheme Perkins
R“reconciliation ” in our everyday experience suggests the restoration of friendship or harmony between individuals or groups that have been separated from one another by bitter conflict. Biblically, “reconciliation” is used more frequently to describe humanity’s relationship with God. We tend to think of that relationship as an individual experience initiated by a person who repents. Yet, when we turn to the Bible, we find that such individual acts of repentance are not the primary subject of reconciliation language at all. The most important use of reconciliation describes God’s turning toward a sinful humanity.1 Without practices of justice based on reconciliation and mercy, God’s holy people cannot survive.
TENSIONS BETWEEN BROTHERS:
JOSEPH TO JESUS
Genesis has repeated tales of tensions between brothers that culminate in the murderous plan of Joseph’s brothers (Gen 37-50). But thanks to his rise in Pharaoh’s court and wise provisions for impending famine, Joseph not only saves Egypt but his own people as well. The passage’s final words of fraternal reconciliation are, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people” (Gen 50:20). This story highlights an important facet of reconciliation. It does not “forget” the past hostility or injustice. Joseph had devised elaborate testing of his brothers to prove their change of heart before the great reveal (Gen 42-44). Only then does the story end with Joseph forgiving his brothers. Numerous Hebrew narratives told the tale of younger sons surpassing privileged elder brothers. But Jesus flips that script in the Prodigal
Son parable (Lk 15:11-32) . Here family dynamics of Jesus’ Jewish audience is writ large. The younger son has alienated himself from everything Jewish. Left starving among pigs, he remembers the justice of his father’s farm. On the way home, he rehearses a confession that his father’s joy overrides. But the father must still bring his older son into that party, “…brother of yours was dead and has come to life” (v. 32). This is not at a cost to the elder of his relationship with the father. Reconciliation requires changing “hearts” on both sides—acknowledging failures and joyful embrace of the lost. Only then is the family restored.
TO GOD’S EARS: FORGIVENESS AND PRAYER
Similarly, a transformed heart appears in the prayer which Jesus recommends to disciples seeking God’s forgiveness. Luke 11:4 refers to a source of communal tensions, debts owed: “…forgive our sins, for we forgive everyone indebted to us” (Lk 11:4). Matthew’s longer, liturgically adapted version has framed petitions as requests for the realization of God’s will on earth, “…forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Matt 6:10-12). Even when it is described as forgiveness, reconciliation is not merely a private transaction between the individual and God. Reconciliation seeks to establish the holiness of the people of God.
Christians typically open worship by acknowledging sin and asking God for forgiveness. Matthew 5:2326 contains two sayings of the Lord aimed at reconciliation. First, “…if you remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift…go first and be reconciled…” (Matt 5:23-24). Jesus warns that one is to be reconciled with the person
The Forgiving Father (1950), by Indian-Australian artist Frank Wesley (1923–2002), powerfully depicts the Parable of the Prodigal Son, capturing the moment the son is welcomed home by his father.
one has offended before approaching God in the liturgy. This injunction is followed by a separate proverbial wisdom saying (Matt 5:25-26; Lk 12:57-59) to settle disputes before getting into court. Otherwise, a capricious system of justice can land persons in prison, “…until you have paid the last penny.” 2 So, courts being courts and prisons being prisons, they cannot deliver the healing reconciliation which Jesus imagines as God’s kingdom coming to Earth.
FORGIVENESS IS THE RULE
Communal life can be poisoned by resentments. The community is
summoned to exemplify forgiveness and reconciliation in the concrete relationships between its members. Jesus offered various exhortations, “If another disciple sins, you must rebuke…if the same person sins seven times a day and turns back…and says ‘I repent,’ you must forgive…” (Lk 17:1-4). Matthew 18:15-22 offered procedural rules for how the community is to address a wayward sinner. Matthew 18:17 incorporates expelling a person who refuses to accept the community’s decision. However, the entire emphasis of this section is not upon excluding sinners, but upon winning them back.
This is followed with the dramatic Parable of the Unforgiving Servant (Matt 18:23-35) . Jesus’ parable opens with a servant forgiven a debt greater than the annual budget of Herod’s kingdom. Such a great relief should have changed his heart, but did not. The servant’s refusal to extend forgiveness when another seeks relief for a plausible amount results in his downfall. The king retracts the prior forgiveness. Jesus’ parable provided a warning to Christians that their forgiveness must be modeled after what they have received from God. Thus, it would be wrong to imagine the possibility of “sins being retained” by the community. Quite the contrary, the quest is to seek out, to forgive, to reconcile.
Peeking through the leaves of Paul’s letters are glimpses of situations that required churches to practice reconciliation. Writing from prison, Paul asks a companion in Philippi to help reconcile two women involved in Philippian evangelization efforts (Phil 4:2-3). 2 Cor 2:5-12 speaks to another situation in which Paul himself had been the victim during a disastrous visit. The Church has turned back to its apostle founder. Paul encourages them to forgive the original offender, “…so that he may not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow” (v. 7)
IN CONCLUSION
Our sampler of biblical witnesses uncovers a multifaceted approach to the human difficulties with forgiveness and reconciliation. Even the legitimate justice of the guilty
The New Testament on Reconciliation
Thomas D. Stegman, S.J.
The vertical dimension of reconciliation is God’s role in reconciling the world to himself. It deals with the restored relationship that exists (at least potentially) between God and human beings, and focuses on what reconciliation reveals about the character and nature of God. The horizontal dimension of reconciliation is how God’s act of reconciliation has created new and life-giving ways for people to be in communion with one another. Finally, the ministerial dimension of reconciliation shows that God’s work continues in the newly founded Church.
The New Testament teaches that reconciliation begins with God. Through the self-giving love of Jesus, culminating with his death on the cross, God has acted to reach out and reconcile the world to himself. The source of reconciliation is God’s compassionate, merciful love, his impetus to make right what has gone wrong through human sin. The restoration of the divine-human relationship also involves the healing of relationships between human beings. Indeed, the authentic appropriation of the vertical dimension of reconciliation requires a commitment to the horizontal dimension, to the healing of the divisions and enmity among peoples. The mark of a person who has truly received God’s mercy and forgiveness is to become more merciful and forgiving in turn. The Christian community is to be the place where reconciliation is both practiced and imaged forth for others to see ■
Thomas D. Stegman, S.J. (1963–2023) was professor of New Testament, professor ordinarius, and former dean of the Clough School of Theology and Ministry at Boston College.
This excerpt from “What Does the New Testament Say about Reconciliation?” in Thomas A. Kane (ed.), Healing God’s People: Theological and Pastoral Approaches/A Reconciliation Reader (Paulist, 2013) is reprinted with permission—paulistpress.com.
“paying the penalty” will not elicit a change of heart that will embrace offenders as beloved brothers and sisters. Proverbs 17:14 highlights vigilance: “The beginning of strife is like letting out water; so stop before the quarrel breaks out.” We see in Leviticus 19:18 that, “You should love your neighbor as yourself” rather than harboring “hate in the heart” that seeks revenge. Reconciliation embraces all of the significant dimensions of salvation in the New Testament. The radical conversion and reorientation of one’s
life in baptism is carried out in the community of reconciliation. That community is summoned to exemplify forgiveness and reconciliation in the concrete relationships between its members. The community is called to share the destiny of its Lord in undertaking a ministry of reconciliation that is addressed to the whole human community (Col 1:24-29). 3 ■
Pheme Perkins is the Joseph Professor of Catholic Spirituality at Boston College, where she teaches biblical theology.
Sources for this article can be found at: bc.edu/c21reconciliation
A Promise to a FRIEND
Dunn shares the story of a promise he made to his best friend, Nick, who is battling amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Lou Gehrig's disease.
Ii went over to greece to visit with Nick, and on my last day there I said to him, “There’s something I need to tell you: I love you, and I’ve cherished every day of my 30-year friendship with you.” He said to me, “I love you, too, and I know I’m going to die, but I need you to know that I’m happy, I’m at peace, and I believe that we’ll see each other again in the Kingdom.”
His words were the most profoundly beautiful thing a friend had ever said to me. Here I was angry at the world and feeling sorry for myself, and here he was confronting the cruelest of illnesses, and somehow he was happy, he was at peace, and he was thinking about God’s Kingdom.
I left him that day and promised that I would be back to see him as soon as I could. I fulfilled my promise and
returned around six months later. Upon arriving, I noticed how much he had declined. He was confined to a bed and a chair, and his speech was now slurred. On the last day of my visit I said to him, “I can’t explain this, but I need you to tell me what I can do for you. It would do me wonders to do something for you.” He said, “There is something that I’d like you to do.” I said, “Anything, anything at all.” And he said, “I want you to go to confession.”
Confession? I was shocked. I thought he was going to ask me to run a marathon in his honor, start a scholarship, find a cure, paint his house, anything. But confession? I had not been to confession in years. I guess I just could not go there. I went to Mass faithfully every Sunday and offered my sins up to God, but I could not embrace the
Jack Dunn
Jack
“Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It’s been 20 years since my last confession, and I’m here only because I promised my best friend that I’d do this. So please forgive me. Here are my sins...”
Sacrament of Reconciliation. I was hurt and angry over the losses I had endured, and I selfishly felt that I was owed more than I was getting in return.
So I returned home, having made a promise to my terminally ill friend that I would go to confession. And I did what guys always do: I put it off. I put it off until the week before I was scheduled to return to Greece to see my friend. That Sunday before my trip, a parish priest talked at Mass about an archdiocesan initiative called The Light Is On for You, where local parishes offer the Sacrament of Reconciliation on Wednesday evenings from 6:30 to 8 p.m.
The Wednesday evening before my Thursday flight, I set out to fulfill my promise. I went to my parish in the town where I live. I walked up the stairs, still not embracing the concept, but knowing what I had to do. I entered the church and saw my pastor entering into the confessional to hear confessions. I said, “Time out. I know him. He knows me. This is too personal. This won’t work for me.”
So I left and went to a different church on the other side of my town. The format in this parish is to go into a small room, shut the door, and sit face-to-face across from the priest for an open confession. I did not like it. I thought, “This is too informal. I’m out of here.” So I left and I drove to a different town.
I went into a church in a neighboring town and was sitting in the pew, awaiting my turn to go into the confessional, when I looked to my right and suddenly saw the mother of an ex-girlfriend—a girl I had dated in college—enter the church. I thought, “I have 20 years’ worth of sins, and the mother of my ex is going to see me in confession for a half an hour!” All I could picture was her calling my ex-girlfriend and saying, “I saw that nogood former boyfriend of yours at confession last night, and he was in there for 30 minutes—30 minutes’ worth of sins. It’s a good thing you dumped him when you did!”
I got in my car, drove down the street, and eventually came to St. Anne’s Parish—St. Anne, the mother of the Blessed Mother. I walked into St. Anne’s, and as I was going up the stairs, the church lights were suddenly turned off. I looked at my watch. It was 8:30. I had blown my chance. I could not believe it. I had reneged on a promise to my friend. I was furious with myself. Then, amazingly, the parish priest looked out and realized that I was
standing on the steps. So he turned the church light back on, unlocked the door, and went into the confessional, illuminating the light above. I entered the confessional, knelt down and said, “Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It’s been 20 years since my last confession, and I’m here only because I promised my best friend that I’d do this. So please forgive me. Here are my sins...”
I let it all out—20 years’ worth of sins, regrets, mistakes, everything. And when I finished, in the kindest of voices, the priest said to me:
“You have to understand that God loves you. He loves you unconditionally and He forgives your transgressions because He made you and He understands you. God wants more than anything for you to be happy. So all this baggage that you’ve been carrying around for 20 years, let it go. Let it go, because God wants you to be free to live your life to the fullest. All He asks is that you go forth and do your best to sin no more.”
Overcome with emotion, I thanked him, and as I got up to leave, he said, “And one more thing: You have a hell of a friend.”
I cannot explain it in any other way, but I felt as if the weight of the world had been lifted from my shoulders. I felt joyous. I felt liberated from the burdens I had carried in my heart for years. I went home, and the next day I kissed my wife and my kids and flew to Greece to see my friend. Upon arriving, it was clear that he had worsened. He was very thin, and could no longer speak, but his eyes lit up when I walked in. I said, “Nick, I have something to share with you. I went to confession as you asked and I feel wonderful. I have never felt better. I will never be able to thank you for what you did for me.” And he burst into tears. ■
Jack Dunn is the associate vice president of the Office of University Communications at Boston College. He also serves as the University spokesperson.
T his article was originally published in the Spring 2015 issue of C21 Resources - Our Faith, Our Stories , and is an excerpt from an Agape Latte program talk at Boston College.
The EUCHARIST as Reconciliation
Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Ffew persons have understood the Eucharist as deeply as St. Augustine. His homilies on it are precious, particularly those he delivered to newly baptized adults who were receiving the Eucharist for the first time. In one of these he tells them that their sins are forgiven at the Eucharist:
“Next [at the Eucharist] the Lord’s Prayer is said… Why is it said before receiving the body and blood of Christ? Because perhaps on account of our human fragility our minds have imagined something which is not becoming, our eyes have seen something which is not decent, or our ears heard something which was not fitting. If perhaps such things have been kept in because of temptation and the fragility of human life, they are washed away by the Lord’s Prayer at the moment we say ‘Forgive us our trespasses’ so that we can safely approach the sacrament.”
According to Augustine, when we stand around the altar at the Eucharist as a community and sincerely pray the Lord’s Prayer, any sins we have committed are forgiven. The Eucharist is the ultimate Sacrament of Reconciliation. It is the ancient water of cleansing, now turned into the new wine of reconciliation, that purifies us so that we can enter the house and celebrate. How is this so?
In the second chapter of John’s Gospel, we have the miracle at Cana, where Jesus changes water into wine. Too often we see this simply as a gesture of hospitality: the hosts ran out of wine, Jesus felt sorry for them, and so changed six jugs of water into wine to spare them the embarrassment. Such an interpretation, however, misses the main point. Scripture scholars, Raymond Brown among them, tell us that in the early chapters of John’s Gospel there is a strong recurring theme of Jesus replacing the old with the new. That is the case here. He is replacing the old rite of cleansing with something new. What?
Key to grasping the significance of this miracle is the particular jugs of water that got changed into wine. The water that Jesus changed into wine was the wash-water, the water used to ritually cleanse yourself when you entered a house. At the door of every Jewish house there were a series of water jugs, usually six of them, which were kept filled with water. Upon entering a house, you were obliged to first stop and wash your hands and feet, both because they were usually covered with dust and
Water jars, like these, were an important part of cleansing rituals in Ancient Israel and typical of those present at the miracle of Cana.
because you were obliged, ritually, to do this. By washing in this way, you made yourself “clean” so that you could join the household and sit at table with them. What Jesus does at Cana is change this water, used for cleansing, into wine. He replaces the old rite of cleansing with something new—the Eucharist.
The Eucharist is therefore both the sacrament that celebrates unity and the sacrament that cleanses us for it. At the Eucharist, our sins are forgiven because to touch Christ is to be healed, even of sin. And we touch Christ, physically, in the Eucharist. But if this is true, if our sins are forgiven in the Eucharist, where does that leave the Catholic Sacrament of Confession? Is there still a need for explicit confession?
That we can have our sins forgiven by participating in the Eucharist in no way denigrates the need for private confession. The opposite. To touch the body of Christ is the greatest antidote to the rationalizing individualism that precisely tempts us away from explicit confession. A biblical text, the story of the woman who touches the hem of Jesus’ garment, can be helpful in understanding this. In her encounter with Jesus, we see that there are in fact two moments of healing, the initial touch and a subsequent, explicit, one-to-one conversation. Confession to a priest and forgiveness of sins through simply touching the body of Christ in the Eucharist are connected in the same way as that woman’s explicit exchange with Jesus
“The Eucharist is therefore both the sacrament that celebrates unity and the sacrament that cleanses us for it.”
is related to her initial touching of his garment. The person-to-person exchange brings the healing to a fuller moment, a fuller maturity, and a fuller peace. Explicit confession is to the Sacrament of Reconciliation what an explicit apology is to reconciliation with each other in our daily lives. Actions speak, just as words do, and we can apologize to each other simply by letting our presence speak. But something is left unfinished until an explicit apology is spoken. Mature people apologize, in words as well as in actions. Moreover, as the literature on addictions points out, there can never be a full healing of one’s past until one faces, with searing honesty, one’s sins and tells them, face to face, to another human being. Explicit, sacramental confession is an indispensable piece within the process of full reconciliation.
However, as both scripture and Augustine assure us, when we stand around an altar at Eucharist and pray the Lord’s Prayer, our sins are already forgiven. ■
Ron Rolheiser, OMI, is a priest of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate and a theologian, teacher, and award-winning author.
Used with permission of the author, Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser. He can be contacted through his website, www.ronrolheiser.com. Follow on Facebook, www.facebook.com/ronrolheiser.
PRAYER FOR RECONCILIATION
Lord Christ, help us to see what it is that joins us together, not what separates us. For when we see only what it is that makes us different, we too often become aware of what is wrong with others. We see only their faults and weaknesses, interpreting their actions as flowing from malice or hatred rather than fear. Even when confronted with evil, Lord, you forgave and sacrificed yourself rather than sought revenge. Teach us to do the same by the power of your Spirit.
—William Breault, S.J.
photo credit : Adobe Stock/furyon
“We See Light” Reconciliation Must Cost Us Something
Elizabeth Scalia
Rreconciliation is never easy— not within a confessional, nor on the streets, nor even in the quiet of one’s own heart.
Obviously, some efforts at reconciliation—whether it is a small habit of sin that is ultimately between us and God, or something larger, ingrained, and systemic, like entrenched racism or the abuse of minors too long unheeded—require something more than confession. For those habits of sin we live with every day (and too comfortably), real reconciliation requires more of us than mere admission. It requires action meant to bring about authentic change.
Pope Francis said of the Gospel reading Matthew 5:20-26, “I cannot go to the Father if I do not have peace with my brother…. One cannot talk to the Father if one cannot even speak to one’s brother.”
It is a challenge, the pope admitted: “This program is not easy, is it? Though, it is the way that Jesus tells us to keep going.”
No, it is not easy. And sometimes the way toward healing seems barely clear. Jesus tells us to be reconciled, with God and with each other. But he doesn’t tell us precisely how to do that. Yet, moments before his discourse on reconciliation, he has said to us: “You are the light of
the world”—lights that are meant to “shine before all” that God may be glorified (Matt. 5:13, 16).
Perhaps there is a hint there—the beginning of a way that starts by acknowledging the power of light, even within our poor selves. A healthy body will often be described as “glowing,” but how do we help a troubled, sickened society to become healthy, to become so reconciled and healed of our crippling and sinful sicknesses that it comes alight?
Perhaps it will require a willingness for each of us to look at one another and actively seek out the light Christ says we possess, to pray for the gift of seeing each other as Thomas Merton did for that flash of a moment, when everyone before him shone clearly with the spark of the Creator that resides in each one of us. He says as much while relating the moment in his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, written during a time of social stresses not unlike those we are experiencing today:
“Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each
other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…But this cannot be seen, only believed and ‘understood’ by a peculiar gift.”
Perhaps we should pray daily that such a gift be bestowed upon us, that when we are making our morning and evening prayers, we might include a plea to see the light in others (and in ourselves), helpfully reminding the Creator that “in your light we see light itself” (Ps. 36:10).
Sounds easy, doesn’t it?
Do not be fooled. It is a hard, hard thing to make oneself a willing witness to the light of others, particularly if we are only willing to see it in those we want to like while resolutely unwilling to see it in others—unwilling to believe that the same light that resides within us might also reside in them.
It is a hard, hard thing to look at someone we utterly hate—whether that person is a politician or a sports figure or just someone down the street from us—and think, “Holy smokes! God loves him the same way he loves me! Even him! Even her !”
Perhaps it will require a willingness for each of us to look at one another and actively seek out the light Christ says we possess, to pray for the gift of seeing each other as Thomas Merton did for that flash of a moment…
Try it. Think of someone you hate: that politician, that person at work who is disruptive, that fellow Christian who cries “heresy” on everyone, everyday. Now reconcile yourself to the fact that God loved that person into being, and loves that person still—despite all the flaws, all the sins, all the reckless, stupid things he or she says and does— just as much as God loves you.
That Christ died for that person too.
It can seem unthinkable, especially if we really, really love the way hating that person feels. It makes us roll our eyes and say (as I did at my home prayer corner recently), “Ugh! Really, God? Christ in heaven, must
I acknowledge this? Must I confess to my own awareness that you love that…that unspeakable idiot as much as you love me? Why do you make everything so hard?”
But if we’re sincere in wanting some sort of reconciliation with others, either to foment a greater peace in our own hearts or within the world, then we are fundamentally bound to see the one before us as Godbeloved, no less than ourselves—a maddening truth and something we cannot deny or apportion only to the “good” people we approve of. Jesus actually gets into that a bit later in his discourse, reminding us that “even pagans” are good to those they like. We’re supposed to be better than that.
Reconciliation, then, has to cost us something. Whether in a confessional or in our hearts (or our social media threads), we have to bring some of our own skin into the game if we are ever to help right the world by doing the daring work of seeing the light in each other through the light of the Father. If we can manage it, though—if we can acknowledge even the barest flicker of the God-given light in an “enemy”—that can be the beginning of genuine reconciliation, of real healing between human beings. ■
Elizabeth Scalia is a Benedictine Oblate, award-winning author, developmental editor for OSV Books, and blogs as “The Anchoress” at www.theanchoress.com.
This article first appeared on Word on Fire’s Evangelization & Culture Online, June 11, 2020, www.wordonfire.org/articles/fellows/ we-see-light-reconciliation-must-cost-us-something/.
I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
—Thomas Merton, Fourth and Walnut Epiphany, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
How to Move from Forgiveness to Reconciliation
Steve Cornell
Hhe said i am sorry, but it’s at least the tenth time! I don’t know what to do. I am told that it’s my Christian duty to forgive, and the Lord knows I’ve tried. But each time I forgive him, he changes for a little while and then returns to the same behavior. I have a gut feeling I am handling things the wrong way. He never really changes, and I just get angrier. What should I do?
Sound familiar? I encounter people all the time who are trying to forgive someone who has repeatedly hurt them. They know it’s their Christian duty to forgive, but they often feel they’re either being deceived or taken advantage of. They also have a disturbing sense that they’re enabling the selfish behavior of the very one they’re trying to forgive. Is this what forgiveness requires?
Is it possible to forgive someone and to withhold reconciliation? We must learn the differences between forgiveness and reconciliation. Forgiveness is always required by God, but it does not always lead to reconciliation.
FORGIVENESS AND RECONCILIATION: NOT THE SAME
Jesus clearly warned that God will not forgive our sins if we do not forgive those who sin against us (Matthew 6:14-15; Mark 11:25). It’s not that we earn God’s forgiveness by forgiving; instead, God expects forgiven people to forgive (Matthew 18:21-35). Yet forgiveness is very different from reconciliation. It’s possible to forgive someone without offering immediate reconciliation.
It’s possible for forgiveness to occur in the context of one’s relationship with God apart from contact with her offender. But reconciliation is focused on restoring broken relationships. And where trust is deeply broken, restoration is a process—sometimes, a lengthy one.
Differing from forgiveness, reconciliation is often conditioned on the attitude and actions of the offender. While its aim is restoration of a broken relationship, those who commit significant and repeated offenses must be willing to recognize that reconciliation is a process. If they’re genuinely repentant, they will recognize and accept that the harm they’ve caused takes time to heal.
In many cases, even if an offender confessed his wrong to the one he hurt and appealed for forgiveness, the offended person could justifiably say, “I forgive you, but it might take some time for me to regain trust
and restore our relationship.” The evidence of genuine forgiveness is personal freedom from a vindictive or vengeful response (Romans 12:17-21), but not always an automatic restoration of relationship.
Even when God forgives our sins, he does not promise to remove all consequences created by our actions. Yes, being forgiven, restored, and trusted is an amazing experience, but it’s important for those who hurt others to understand that their attitude and actions will affect the process of rebuilding trust. Words alone are often not enough to restore trust. When someone has been significantly hurt and feels hesitant about restoration with her offender, it’s both right and wise to look for changes in the offender before allowing reconciliation to begin.
TIMING OF RECONCILIATION
The process of reconciliation depends on the attitude of the offender, the depth of the betrayal, and the pattern of offense. When an offended party works toward reconciliation, the first and most important step is the confirmation of genuine repentance on the part of the offender (Luke 17:3). An unrepentant offender will resent your desire to confirm the genuineness of his confession and repentance. The offender may resort to lines of manipulation such as, “I guess you can’t find it in yourself to be forgiving,” or, “Some Christian you are, I thought Christians believed in love and compassion.”
Such language reveals an unrepentant heart. Don’t be manipulated into avoiding the step of confirming the authenticity of your offender’s confession and repentance. It is advisable in difficult cases to seek the help of a wise counselor, one who understands the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation. Such a counselor can help the injured person establish boundaries and define steps toward reconciliation that are restorative rather than retaliatory.
It is difficult to genuinely restore a broken relationship when the offender is unclear about his confession and repentance. We should strive to be as certain as we can of our offender’s repentance—especially in cases involving repeated offenses. Even God will not grant forgiveness to one who is insincere about his confession and repentance. The person who is unwilling to forsake his sin will not find forgiveness with God (Proverbs 28:13).
The sculpture Reconciliation, by Josefina de Vasconcellos, has become a worldwide symbol of reconciliation. Bronze casts, such as this one at the cathedral in Coventry, England, also exist in Hiroshima Peace Park, the Chapel of Reconciliation at the former Berlin Wall, and Stormont in Belfast.
Of course, only God can read hearts; we must evaluate actions. As Jesus said, “By their fruit you will recognize them” (Matthew 7:16a). We must not allow superficial appearances of repentance to control our responses. Displays of tears or appearing to be sorry must not become substitutes for clear changes in attitude and behavior. ■
Steve Cornell was the founding and senior pastor at Millersville Bible Church in Millersville, Pennsylvania, for thirty-five years.
This article is reprinted with permission from The Gospel Coalition, March 12, 2012, www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/ how-to-move-from-forgiveness-to-reconciliation/
To access the full article, which also includes Guidelines for Those Hesitant to Reconcile, please visit bc.edu/c21reconciliation.
SIGNS OF GENUINE REPENTANCE
There are seven signs that indicate the offender is genuinely repentant:
1. Accepts full responsibility for his or her actions. (Instead of: “Since you think I’ve done something wrong…” or “If I have done anything to offend you…”)
2. Welcomes accountability from others.
3. Does not continue in the hurtful behavior or anything associated with it.
4. Does not have a defensive attitude about being in the wrong.
5. Does not dismiss or downplay the hurtful behavior.
6. Does not resent doubts about their sincerity or the need to demonstrate sincerity—especially in cases involving repeated offenses.
7. Makes restitution where necessary.
The Reach of Forgiveness and Reconciliation
Stephen J. Pope
R“reconciliation ” generally refers to the rebuilding of a relationship, community, or society that has been significantly damaged by wrongdoing. People subjected to unjust treatment usually find themselves feeling resentful toward their wrongdoers. Resentment is a kind of internal moral protest that says: “I don’t deserve to be treated this way and I’m holding it against you.” Resentment is often accompanied by a desire to retaliate, especially when doing so does not come at a great cost. A resentful victim might say to herself: “I don’t deserve this kind of treatment and I’m not going to let him get away with it.” Retaliation, like resentment, can be a way of affirming one’s own worth.
Resentment can be morally legitimate. Sometimes, though, victims can feel resentment either too strongly (say, treating a minor offense as if it were major) or not strongly enough (say, not resenting a peer’s habit of making insulting comments). Retaliation for demeaning treatment can be disproportionate either by imposing too heavy a cost on the wrongdoer or by not imposing enough of a cost on the wrongdoer. Resentment and retaliation can both become destructive. Resentment can lead to bitterness and hardness of heart; retaliation can fuel ongoing cycles of mutual harm. This caution noted,
sometimes injured parties have a right to feel resentment and to impose a cost on their wrongdoers.
Forgiveness is most often described as giving up both resentment and the desire to retaliate. Human experience suggests that, other things being equal, the more profound the hurt, the harder it is to forgive; in the latter case, it is usually a process rather than a single decision.
A decisive issue here for most injured parties is whether the offender has repented for his or her wrongdoing. Repenting is a process that has five components: acknowledging the wrongdoing to oneself, feeling remorse, apologizing to the victim, trying to make amends, and undertaking a commitment not to repeat the same wrongdoing in the future. The more thoroughly these criteria are met, the stronger the repentance. Victims usually find it less difficult to forgive offenders who repudiate what they have done to them; conversely, they find it harder to forgive offenders who stubbornly insist on their innocence.
If it is right to say that injured parties can, under some circumstances, legitimately resent and want to penalize their offenders, then must they always forgive? In answering this question, it helps to distinguish appropriate from inappropriate forgiveness. Forgiveness
This tympanum by Lewis Simek adorns the main entrance to the Church of St. Peter in Porici (Prague) and symbolizes Christ's words to Peter: “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Matthew 16:19).
can be inappropriate when the injured party forgives in a way that suggests she does not take herself seriously. We can also point to cases at the other end of the moral spectrum. Supererogatory forgiveness is a decision to do what goes above and beyond what is morally required.
In addition to these two categories—questionable forgiving and heroic forgiving, respectively—might injured parties on some occasions have a moral obligation to forgive? I believe Christian ethics, somewhat like the tradition of Judaism, is best understood as requiring injured parties to forgive their truly and thoroughly repentant wrongdoers. It is best to think of this obligation as done from the love of God rather than because the repentant offender has a right to be forgiven. Rather than an exceptionless norm, however, we do best to think of forgiving repentant wrongdoers as a prima facie obligation—one that can be overridden in certain exceptional cases.
This threefold categorization— forgiving that is wrong, praiseworthy, or mandatory, respectively—contradicts the widespread impression that Christians are always required to forgive everyone, regardless of the severity of the harm done or the attitude of the wrongdoer. Jesus himself teaches his disciples: “If your brother or sister sins against you, rebuke them; and if they repent, forgive them. Even if they sin against you seven times in a day and seven times come back to you saying ‘I repent,’ you must forgive them” (Luke 17:3-4; emphasis added).
The general biblical pattern moves from Israel’s breach of the covenantal relationship to its repair: Israel sins, God then holds Israel accountable, Israel eventually comes to its senses so that God can forgive Israel and restore their relationship. Biblical stories are more complicated but the general paradigm is communicated by Jesus when he invites sinners to accept God’s forgiveness so that they can be restored to the people of God.
The Christian paradigm envisions forgiveness as a gift given by injured parties to their offenders. Forgiveness paradigmatically culminates in reconciliation, but some acts of forgiveness are non-paradigmatic in that they do not give rise to reconciliation. Forgiveness only leads to reconciliation when offended parties can renew their trust in their offenders—this is a key reason why the offender’s repentance is decisive. The risen Jesus both forgives Peter for publicly denying him and welcomes him back into their community (“Peace be with you!”).
Forgiveness only leads to reconciliation when offended parties can renew their trust in their offenders.
Jesus somehow continued to trust this quite unreliable follower. Not only that, Jesus here gives him a special authority: “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven” (John 20:21, 22). Yet when Jesus prays from the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34), reconciliation was not possible because they were nowhere close to repenting.
The beauty of forgiveness is revealed most fully in reconciliation, but a different kind of moral nobility is revealed by victims who unilaterally forgive unrepentant wrongdoers whose own self-justifying attitude renders them (at least for the time being) unqualified for reconciliation.
This sequence is clear: if you are wronged against, confront the offender; if the offender accepts the correction and takes responsibility for it, then you must always (“seven times a day”) forgive. The conditional obligation captured in this “if” sets this norm apart from two extremes: one views injured parties who withhold forgiveness from repentant wrongdoers as always morally blameworthy; the other asserts that injured parties are never required to forgive even their most profoundly repentant offenders. The first alternative is too demanding and the second not demanding enough.
This leads to the question of how forgiveness is related to reconciliation, the restoration of a right relationship (or, by extension, the building of a just relationship for the first time). Forgiveness in the Bible usually facilitates reconciliation between injured parties and their offenders.
Interpersonal reconciliation is always based on the giving and receiving of forgiveness between family members, friends, colleagues, and the like. But the same is not necessarily true of larger scale political and social forms of post-conflict reconciliation. As chair of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Archbishop Tutu liked to highlight ways in which forgiving perpetrators can liberate victims from overbearing resentment and bitterness. His critics, however, insisted that sometimes survivors affirm their own dignity by withholding forgiveness, especially when their offenders refuse to admit their guilt and apologize.
Reconciliation on all levels aims at overcoming enmity, establishing some degree of trust, and healing wounds caused by unjust actions and policies. Yet it functions differently after prolonged, large-scale conflict. It is a mistake, for example, to envision the process of national reconciliation as just like overcoming interpersonal estrangement. ■
Stephen J. Pope is professor of theological ethics at Boston College.
Restoring Family Relationships Navigating Conflict, Connection, and Care
Stephanie C. Edwards
Aas i sit on my mother ’ s couch , I feel my teenage rebellion rise up inside me—despite the fact that I’m closer to the stereotypical age for a midlife crisis than the age at which I passed my driver’s test. The complexity of our life together, and our various roles in its many stages, is further muddied by long-term mental health obstacles. The all-too-common mother-daughter conflict is surrounded by immense pain, seemingly uncontrollable suffering, and what each person has done to survive these throes.
Mental health struggles are the most common longterm health problem on Earth,1 and more than one in five US adults struggles with mental illness every day.2 While these challenges range from manageable to severe, it is likely that you or someone in your family falls into this broad category. Understanding the prevalence of mental health obstacles is a necessary piece of the puzzle when we think about reconciliation—particularly in our families.
Reconciliation, in its most basic form, asks us to “restore right relationship”—first with God, and with those with whom we are in conflict. Despite its beatific intent, and the virtues fostered in the practice, enacting real reconciliation is a difficult, humbling, uncomfortable process. When mental illness is present, pursuing this good can feel impractical and fruitless. When these mental challenges are further intertwined with our families, even knowing where to begin reconciliation can feel impossible.
Here, key principles from mental health best practices can offer necessary assistance to our faith-based call to reconciliation: readiness, decentering, boundaries, and self-awareness. 3
READINESS What steps can I take to honestly assess my situation for reconciliation?
The first principle when considering reconciliation is readiness. Healing is complex, even when all our other circumstances are ideal. While you may feel called to reconciliation, another family member may not be ready, or may not be in a state of health that allows for full engagement. It is all too easy to replicate old patterns with our closest relatives, and we must recognize that there are real limits to how prepared we are to engage in a practice that asks us to transform ourselves and our relationships.
As frustrating as it may be, being realistic about readiness, and allowing ourselves to slow down a process we may yearn for, is essential. Authentic reconciliation is as much about the past as it is about forward-looking discussions that imagine, and begin to create, a healed future. If someone is not ready for this change, and/or is not open to asking for the support of qualified caring professionals (therapists, doctors, religious leaders, mediators) in the process, the time may not be right for reconciliation.
Further, the outcome of reconciliation is not guaranteed. We must ask ourselves: What resources do all family members have if reconciliation “fails,” or fails to satisfy? Will everyone remain safe and cared for during and after reconciliation? Even if reconciliation is desired by all parties, what will we do if patterns of harm are not changed? As theologian John Swinton reminds us, God’s time is slow, and rather than rush toward resolution, we often have to find patience and grace in the process of readying for reconciliation—preparing our hearts for healing that may only come in God’s time.4
DECENTERING —Am
I really ready to listen, as well as speak?
Decentering is the practice of intentionally foregrounding the experience of “the other” rather than yourself. In family reconciliation that includes mental challenges, it also means recognizing that, most often, we are not the cause nor the cure for mental health. We are not each other’s savior, even while we are (or can be) each other’s comfort, resource, and loving home. While our families may be the original location of harm (I refer back to readiness if this is the case), decentering my interpretation of events or a relationship to deeply listen to another is central to reconciliation.
When involving mental challenges, our decentering capacity must grow even larger. Can I listen without judgment or anger to stories that, while true to the speaker, may have no ground in fact? Am I able to hear another’s pain and longing, no matter the form in which they tell it?5 The practice of “deep listening,” where each party is allowed to speak for a certain amount of time and the listener is not allowed to comment or question
the speaker, is a powerful tool for practicing our ability to enter reconciliation with truly open hearts.6
BOUNDARIES—Am I able to name my limits in reconciliation?
Decentering is balanced with the practice of healthy, strong boundaries. Here, we must be able to name and accept the impact of words and actions, at times over the intent behind them—both mine and those of others. In reconciliation that includes mental challenges, holding boundaries means we must be able to identify ways of acting and speaking that are tied to mental health, and how these behaviors nonetheless impact the boundaries that protect our emotions, sense of self, and even our safety.
It is often very easy to let family members exceed behavioral limits we place on others with whom we interact. Your ability to calmly name and then enforce your boundaries within reconciliation is a strength that provides clarity and healthy limits to the process. The same goes for when you need to hear and respect another’s boundaries. Such limits are not reflective of a lack of love, grace, or mercy. In fact, your capacity to do the work to clarify your own, and another’s, boundaries is an expression of the care, commitment, and honesty you bring to reconciliation.
SELF-AWARENESS—Do I know myself well enough to enter reconciliation?
Despite its powerful action in our lives, reconciliation is difficult and messy. Often such efforts harm individuals
while they simultaneously heal the social or family unit.7 As such, awareness of our “buttons” (the ones our families know how to push!), our ever-changing capacity for difficult conversations, and our emotional and physical needs is essential. This self-awareness leads directly to voicing and following through on actions that correspond to what we need to be our best, most loving selves. Becoming aware of yourself and the care you need is some of the best work you can do to prepare for and participate in reconciliation.
Ultimately, reconciliation cannot be forced, and family ties cannot be the final arbiter of staying in a harmful environment or relationship. Similarly, mental challenges cannot be used to excuse or continue harmful behaviors. In this complexity, hope persists. Our faith testifies to a God that exceeds understanding, and whose power of redemption is infinite. Through following these basic guidelines for reconciliation, we may be able to safely open ourselves to transformation we never thought possible. ■
Stephanie C. Edwards is director of the Boston Theological Interreligious Consortium as well as adjunct professor of theology at Boston College.
Sources for this article can be found at: bc.edu/c21reconciliation
Going to CONFESSION A Memory
James M. O’Toole
Tthe church always seemed different when the boy went to confession. To begin with, most of the lights were off, a shadowy contrast to the brightness of Sunday mornings. Off in a corner, a solitary red sanctuary lamp flickered, and there were several racks of small votive candles, only about half of them lit at any one time, just inside the altar rail. The natural light of the afternoon sun came through the stained glass windows from outside, and he could stare at the radiant scenes, imagining h imself into the stories they depicted: the adolescent Jesus instructing the astonished elders in the Temple, the hesitant Peter sinking into the sea while Jesus stood serenely on the waves. The smells of Sunday were gone too, the pungent incense and the sweetness of flowers having grown faint after a week’s time. Now, his nose detected only the varnish that made the wooden pews shine, particularly on the ends, each one topped by an ornate carved fleur-de-lis. Above all, the place was quiet. No matter how many people, young and old, were there—as few as a dozen, as many as fifty—they all kept silent, absorbed in their own thoughts and averting their eyes from one another. It was a curious sensation: somehow, he was alone in public.
He took his place in a pew on a side aisle, kneeling to say some silent prayers. Periodically, he would get
up and move to the pew ahead of him once that one had been vacated by its previous occupant, everyone successively inching closer to the small enclosure, like an oversize box, that stood out from the side wall. There was a door in the middle of it, and on either side an open archway, covered by a curtain, into which the waiting parishioners disappeared, one after another, reemerging a few minutes later. By the time he got to the head of the line, the boy’s random thoughts had begun to focus. He had decided—rehearsed, really—what he was going to say to the priest who, he knew, occupied the center compartment. Just as important, he had decided what he was not going to say. When it came his turn, he walked purposefully, went in behind the curtain, and knelt down. He could hear the little click of the electrical switch in the kneeling pad that turned on the light above his entryway outside, alerting others to his presence so they would not burst in unawares. He waited in silence, conscious of indistinct murmurs as the priest talked with the person in the opposite stall. He knew he was not supposed to make out what they were saying, and he was seldom tempted to try, more concerned with last thoughts of what was about to happen. Then, at once, the wooden panel covering the window that separated him from the priest slid open,
photo credit : Andrew Craig '17, MATM '19.
Confessionals behind the wooden sculpture of Jesus in St. Mary's Chapel, Boston College.
“…without dwelling on the idea or even quite understanding how, they nevertheless believed that something important had just happened to them…”
sometimes with a soft bang. The window was covered with an opaque plastic shield, making it possible for him and the priest to hear but not to see one another. They were both in darkness.
The boy began by crossing himself and reciting the words he had first learned in the second grade: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two weeks since my last confession, and these are my sins.” Then he launched into his brief catalog, specifying the things he had done wrong and the number of times, according to his best recollection, he had done each of them. They were pretty much the same from month to month, year to year. He didn’t snitch money from his mother’s pocketbook, and he mostly followed his father’s good example in not cursing, but there were always squabbles with siblings and schoolmates to report. Over time, he had developed some lawyerly skills, consolidating a number of miscellaneous offenses into the single category of disobedience. His reasoning, he thought, was ironclad. His parents may not have known that he was doing these things, but they would have forbidden them if they had; this constituted a form of implicit disobedience. Better to confess that than to recount potentially more graphic details. When he had finished his list, again following the formula, he concluded by saying that he was sorry “for these and all the sins of my past life.” The priest might then ask a clarifying question or two—the boy’s later memory was that this did not happen very often—and he would usually give a word of advice or encouragement to do better in the future. After that, the priest assigned what was called a penance, a kind of punishment, far from onerous but necessary for forgiveness to be complete. Finally, as the boy recited aloud the prayer known as the Act of Contrition, the priest whispered the words of absolution in hasty, mumbled Latin, which the boy could not really hear and would not have understood if he could. He also vaguely discerned the priest’s silhouette making the sign of the cross in his direction. With that, it was over. The slide closed again, and the boy went back outside, his place taken by the next person who had been waiting, setting off another chain reaction in the pews.
Not looking around, he walked up to the altar rail at the front of the church, knelt there, and silently performed his penance. Usually this consisted of some combination of the fundamental Catholic prayers, the “Our Father” and the “Hail Mary,” repeated for perhaps three to five times each, depending on the priest’s instructions. If he had a dime in his pocket, he
might slip it into the slot and then light one of the votive candles; there was always a little thrill that came from playing with fire in this permissible way. Then he was done. He went back outside to wait for those others in the family who had come along that day. They did not speak about what they had just done, simply going home to Saturday night supper. But without dwelling on the idea or even quite understanding how, they nevertheless believed that something important had just happened to them, that they were different now from what they had been earlier in the day, that they were reconciled with God in spite of their human failings. It was a remarkable thing. ■
James M. O'Toole is University historian and the Clough Millenium professor of history emeritus at Boston College.
I am sorry for my sins with all my heart. In choosing to do wrong and failing to do good, I have sinned against you whom I should love above all things. I firmly intend, with your help, to do penance, to sin no more, and to avoid whatever leads me to sin. Our Savior Jesus Christ suffered and died for us. In his name, my God, have mercy.
How to Forgive a Stranger Parking Lessons & the Power of Perspective
Laura Kelly Fanucci
Wwhen we were leaving the hospital after our twins died, my husband, Franco, pulled up to the entrance to help me ease into the car from the wheelchair. Then he went back inside to get something we’d left behind.
While he was gone, a car pulled up from around the back of the hospital entrance, a driveway I’d never seen before. The driver tried to turn into the circle entrance, but without realizing it, Franco had parked with our front tires blocking the exit.
So she blared the horn and glared at me.
I looked up from where I was weeping. It took me several seconds to figure out what was going on: a road I’d never seen, an angry driver, our car blocking her way (surely a sign that all was not right with my meticulous parker of a spouse).
I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t drive because I’d just had a C-section. I tried to apologize with exaggerated expressions and explain with hand signals that the driver was coming back and we’d leave as soon as we could.
I rolled down the window in the freezing February wind to call to her, but she shook her head, clenched the steering wheel, and glared at me. Snarled, actually— teeth bared, eyes narrowed, furious hand smacking the car horn again and again and again.
I buried my face in my hands and wept as she raged. My babies’ bodies were in the morgue. We were leaving
the hospital empty-handed. And here was the cruelty of the unfeeling world, blaring its blind fury at me.
Only years later could I come to see that horrible scene from another vantage point.
She, too, was leaving the hospital. Pain or grief or anger could have been her story, much the same as mine. She might have been stuck there after her own worst day, in disbelief that the universe would pin her into this horrible place by a stranger’s careless parking.
When we make ourselves the protagonist of every story, we forget that everyone else is doing the same.
That awful day I wept the whole way home—wept for my children, wept for my wounded self, wept for the world that would never understand my grief. But in my pain I was unable to understand another too.
We were both stuck.
Believe me, part of me still wants to yell at that woman. I can be a lousy pacifist of a Christian, despite my daily scrappy climb toward love. But when I see her hell-bent face in my memory now, I start to turn to curiosity, which is the soft soil of compassion.
What if she and I had been able to speak? Could we have seen we were both in an impossible place? Was her story closer to mine than I realized? Might our hard edges have melted enough to let each other pass unharmed?
“ When we make ourselves the protagonist of every story, we forget that everyone else is doing the same.”
R ight now I sense our collective rage on the roads, our toxic mix of grief and pain, our fury at being misunderstood by the other side. Sometimes we are the raging driver in the car; sometimes we are the weeping passenger in pain.
It takes a heap of humility and hope and hard work to remember everyone is only human.
But forgiveness—even years later, even to a stranger I’ll never see again—has brought freedom. I only know a handful of ways to help make a gentler world, and curiosity and compassion and kindness are among the first steps.
Whom else might I need to forgive? What freedom could come from release?
Where in your life might you need to do the same? ■
Laura Kelly Fanucci is an author, speaker, retreat leader, and founder of Mothering Spirit, an online gathering place on parenting and spirituality.
This story was originally published in The Holy Labor (2021). To learn more about Laura’s work or to subscribe to this Substack, visit: laurakellyfanucci.com
The POWER of LOVE
Unconditional love (agape) is an essential element to healing, forgiveness, and the reconciliation process. In an Agape Latte program presentation at Boston College, theology professor Fr. Michael Himes (1947–2022) spoke to students about the power of love. The following is an excerpt from this talk:
over time , my mother began to show the unmistakable signs of dementia. She didn’t know that she wasn’t recognizing anybody. And I would ask her, “Do you know who I am?” And she would really scrutinize me and then say, “I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name, but I do know that you’re someone I loved very much.”
Well, I’ve always said to my brother Ken (a Franciscan friar) that Mother was the best theologian in the family, that the two of us were just amateurs compared to her, because she got it exactly right. You may forget everything else, everything else in your life may disappear. You may forget even who loved you and how they loved you. But you never totally forget having loved someone else. You may forget being loved, but you never forget loving, because it is the most central, the most important, the most fundamental of all activities, not being loved, but loving.
That’s what family gives us an intimate chance to do, in circumstances that may be very supportive or very painful, that we have the opportunity to give ourselves, to learn how to give ourselves to one another wisely and courageously and with tremendous forgiveness and deep acceptance. If you learn that, you’ve learned everything that you need to know. If you learn everything else and you never find that out, you’ve missed what it is to be a human being, because human beings are called to be the people who do what God is. God is agape, and we get to enact it. That is the most extraordinary statement about being a human being that I know.
Originally published in Catholic Families: Carrying Faith Forward, the spring 2015 issue of C21 Resources magazine.
photo credit : Tomas Ryant
JUSTICE AFTER WAR: The Pursuit of Political Healing
David Kwon
Ddoes a war really end once fighting stops? Even after battles are over, the effects of war can last for generations. Consider a postwar society where people continue to harm each other for revenge or other reasons, all of which lead to a dysfunctional society and threaten human security. As wounded bodies lie in the streets again and people fear recurring violence, we must ask how best to establish a just and sustainable peace following violent conflict.
According to both the Peace Agreements Database (PA-X) at the University of Edinburgh and the Peace Accords Matrix (PAM) at the Kroc Institute of the University of Notre Dame, while partial peace accords, such as ceasefires, have an 85% rate of conflict relapse, comprehensive peace accords, which go beyond the end of violence to include human security and political reconciliation, have a 14% rate of conflict relapse. For example, if we want to preserve the sovereign nation of Ukraine and prevent further human suffering, a comprehensive peace accord could be a more just, legitimate, and effective direction than its counterpart at least from a jus post bellum ( jpb, postwar justice and peace) perspective.
There is a wide range of discourse on jpb ethics. One popular approach is the restricted, or minimalist, position, grounded in the just war tradition. Historically, t his tradition has focused on two categories, jus ad bellum (right to wage war) and jus in bello (just conduct in war). However, growing attention is now given to how war ends and what follows, particularly the moral
quality of postwar reconstruction as a determinant of a war’s over justness. Within this context, some scholars highlight jus terminare bellum —the principles guiding the responsible termination of conflict or the responsible use of force to end hostilities—as a distinct phase. While jus terminare bellum addresses how a war is concluded, jpb focuses on the postwar transition and the establishment of a just peace in the immediate aftermath of war. T hough related, they mark separate but complementary aspects of just war theory.
Another emerging approach is the extended, or maximalist, position, which seeks for a broad comprehension of postwar justice that may include various civil society peacebuilding actors to support reconstruction, so as to ensure a comprehensive peace accord that aims for human security and political reconciliation. Hence, jpb is a set of legal, political, and moral principles that guide the transition from war to peace as it includes the establishment of just policing (e.g., fair law enforcement ensuring safety for both peacekeeping and nation building), the establishment of just punishment (e.g., holding c riminals accountable while allowing rehabilitation), and the establishment of just political participation (e.g., inclusive governance for a stable society). As the twentyfirst century’s postwar conflicts in the Middle East, Central Africa, the Balkans, and elsewhere wind down, we have witnessed that in the immediate aftermath of war, there has been little or no policing, punishment, or avenues for political participation to protect the lives of people, especially those most vulnerable. Furthermore,
photo credit : UN
Photo/Marco Dormino
United Nations police officers talk with local children as part of larger peacekeeping missions to understand the needs of a community in Haiti.
the need for jpb scholars and practitioners across various disciplines to elaborate and apply norms of postwar peacebuilding to assessment of reconstruction policies—of just policing, just punishment, and just political participation—have grown more apparent. Therefore, a more balanced understanding of jpb must pay direct attention to the elements comprising human security in a postwar context as well as the quest for political reconciliation. Certainly, reconciliation ought to be among the norms just actors employ as long as it serves the jpb ’s primary and foremost mission of human security.
Human security is the most fundamental characteristic included within peace accords and is found in 85% of the accords listed on PA-X: “Beyond a suspension of hostilities and affiliated prohibited actions, human security provisions deal with collaborative endeavors such as disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of insurgent forces, and the reform of existing security forces.” But also, as emphasized with the importance of comprehensive peace accords, long-term peace cannot be achieved through punishment and security measures alone; rather, it must include a commitment to reconciliation. This viewpoint shifts the f ocus from state-centric approaches to justice toward a more inclusive and human-centered vision of postwar recovery. I want to highlight the tendency of postwar societies to focus on legal retribution and security enforcement, often at the expense of social healing and reconciliation, which can perpetuate cycles of violence. An example of this is the post-invasion Iraq strategy, which excluded former Ba’ath party members and other Sunnis from governance, ultimately fueling insurgency and prolonged instability. Reconciliation is not merely about moving on but addressing wounds that, if left untreated, may continue to fester and divide societies. It is not about excusing past crimes but rather creating an environment where former enemies can coexist and rebuild trust.
i n the monotheistic religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, where pursuing justice demands political reconciliation through mercy and peace. He is inspired by advocates of restorative justice, who typically look beyond modern Western law and justice to the ubuntu ethic of sub-Saharan Africa, sulh rituals in the Islamic tradition, and certain strands of Christian theology, especially both the historic peace church tradition and the recent Catholic nonviolence and just peacemaking movements. He proposes an array of practices that seek to restore right relationships. These practices are composed of six more nonviolent-leaning jpb elements: the building of socially just institutions, acknowledgment of suffering caused, reparations, accountability, apology, and forgiveness. These elements are independent and complementary. The ultimate intention of the ethic of political reconciliation is not only to redress a different set of wounds of political injustice in a distinct and nonviolent way but also to restore a dimension of human flourishing and just political order.
As emphasized with the importance of comprehensive peace accords, long-term peace cannot be achieved through punishment and security measures alone; rather, it must include a commitment to reconciliation.
Further, Christian ethicists Mark Allman and Tobias Winright categorize reconciliation as one of the four jpb phases that function as restorative justice—transforming the relationships of the belligerents from hostility to tolerance, leading to postwar justice tempered by mercy. This restorative justice transforms relationships from hostility to peace. Political scientist Daniel Philpott develops it into the notion of political reconciliation rooted
Political reconciliation must coexist with human security to restore justice and social harmony. Plainly, human security is fundamental but also interdependent to political reconciliation as it paves the way for long-term social restoration of participatory government and cooperative i nstitutions. As introduced in my book Justice after War, if human security is fulfilled, a long-term effort more than a minimalist version of jpb must be imposed. Efforts include “calling upon transitional justice, moving from the phase in which armed forces are in charge of just policing to the phase in which a non-military civilian force, namely police, is in charge of just policing.” Accordingly, postwar policies should focus on securing human d ignity and political participation before attempting broader societal transformations. While idealistic models of postwar justice often aim for full democratic reconstruction, I believe that in the immediate aftermath of war, basic security and trust building must be a priority. This idea is very relevant, considering how high the failure rate of peace accords is. Many of these agreements fail due to an overemphasis on institutional reform without addressing various levels of security and reconciliation, including grassroots and local community based. ■
David Kwon is assistant professor of theology and religious studies at Seattle University. He is the author of Justice after War: Jus Post Bellum in the 21st Century (Catholic University of America Press, 2023).
Building Bridges Migration and Conversion
Kristin E. Heyer
Ppope francis ’ gestures of solidarity with migrants were central to his papacy, from his repentance in the “graveyard of wrecks” of Lampedusa to his lived example returning from Lesbos with refugee families.1 His bridgebuilding theology is evident in his written reflections on migration as well. He underscored structures of injustice that treat migrants like pawns on a chessboard and joined repentance from harmful idolatries with a recognition of our fundamental relatedness in light of the harm borders wreak.
Francis’ initial embrace of a Church for the poor became a continuous refrain, reverberating in his charge to the Church as field hospital and summons, rooted in the Gospel, to a revolution of tenderness. In Evangelii gaudium, Francis warned against the danger of dwelling in the realm of ideas and rhetoric alone, insisting on the priority of reality: “We want to enter fully into the fabric of society, sharing the lives of all, listening to their concerns, helping them materially and spiritually in their needs, rejoicing with those who rejoice, weeping with those who weep; arm in arm with others, we are committed to building a new world” (no. 269). Hence a praxis of justice and mercy for migrants must be not only mindful of the dynamics of social sin and complicity but concretely grounded in practical encounters across difference.
global concern, a culture in which “good fences make good neighbors” due to isolationist fears significantly hinders bridges toward common goods. Fear of the other is easily mass-marketed; mutual understanding across difference is more difficult to realize.
To “become islands of mercy in a sea of indifference,” 2 Christian leaders must forge common ground across difference and yet be unafraid to condemn destructive policies and practices that harm children, separate families, and roll back historic protections. A bridgebuilding hospitality that welcomes the least may also entail prophetic resistance: think of Bishop McElroy insisting “we must all be disruptors” at the US Regional World Meeting of Popular Movements in 2017 or Cardinal Joseph Tobin accompanying a New Jersey grandfather to his ICE hearing that same year.
To "become islands of mercy in a sea of indifference," Christian leaders must forge common ground across difference and yet be unafraid to condemn destructive policies and practices…
This commitment to bridge-building for the common good swims against significant cultural tides beyond antiimmigrant sentiment, each of which hardens resistance to communitarian claims. The all-American credo that we pull up our bootstraps and make our own fate is as entrenched as it is incompatible with the reality that we share each other’s fate. The Catholic conception of the common good radically challenges a culture that prioritizes economic efficiency over solidarity with the weak and marginalized, or narrow national interest over
Preaching and advocacy should frame our complicity in generating migration flows rather than treating this as an unexpected “crisis” or “invasion.” For example, it should expose how consumers directly benefit from underpaying for goods and services and politicians benefit from unfounded scapegoating. In drawing attention to relevant history and complicity in this way, Catholic leaders can appropriately frame a response to refugees in terms of human rights and restorative justice, not optional largesse. In particular, they should remind people in the pews that the Catholic social tradition makes a preferential option for the vulnerable, not a preferential option for the innocent. Catholic communities can also humanize the perceived “onslaught” of refugees with parish-based outreach programs, testimony sharing, and educational programming. They have an opportunity to connect biblical journeys of migration with those undertaken by desperate asylum seekers today.
Unsheltered migrants wait for bed space to open for the evening in the gymnasium at Sacred Heart Church after crossing the Rio Grande into the United States in El Paso, Texas (2022).
Catholic parishes are one of few places that minister to people on all sides of the immigration issue. In terms of recommendations for fostering difficult dialogues on this topic, the following practical recommendations are offered for consideration:
1. Guard against xenophobic rhetoric, scapegoating, and conspiracy theorizing. Reasonable people can disagree about border policies without demonizing immigrants or one another. Counteract myths about immigrants and refugees while remembering that our own “deep stories” can tempt us to select facts, too. Be mindful that migrants may be in particular need of allies to amplify their voices amid climates of increased fear and intimidation.
2. B reak through not only “soap bubbles” of indifference but also insulating echo chambers. Risk d ifficult conversations with family members and colleagues with whom you disagree and try to identify common values. Too often we “agree to disagree” and remain confirmed in our perspectives by selective news and social media feeds, avoiding underlying differences at the root of immigration disputes. Participate in parish or other community programming that takes you outside of your typical social circles or comfort zone.
3. Avoid amnesia at national and personal levels alike. Get curious about your own immigration family histories and how they have shaped your
attitudes regarding the current situation. Invite others to do the same. Investigate how your present habits—purchasing, eating, child care, voting practices—impact the well-being of migrants and make a change. Pressure your elected officials and goods/service providers to do the same.
In the southern Mediterranean, Pope Francis shared in the grief and anguish of forced migrants—moved by t he humanity of the Eritreans he met and provoked by the inhumanity of those numb to their plight. May we too repent of our complicity and move out of our comfort zones to “become islands of mercy in a sea of indifference.” ■
Kristin E. Heyer holds the Joseph Chair in Theology at Boston College, where she is professor of theological ethics.
The article is an excerpt from “Becoming Islands of Mercy in a Sea of Indifference: Migration, Social Sin, and Conversion,” in Thomas Kelly and Robert Pennington (eds.), Bridge Building: Pope Francis’ Practical Theological Approach (Herder & Herder, 2020).
Sources for this article can be found at: bc.edu/c21reconciliation
photo credit :
Jim Urquhart for NPR.
The Heart of DIPLOMACY
Peter G. Martin
Aarriving early on a monday morning at the National Foreign Affairs Training Center in Arlington, Virginia, I did not know exactly what to expect. I was there with 49 other new U.S. Foreign Service Officers for training to prepare us for our new careers as U.S. diplomats. Over the eight-week course, my classmates and I learned many things about the way the State Department and Foreign Service worked, how embassies and consulates were structured, and how we would be assigned to our language training and foreign postings. We even had a session on how to “work a room” at a diplomatic reception and gracefully extricate ourselves from an endless conversation. (After having accompanied me on many long evenings on the diplomatic circuit, my wife has told me that I should have paid better attention to that one.)
Despite all these lessons, the instructors in Arlington could not really teach us how to practice diplomacy— that we learned only through years in the field. And through these experiences, I have become convinced that the key to successful diplomacy is the promotion of reconciliation, finding common ground with others. Now, this is more easily said than done. As Foreign Service Officers, our marching orders are always to promote U.S. foreign policy interests. Sometimes confrontation is necessary in order to preserve those interests. But I learned over the course of my career that following the guiding principles of reconciliation would lead to the most positive results in our international dealings. Here are four of these principles.
1. BUILD PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS
The ambassador in my first Foreign Service posting was notorious for coming into the embassy’s political section where we worked and asking with a staged note of exasperation, “What are all of you doing here?” (We thought we were working hard on important tasks!) He told us he never wanted to come into the section in the middle of the day and see us there. We needed to be out meeting local government officials, university professors, leaders in business, as well as ordinary people on the street. “You could just as well be sitting in an office in Washington doing whatever you’re doing here,” he would say. He was right. Only by taking the time to get to know a host country’s people, ideally in the local language, will you get to understand more deeply the country where you are serving—and pass that knowledge on to Washington. The more thoroughly we—diplomats and foreign policy practitioners—understand our partners,
the more effectively we can build bridges on issues that might otherwise divide us.
2. LEARN TO LISTEN
Diplomats love to talk. We are told to argue for our priorities, explain what makes our country tick, and to be the “voice of the United States.” When we give interviews or formal speeches in public we have to be “on message.” But focusing so intently on our interests, we can talk past the other side, especially as representatives of a global superpower. The most effective diplomacy comes about when both sides are really listening to each other.
When I was assigned as a diplomat at the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See, I once found myself sitting across the table from a group of Dinka Elders from South Sudan at the headquarters of the Community of Sant’Egidio, an international Catholic organization based in Italy. The Community had invited the Dinkas to Rome to discuss how they could play a constructive role in their country, where violence and poverty threatened the future of all who lived there. Sant’Egidio had asked me to join the talks in order to signal U.S. support for the initiative.
At first, I was concerned that the members of the Community guiding the discussions failed to promote the common Sant’Egidio/U.S. view of the situation on the ground. The Dinkas seemed to monopolize the first several hours of the talks. But it became clear that the key to this dialogue was for us to listen to their concerns first and show an understanding of their reality.
“I have learned that the key to successful diplomacy is the promotion of reconciliation, finding common ground with others. ”
4. PROMOTE SECURITY
In due time, members of the Community and I made the points we needed to make, and the exchange turned out to be constructive.
3. REMEMBER THE HISTORY
Poland in the late 1990s was a dynamic society that, on the surface, seemed to be ready to move on from its Communist past. Businesses were growing, everyone was learning English, and Poland was about to join NATO. My job was to report to Washington on Polish society and politics, giving the policy-makers and analysts in DC input as they charted the course of U.S. foreign policy in this newly liberated land.
But while the policy of the United States was to assist the growth of Poland’s democratic society and help it achieve its goal of integration with Western institutions, the process became complicated, as many Poles felt that there had been no clear reckoning with recent history. How many of those profiting from the new Polish economy had collaborated with the Communist authorities? W hich government leaders, now proudly post-Communist, had only a few years earlier supported the former regime? Without an honest reconciliation with the past, it was difficult for many to move forward. The movement that sought to respond to this challenge, lustracja , was complicated and incomplete. It also had unintended victims. However, it did promote important and necessary conversations in Polish society, conversations that t he United States needed to learn from in order to work more effectively with its new international partner.
After the Balkan wars of the 1990s, the United States worked to advance reconciliation in the region, a difficult process after so much bloodshed. Many initiatives aimed to help the people of the region move forward from conflict, but before any rapprochement could take place, people had to feel safe. As U.S. Department of State liaison for United Nations peacekeeping operations in Kosovo and Bosnia from 2001–2003, I worked w ith a number of countries joining the United States to send civilian police and troops to the region. Previous UN forces had failed to stop the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica, so countries could have been hesitant to wade back into the conflict in this way. These deployments were also costly to the UN and to NATO—and sometimes dangerous for the peacekeepers. However, the investment by the sending countries was crucial to create an atmosphere in which peace and understanding might grow. Previously warring populations had to feel some relief from the daily, oppressive threat of violence in order to take the first steps forward toward coexistence in a common state. The record of the peacekeepers i n those post-war years was far from perfect, but their contribution to security helped create a path toward stability—and reconciliation.
I n today’s globalized, interconnected societies, we see that war, poverty, and disease in any part of the world will inevitably adversely affect all of us in some way. Seeking reconciliation among different groups, finding common ground, and cooperating to face the world’s great problems give us the best opportunity for long-term success and durable peace. Strong allies make for good partners in trade and security. People lifted out of warfare and poverty are more likely to form lawabiding, stable governments whose territories will not become havens for terrorist organizations.
One overarching lesson I learned back in my diplomatic orientation has always rung true and is important to mention today: a robust, professional, non-partisan U.S. Foreign Service is the best tool the United States has to create opportunity for peace and prosperity at home and abroad.
Peter G. Martin, special assistant to the president at Boston College, was a U.S. Foreign Service Officer for 23 years, serving in various posts overseas and in Washington, DC. He is the chairperson of the Steering Committee of BC’s Church in the 21st Century Center and teaches in BC’s International Studies Program.
A Path Toward Healing and Justice in the Church
Kate Jackson-Meyer
Tthe church has yet to fully heal the wounds of clergy sexual abuse and its coverup. The Final Document of the Synod states: “The need within the Church for healing, reconciliation and the rebuilding of trust has resounded at every stage of the synodal process, particularly in light of so many scandals related to different types of abuse.”1 The bishops write, “The Church needs to listen with special attention and sensitivity to the voices of victims and survivors of sexual, spiritual, economic, power and conscience abuse by members of the clergy or persons with Church appointments. Listening is a fundamental element of the path to healing, repentance, justice and reconciliation.” 2 Synodal documents from the United States reveal that the U.S. Church must still address, especially, the enduring wounds of clergy sexual abuse and its coverup: “The sin and crime of sexual abuse has eroded not only trust in the hierarchy and the moral integrity of the Church, but also created a culture of fear that keeps people from entering into relationship with one another and thus from experiencing the sense of belonging and connectedness for which they yearn.”3
But what does healing around this look like and is reconciliation for such a tragedy possible? Joshua Snyder defines reconciliation in the Christian view: “the reestablishment of right relationship with God, oneself, and one’s neighbor requires the triple dimension of truth, justice and forgiveness.”4 Following this, reconciliation after the deep wounds of clergy abuse and its coverup requires that the Church commit to restoring right relationships with victim/survivors and their families and the whole Church by creating structures for unearthing the truth and upholding justice in order to create pathways for those who desire to walk toward forgiveness and reconciliation. Since 2002, when the Boston Globe Spotlight Team exposed the clergy abuse crisis and its coverup in Boston, we have continued to learn of the extent of this tragedy in the United States and around the world. 5 The USCCB responded in 2002 by introducing what became known as the “Dallas Charter,” which set up safeguarding protections and guidelines for how to respond to allegations and initiated the John Jay College of Criminal Justice to provide a nationwide investigation, which was released in 2004. 6 But the U.S. Church has continued to be unmoored by additional waves of allegations, including the 2017 revelation of abuses done by Cardinal Theodore Edgar McCarrick and the 2018 Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report that documents over one thousand cases of abuse.7 And there is growing awareness of how abuse within Native, Latino, and Black communities has
yet to be fully acknowledged and reckoned with.8 Abuse is not unique to the U.S.; investigations and revelations have occurred across the globe.9
The pain of victim/survivors is unfathomable, and the effects of abuse can manifest on mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual levels, including what Brian Clites describes as “soul murder,” and what Thomas Doyle describes as “spiritual trauma.”10
Repair efforts have been ongoing in the U.S. and around the world. The USCCB’s National Review Board actively works to prevent sexual abuse on a national level and diocesan and religious review boards exist throughout the country. Monetary settlements have been common globally, while holistic approaches have varied from restorative justice healing circles supported by bishops to various lay-led support groups.11 And there have been numerous papal apologies.12
Yet, more must be done in the U.S. and around the world to heal these wounds. The recent “Annual Report” of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors includes testimonies from victim/survivors from the Americas revealing the healing work that lies ahead for the Church. Survivors express the need for transparent and empathetic responses: “We are very specific when we show our wounds, but the Church’s response is not concrete; it is cold, vague or none at all.” And survivors explain how the Church herself must heal: “If to us as victims the Church does not take care of us, and to our families even less, how can those domestic Churches be recovered, if it is the same Church that closed the doors to them?” The report describes two phases for reckoning with abuse: safeguarding and healing. They explain that “[b]oth transitions require practices of truth-telling, justice, reparations, and guarantees of nonrecurrence through personal and institutional reform,” and to do this they have adopted “the framework of conversional justice” rooted in those concepts as understood theologically. As the report powerfully proclaims, healing requires caring for victim/ survivors and addressing the impact this has had on the whole Church.13
As the Church reflects on how to implement these commitments, I propose that Clergy Abuse Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) are one way to embody the pillars while centering the needs of victim/ survivors and inviting the People of God to stand in solidarity with them.14 Truth and Reconciliation Commissions are political tools that have been used in conflict areas as a way forward after war and strife.15 They are generally
hope (anchor), and charity (heart).
commissioned for a specific period of time to address particular harms and to produce a report of their learnings with recommendations for further healing and institutional changes. At their core, TRCs make space for truth-telling and use testimonies as the foundation for reconciliation and justice. The most well-known TRC is probably South Africa’s, which was commissioned in 1995 and led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to address the human rights violation of apartheid.16 While South Africa’s TRC offered amnesty in exchange for truth-telling, this is not a universal requirement of them.
A global model for Clergy Abuse TRCs could be developed by the episcopacy in conversation with survivors and a variety of experts, including mental health professionals,
trauma experts, restorative justice specialists, theologians, and canon lawyers. Dioceses (or parishes) could then implement the TRC model while adapting it to their cultural context and following the needs of survivors in their communities. This would create the conditions for the possibility of reconciliation for those who desire it, wherein the Church takes visible and concrete steps toward accountability and justice, but forgiveness and reconciliation would not be forced.
The TRC model provides a mechanism to promote reconciliation—the
restoration of right relationship— through a process founded on the healing commitments championed by the Synod and Pontifical Commission, most importantly truth-telling. Testimonies of victim/ survivors would be the central fixture of Clergy Abuse TRCs. These could be honored through public testimonials or in private, according to the needs and desires of victim/survivors and their families. Liturgical practices could be used to invite the diocese to stand in solidarity with survivors by bearing witness to, and lamenting, survivor stories. The perpetrators (or representatives of the Church) could offer apologies in ways that feel fitting for the victim/survivors. Each Clergy Abuse TRC could determine appropriate reparations that support the physical, psychological, and spiritual needs of survivors with attention on how to involve the local community. Like political TRCs, Clergy Abuse TRCs would write reports and make suggestions for changes. The Church could synthesize reports from around the world to identify persistent issues and offer recommendations for structural changes.
The visible and transparent processes of Clergy Abuse TRCs implemented in dioceses around the world would raise the voices of victim/survivors and allow the People of God to lament in solidarity with them. This manifestation of truth, justice, and accountability could pave a path to healing and reconciliation.17 ■
Kate Jackson-Meyer is a researcher at Harvard University in the Human Flourishing Program. Her current research focuses on well-being and the possibilities and limits of forgiveness. She is a trained mediator and volunteers in local courts.
The Camargue Cross, designed in 1926 by painter Hermann-Paul, symbolizes the three theological virtues of faith (cross),
Liberation A Latin American Perspective
O. Ernesto Valiente
Uuntil recently , little had been written on reconciliation from a liberationist perspective, in part due to a reluctance to engage a concept that has often been co-opted by those in power to justify political amnesties that shield human rights violators at the expense of justice. Nevertheless, many of the key concerns explored in theologies of reconciliation have been central to Latin American liberation theology since its inception. In this short essay, I examine the relationship between reconciliation and liberation, focusing on two fundamental aspects of liberation theology’s methodology that shape its unique approach to reconciliation: the preferential option for the oppressed, and the centrality of reflective Christian practices.
Like reconciliation , the term liberation carries a rich meaning that is both historical and transcendent. When speaking in transcendent terms, liberation theologians tend to equate the concept of liberation with that of reconciliation, conveying God’s promise for deliverance such as redemption, salvation, or communion. When discussing how salvation unfolds within history, liberation theologians develop a more nuanced distinction between liberation and reconciliation.
Liberation theologians describe historical salvation as the integral liberation of the human person—one that encompasses the different dimensions of human existence and establishes the necessary conditions for reconciliation. This liberation unfolds on three interrelated levels: first, liberation from social structures and conditions of oppression and marginalization; second, liberation from obstacles that hinder personal fulfillment; and third, liberation from sin. These forms of oppression are the result of human rejection of God’s grace. While the third level explicitly refers to sin as that which disrupts communion with God and others, the first two illustrate how sin manifests in both social and personal dimensions. Liberation is ultimately oriented toward love. It is not an
end in itself but a means to communion—we are liberated to love.
Reconciliation, from the perspective of liberation, speaks of God’s redemptive work on behalf of the oppressed, the excluded, and the materially poor. By choosing the situation of the oppressed as the starting point for theological reflection, liberation theologians reject the idea that theology can remain neutral in the face of suffering. Instead, they affirm that the universal love of God is concretely manifested in Christ’s preferential love for the marginalized. Their partiality for the wellbeing of the oppressed is not merely an ethical stance, but grounded in what God has revealed to us: Learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow (Isaiah 1:17); And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me’ (Matthew 25:40).
God’s preference for the poor must be viewed within the context of God’s universal and gratuitous love. Scripture provides no indication that God’s preferential concern for the oppressed is because they are more deserving or morally superior to their oppressors. Rather, the poor are favored because they are in greater need than the non-poor.
As the oppressed become aware of their situation and the possibility of change, they take on their rightful role in the process of reconciling reality. The demands of their agency call them to choose solidarity with themselves and others who are oppressed. At the same time, the Christian nature of their mission compels them to abandon any desire for retaliation and extend forgiveness to their enemies. This is essential if the pursuit of justice and reconciliation is to be rooted in God’s gratuitous love rather than in the limited framework of just deserts. Love is manifested in the process of reconciliation, which prioritizes addressing the needs of survivors and suffering
photo credit : Oscar Leiva Marinero
St. Óscar Romero (1917–1980), archbishop of El Salvador, was an outspoken advocate for the poor and the marginalized, exemplifying the teachings of liberation theology. He was canonized as a saint in October 2018 by Pope Francis.
victims while remaining committed to the effort and hope of restoring the oppressor.
Drawing from both secular and religious sources, liberation theologians identify three interrelated dimensions essential to any process of reconciliation: (1) the truthful uncovering of past events and sources of conflict, along with the responsibility to honor the memories of those affected and restore the agency of victims; (2) the pursuit of justice that responds to the claims of victims and seeks to build a more just and harmonious socioeconomic and cultural order; and (3) the forgiveness necessary to restore communal life and envision a transformed future.
Inspired by God’s unconditional mercy and driven by Christ’s promise of a reconciled world, reflective Christian practice begins with the reality of oppression and moves toward solidarity with the oppressed. It seeks the transformation of the culture and social structures that perpetuate marginalization and enmity, as well as the re-creation of both the oppressed and the oppressor to facilitate their reconciliation. In conclusion, the journey from enmity and conflict to social reconciliation can be understood as a process that involves liberation from all forms of social, personal, and spiritual oppression, along with the cultivation of new ways of relating that foster communion with others and with God. In this sense, historical liberation is, at its core, the practice of reconciliation. We achieve true liberation only through reconciliation. ■
O. Ernesto Valiente is associate professor of systematic theology at the Clough School of Theology and Ministry at Boston College.
Six Meanings of Political Reconciliation
Robert J. Schreiter, C.PP.S.
In post-conflict situations, the term reconciliation is used (and misused) in a variety of different ways. Its misuse occurs most often when perpetrators call for reconciliation—reconciliation meaning that victims should forget about the harm they have suffered and give up their demands for justice. In the victims' forgetting, perpetrators are released from responsibility for their acts, and society goes on as though nothing has happened. Such actions are hardly reconciling. Similarly, the term is misused when there is a call for reconciliation while the conflict is still raging. Reconciliation in this instance means a cessation of hostilities without taking into account either the causes or the consequences of the hostilities.
Across the discourse on reconciliation today, it is possible to discern a spectrum with at least six different meanings. These six different situations, which all have gone under the name of reconciliation, serve as a reminder that reconciliation is as much a process as it is a goal.
1. T he two parties cease fighting and agree to live with differences. That agreement is guaranteed with the establishment of clear boundaries. The Dayton Accords, which created the three ethnic enclaves in Bosnia-Herzegovina, is an example of this.
2. The two parties expand the social space and change the climate to permit working together more. Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement, and especially since building a new government in 2007, is an example of this.
3. T he parties experience a historical realignment that marks a return to some previous state. The union of the two German states after the fall of the Berlin Wall is an example.
4. The parties try to create a new, common narrative that overcomes the divisions of the past. This is the “racial reconciliation” that the United States and Australia have
tried to achieve with their African American and Aboriginal populations, respectively. The Center for Democracy and Reconciliation in Southeast Europe has a project of rewriting the history books used in the schools of the successor countries of the former Yugoslavia in order to create a less conflictive and more collective narrative of the past.
5. The parties create social conditions so that the violence of the past cannot be repeated. This was the definition of reconciliation that animated the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Chile. It is also behind anti-Nazi legislation put in place in the Federal Republic of Germany after its inception in 1949.
6. T he parties reach a point where the past is no longer problematic for the present. This is perhaps the point that France and Germany have reached through some sixty years of conscious work at cooperation. The picture of Gerhard Schroeder and Jacques Chirac standing hand in hand at Versailles in 2003 was emblematic of this relationship. Versailles was the place where both countries had celebrated their victories over each other in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the twenty-first, it became the site of complete reconciliation. ■
Robert J. Schreiter, C.PP.S. (1947–2021), was a priest of the Missionaries of the Precious Blood. He was professor of theology at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.
Originally published in Peacebuilding: Catholic Theology, Ethics, and Praxis, edited by Robert J. Schreiter, R. Scott Appleby, and Gerard F. Powers (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010) and reprinted with permission.
Reconciling All Things A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace, and Healing
Rev. Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice
Reconciliation is more than a response to conflict—it is a central part of God’s redemptive work in the world. These ten theses present reconciliation as a transformative journey, grounded in lament, sustained by hope, and oriented toward the holistic peace—shalom—of God’s new creation.
1 Reconciliation is God’s gift to the world. Healing of the world’s deep brokenness does not begin with us and our action, but with God and God’s gift of new creation. When we neglect the story of God’s life and action, reconciliation may become popular, but its content will always remain vague. Christians often try to fix the brokenness of the world in a way that puts either us or the world at the center. In responding to the urgent needs of the world, our first question ought not to be, “What should we do?” but rather, “What is going on in the lives and the story of the world?” We begin with what God has already accomplished. The center of that story is Jesus.
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come...God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ” (2 Cor 5:17, 19 NIV).
When reconciliation is connected to God’s story and life, the invitation to be ambassadors of God’s reconciliation in the world is made clear and urgent.
2 Reconciliation is not a theory, achievement, technique, or event. It is a journey.
S cripture is central to the ministry of reconciliation because it both points to the specific end toward which the journey leads and shapes the path of our journey as we engage the deep brokenness of real places and lives. Without the unique stories of Scripture, we cannot cultivate the imagination necessary to live into the gifts and challenges of the journey of reconciliation.
3 The end toward which the journey of reconciliation leads is the shalom of God’s new creation—a future not yet fully realized, but holistic in its transformation of the personal, social, and structural dimensions of life. A key question must always be, “Reconciliation toward what?” Reconciliation is not merely about getting along with neighbors or feeling at peace with God. It cannot be reduced solely to the personal or to the social dimension. It is not merely a political end to conflict nor mediation without healing. Reconciliation must never become a tool of the powerful to preserve the status quo. Rather,
reconciliation is always a journey of transformation toward a new future of friendship with God and people, a holistic and concrete vision of human flourishing.
4 The journey of reconciliation requires the discipline of lament.
We say “discipline” because lament is the hard work of learning to see and name the brokenness of the world. To the extent we have not learned to lament, we deal superficially with the world’s brokenness, offering quick and easy fixes that do not require our conversion. The discipline of lament not only allows us to see the depth of the world’s brokenness (including our own and the Church’s complicity in it), it also shapes reconciliation as a journey that involves truth, conversion, and forgiveness.
5
In a broken world, God is always planting seeds of hope, though often not in the places we expect or even desire.
Reconciliation requires hope. But the ability to hope requires training. Hurried attempts at success in reconciliation can mask a desire to short-circuit the journey of reconciliation, revealing our inability to recognize and live with the signs of a new creation God gives. At the same time, it is easy to despair and give up hope in a broken world. The journey of reconciliation involves learning to see and embody signs of hope as well as training to live with hopeful patience in the sluggish present.
6
There is no reconciliation without memory, because there is no hope for a peaceful tomorrow that does not seriously engage both the pain of the past and the call to forgive.
“Reconciliation without memory” and “justice without communion” are both failures to remember well—the first by forgetting the wounds of history, the second by forgetting the promise of resurrection and the call to forgiveness. A Christian vision of reconciliation provides resources to avoid both of these temptations by remembering the wounds in Jesus’ resurrected body.
7
Reconciliation needs the Church, but not as just another social agency or NGO. Reconciliation is not the ministry of experts. It is God’s gift to “anyone in Christ.” Christians learn what it means both to be reconciled and to be ambassadors of reconciliation in and through the Church, which is called to be a “demonstration plot” of the social existence made possible by God’s gift of reconciliation. The Church’s vocation is to be an interruption of the story of division and violence in the world, participating with the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit pointing to the peace of God’s new creation. Without such interruption, we would not even know the alternative that is made possible by God’s new creation. To be a sign and agent of reconciliation, the Church must inspire and embody a desperate vocation of hope in broken places. We live in local places and in the everyday and ongoing practices of building community, fighting injustice, and resisting oppression while also offering care, hospitality, and service—especially to the alien and the enemy.
8
The ministry of reconciliation requires and calls forth a specific type of leadership that is able to unite a deep vision with the concrete skills, virtues, and habits necessary for the long and often lonesome journey of reconciliation.
We have many experts in reconciliation, but not many leaders. Reconciliation requires leaders rooted in God’s vision of the beyond who work patiently in the thick stubbornness of the now. Formation and conversion produce such leaders, requiring not only good mentors but also a lifestyle marked by prayer, courage, joy, and practical wisdom.
9
There is no reconciliation without conversion, the constant journey with God into a future of new people and new loyalties.
Broken by sin, we do not long for what God wants. The world and its dividing lines—such as nation, ethnicity, race, sex, power, and caste—resist the new creation of God’s beloved community, where there is “neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female” (Gal 3:28). Self-interest easily becomes the goal of relationships, and loyalty to one’s own group easily becomes the aim of politics.
Reconciliation thus requires a transformation of desire, habits, and loyalties. This long and costly journey of conversion is impossible without God’s forgiveness and grace. But there is reason to hope: God has promised to give us everything we need for this transformation.
10
Imagination and conversion are the very heart and soul of reconciliation. Reconciliation is about learning to live by a new imagination. God desires to shape lives and communities that reflect the story of God’s new creation, offering concrete examples of another way and practices that engage the everyday challenges of peaceful existence in the world. That is why the work of reconciliation is sustained more through storytelling and apprenticeship than by training in techniques and how-tos. Through friendship with God, the stories of Scripture and faithful lives, and learning the virtues and daily practices those stories communicate, reconciliation becomes an ordinary, everyday pattern of life for Christians. ■
Rev. Emmanuel Katongole is a priest of the Kampala Archdiocese, Uganda, and professor of theology and peace studies. He holds a joint appointment with the Keough School of Global Affairs, where he serves as a full-time faculty member of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
Chris Rice is an award-winning writer, social entrepreneur, and global networker dedicated to fostering social healing and spiritual renewal, grounded in his Christian faith. He co-founded the influential Duke Divinity School Center for Reconciliation.
“Reconciliation is always a journey of transformation toward a new future of friendship with God and people, a holistic and concrete vision of human flourishing. ”
Jesuits’ Mission in a Challenging World
Marcel Uwineza, S.J.
photo credit
: Courtesy of Gary Wayne Gilbert, Boston College.
Tthe story of jesus and the Samaritan woman found in the Gospel of John reveals that we do not earn God’s love; we return it. The woman is initially perplexed by Jesus’ request: “Give me a drink” (Jn 4:7). In his conversation with her, Jesus reveals that he is not bound by customs that discriminate and implicitly invites his disciples to seek the purity of mind and heart.
The Samaritan woman is surprised to meet a Jew who asks for a service from someone who otherwise should be despised. The woman had a number of strikes against her. First, she was known as a sinner likely reviled by others because of her several marriages. This may explain her lonely trip to the well at the hottest hour of the day. She probably hoped not to find anyone there. Second, she was a person on the margins. Jesus saw her poverty and had pity on her. He revealed her misery to allow her to discover the loving presence of God, source of the everlasting love that quenches the thirst from unsatisfying and temporal loves. Jesus revealed to her that, in Him, God encounters those we despise. Third, she was a Samaritan and, as it were, Jews and Samaritans had very little, if anything, that brought them together. Jesus breaks down the barriers that divide people. Fourth, as a woman, she was to be silent when a rabbi was present. Jesus offers her a golden opportunity not only to be closer to the master of masters, but also to engage in a life-changing conversation.
More than ever, it seems to me that the Society of Jesus is invited to embody this spirit of Jesus as it seeks to help people, disenchanted by many streams, realize that they are first loved unconditionally by God. The mission of Jesuits is to bring people to understand, like the Samaritan woman, that their real problem may not be water or lack of resources, but the absence of genuine love that builds bridges across religions, races, ideologies, and cultural divides. It is an invitation to people to trust in God and a ministry to and with those on the margins like the Samaritan woman. It is a call to consider the current climate change crisis as a priority. Alongside scholarship and education, Jesuits also accomplish Jesus’ mission as writers, chaplains, confessors, listeners, healthcare providers, lawyers, peacemakers, pastors, and more.
to be ministers of hope. In the face of suffering, tears do not replace action.
The Society of Jesus is a discerning body open to wide religious, academic, cultural, and ideological horizons.1 Yet the best we Jesuits can offer to humanity in search of the face of the living God is our union with God and one another in Christ. In the twenty-first century, if we forget that we are one body, bound together in and with Christ, 2 “we lose our identity as Jesuits and our ability to bear witness to the Gospel. It is our union with one another in Christ that testifies to the Good News more powerfully than our competences and abilities.”3
Jesuit ministry is a service that reveals to people that God believes in us. There is a story of a Jesuit priest who was confronted by an aggressive young physicist who rehearsed all the reasons for atheism and arrogantly said, “I do not believe in God.” The priest, not put off at all, replied quietly, “Oh, it does not matter. God believes in you.” God does believe in us. That is the fundamental object of our Christian hope, and it makes us strive to make this world a great home built on the love of God for everyone, for none are outside the purview of God’s love.
God does believe in us. That is the fundamental object of our Christian hope, and it makes us strive to make this world a great home built on the love of God for everyone.
The spirit of St. Ignatius of Loyola continues to inspire many religious congregations in Africa. Many members of the Christian Life Community have also fetched sustenance from the well of Ignatian spirituality. As we live in a world that knows too much division, together with these communities, “we ask God to help our communities become ‘homes’ for the Reign of God.”4 The Jesuit order desires to collaborate with people in a ministry of attraction and shared faith. The Samaritan woman realized that alone she could not make up the Church, but she became a leaven for her village. Similarly, if Jesuits continue to make people feel that they are loved as they are, we will attract others and remain in God, who believes in us despite our frequent moments of unbelief. ■
Marcel Uwineza, S.J., is dean of students and a senior lecturer at Hekima University College in Nairobi, Kenya .
In Burundi, where I worked for some time, I met some H.I.V.-positive women who frequently told me, “Father Marcel, if we had not met the Jesuit AIDS Center (Service Yezu Mwiza), we would now be turning into our graves.” Some of these women contracted H.I.V. through rape, war, or domestic violence, but their lives had completely changed because of access to antiretroviral drugs through the Jesuit health center. They now live with great hopes of seeing their children go to school. As a Jesuit, I have experienced “the Lazarus effect” in working with people living with H.I.V. and AIDS. All this energizes us
This article was originally published by the Georgetown University Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs, January 29, 2018, https://berkleycenter. georgetown.edu/responses/we-do-not-earn-god-s-lovewe-return-it-jesuits-mission-in-a-challenging-world.
Sources for this article can be found at: bc.edu/c21reconciliation
Grace through Dialogue Insights from Fratelli Tutti on Infertility
Emma McDonald Kennedy
Iin policy discussions and theological conversations alike, disagreements about the moral status of embryos and the ethical implications of fertility treatments persist. The intractability of these debates makes it difficult to see how we might work toward the kind of social reconciliation that Pope Francis, in his encyclical Fratelli tutti , named as central to the life of fraternity and social friendship to which the Gospels summon us. Francis suggested that dialogue can help us find our way out of fragmentation to rediscover our common humanity. He says that “[a]uthentic reconciliation” does not involve avoiding conflict, but instead “is achieved in conflict, resolving it through dialogue and open, honest and patient negotiation” (7.243). An appeal to dialogue may on its face sound unimaginative or cliché—an impractical strategy to begin to address divisive and emotion-laden disagreements in reproductive politics. Yet, Francis’ way of defining dialogue can, I find, challenge and refresh our ways of responding to the realities of our disagreements. He understood dialogue expansively: “Approaching, speaking, listening, looking at, coming to know and understand one another, and to find common ground: all these things are summed up in the one word ‘dialogue.’ If we want to encounter and help one another, we have to dialogue” (FT 6.198). For Francis, dialogue wasn’t just about discourse and debate; it is embodied. It involves not only “speaking and listening,” but also “approaching” and “looking at” one another. It strives for knowledge and understanding of the other, and a willingness to recognize what we share in common.
As I reflected on the type of open-ended encounter that Francis seemed to envision here, I was struck by its resemblance to my experiences of conducting qualitative research.1 Between 2020–2023, I interviewed 57 Catholic women who had experience with infertility. While my research aimed to respond to issues emerging in public debates—I wanted to weigh in on the ethical implications of reproductive technologies and scrutinize the social forces that shape moral decision-making related to infertility treatments—the interview process demanded more listening than speaking. It required me to be more receptive and less opinionated. Success, in the context of an interview, was not agreement or persuasion, but understanding. Qualitative methods
prioritize the encounter of another person in their complexity, and they demand from the researcher patience, receptivity, and curiosity. In this way, the process of qualitative research can function as a kind of reconciling practice.
As Kathy Charmaz, an expert on a kind of qualitative research called “grounded theory,” argues, the goal of qualitative methods, including interviewing, is to strive “to see this world as our research participants do—from the inside.” 2 One of the commitments of grounded theory research is to “preserve our participants’ human dignity even if we question their perspectives or their practices.”3 We do our best to understand participants and their perspectives, to “test our assumptions about the worlds we study,” and “look at their world through their eyes…”4 The partnership forged between researcher and participant in the process of qualitative research encourages receptivity and understanding, which are crucial to the work of reconciliation. With a commitment to understanding the person right in front of us, it is easier to heed Francis’ caution against clinging to our own preconceived notions in conversation—something that he saw our media environment exacerbating. In a memorable turn of phrase, Francis lamented “the media’s noisy potpourri of facts and opinions” as “an obstacle to dialogue” that encourages the person to “cling stubbornly to his or her own ideas, interests and choices, with the excuse that everyone else is wrong” (FT 6.201). “Authentic social dialogue,” by contrast, “involves the ability to respect the other’s point of view and to admit that it may include legitimate convictions and concerns” (FT 6.203).
The work of qualitative research, at least as I experienced it, is not far off from Francis’ vision of dialogue. Both assert the dignity of the person and insist on the importance of conversation that foregrounds openness, listening, and understanding. Francis himself observed that through “interdisciplinary communication” and receptivity to “various angles and different methodologies,” researchers can “become open to a more comprehensive and integral knowledge of reality” (FT 6.204). 5 And indeed, the scholarship of several Christian ethicists aptly demonstrates how qualitative research can help theologians hew closer to reality—to truthfulness—in our moral reflection.6
“In my interviews with Catholic women who had experienced infertility, I developed an appreciation for what the theologian and anthropologist Todd Whitmore calls 'the mess that is life' in its diversity and its uncertainty. ”
In my interviews with Catholic women who had experienced infertility, I developed an appreciation for what the theologian and anthropologist Todd Whitmore calls “the mess that is life” in its diversity and its uncertainty. 7 All the women I interviewed had a connection to Catholicism and experience with infertility, but they differed in many ways—age, country of origin, family size, ethnicity, racial background, political affiliation, profession, faith practices, and more. They had different experiences—of infertility, of miscarriage and reproductive loss, of infertility treatments, of the response of their parishes and their families, of their relationship with God. They had different beliefs—about official Church teaching about the moral status of embryos, about the morality of treatments like IVF, about the role of the Church in society. They made different choices—some went through IVF or artificial insemination; some sought treatment in Catholic clinics that aligned with Church teaching; some unexpectedly conceived; some pursued fostering and adoption; some left the Church and critiqued its emphasis on motherhood; some rethought what counted as “procreative” in their lives; some were still figuring out what their next step was.8
These conversations opened up my research in complex and nuanced ways that I cannot render adequately here. What I can communicate, in the spirit of Francis’ exhortation to find common ground in dialogue with one another, is that each person I interviewed faced a particular expression of a central human challenge we all, in our own way, know well—to reconcile ourselves to our frailty, our ignorance, our finitude. For those who hope to have children, infertility can be an abrupt and
unwelcome sign that we lack control. Our very bodies can thwart our deepest desires. For all the advances of modern medicine, we remain finite creatures. Muddling forward is difficult, confusing, and uncertain. It is no wonder we face such trouble discerning as a society what paths lead to the good.
In our strivings for social reconciliation, we do well to seek out opportunities that confront us with the obvious yet overlooked truths of our common humanity, that stretch and strengthen our capacity to encounter the reality of one another. As Pope Francis reminded us in Fratelli tutti: “Each of us can learn something from others. No one is useless and no one is expendable… What is important is to create processes of encounter, processes that build a people that can accept differences. Let us arm our children with the weapons of dialogue! Let us teach them to fight the good fight of the culture of encounter!” (6.215, 6.217). ■
Emma McDonald Kennedy is assistant professor of Christian ethics at Villanova University.
Sources for this article can be found at: bc.edu/c21reconciliation
loving memory of
Nonviolence A Style of Politics for Peace
Pope Francis
The following is an excerpt from the message of His Holiness Pope Francis for the celebration of the fiftieth World Day of Peace (January 1, 2017).
Oon this occasion , I would like to reflect on nonviolence as a style of politics for peace. I ask God to help all of us to cultivate nonviolence in our most personal thoughts and values. May charity and nonviolence govern how we treat each other as individuals, within society and in international life. In the most local and ordinary situations and in the international order, may nonviolence become the hallmark of our decisions, our relationships, and our actions, and indeed of political life in all its forms.
Violence is not the cure for our broken world. Countering violence with violence leads at best to
forced migrations and enormous suffering, because vast amounts of resources are diverted to military ends and away from the everyday needs of young people, families experiencing hardship, the elderly, the infirm, and the great majority of people in our world. At worst, it can lead to the death, physical and spiritual, of many people, if not of all.
THE GOOD NEWS
Jesus lived in violent times. Yet he taught that the true battlefield, where violence and peace meet, is the human
In
His Holiness Pope Francis (1936–2025)
photo credit : flickr/JeffyBruno
“Blessed are the meek, Jesus tells us, the merciful and the peacemakers, those who are pure in heart, and those who hunger and thirst for justice. ”
heart: for “it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come” (Mk 7:21). But Christ’s message in this regard offers a radically positive approach. He unfailingly preached God’s unconditional love, which welcomes and forgives. He taught his disciples to love their enemies (cf. Mt 5:44) and to turn the other cheek (cf. Mt 5:39). When he stopped her accusers from stoning the woman caught in adultery (cf. Jn 8:1-11), and when, on the night before he died, he told Peter to put away his sword (cf. Mt 26:52), Jesus marked out the path of nonviolence. He walked that path to the very end, to the cross, whereby he became our peace and put an end to hostility (cf. Eph 2:14-16). Whoever accepts the Good News of Jesus is able to be healed by God’s mercy, becoming in turn an instrument of reconciliation.
To be followers of Jesus today also includes embracing his teaching about nonviolence. As my predecessor Benedict XVI observed, that teaching “is realistic because it takes into account that in the world there is too much violence, too much injustice, and therefore that this situation cannot be overcome except by countering it with more love, with more goodness. This ‘ more ’ comes from God.”1 He went on to stress that: “Nonviolence is not merely tactical behavior, but a person’s way of being, the attitude of one who is so convinced of God’s love and power that he or she is not afraid to tackle evil with the weapons of love and truth alone. Love of one’s enemy constitutes the nucleus of the ‘Christian revolution.’”2
MORE POWERFUL THAN VIOLENCE
Nonviolence is sometimes taken to mean surrender, lack of involvement, and passivity, but this is not the case… The decisive and consistent practice of nonviolence has produced impressive results. The achievements of Mahatma Gandhi and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan in the liberation of India, and of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in combating racial discrimination will never be forgotten. Women in particular are often leaders of nonviolence, as for example, was Leymah Gbowee and the thousands of Liberian women who organized pray-ins and nonviolent protest that resulted in high-level peace talks to end the second civil war in Liberia.
If violence has its source in the human heart, then it is fundamental that nonviolence be practiced before all else within families. The family is the indispensable crucible in which spouses, parents and children, and brothers and sisters learn to communicate and to show generous concern for one another, and in which frictions and even conflicts have to be resolved not by force but
by dialogue, respect, concern for the good of the other, mercy and forgiveness.3 From within families, the joy of love spills out into the world and radiates to the whole of society.4 The politics of nonviolence have to begin in the home and then spread to the entire human family.
MY INVITATION
Peacebuilding through active nonviolence is the natural and necessary complement to the Church’s continuing efforts to limit the use of force. Jesus himself offers a “manual” for this strategy of peacemaking in the Sermon on the Mount. The eight Beatitudes (cf. Mt 5:3-10) provide a portrait of the person we could describe as blessed, good, and authentic. Blessed are the meek, Jesus tells us, the merciful and the peacemakers, those who are pure in heart, and those who hunger and thirst for justice.
This is also a program and a challenge for political and religious leaders, the heads of international i nstitutions, and business and media executives: to apply the Beatitudes in the exercise of their respective responsibilities. It is a challenge to build up society, communities, and businesses by acting as peacemakers. It is to show mercy by refusing to discard people, harm the environment, or seek to win at any cost. To act in this way means to choose solidarity as a way of making history and building friendship in society. Active nonviolence is a way of showing that unity is truly more powerful and more fruitful than conflict.
I pledge the assistance of the Church in every effort to build peace through active and creative nonviolence. The Church will promote in an ever more effective way “the inestimable goods of justice, peace, and the care of creation” and concern for “migrants, those in need, the sick, the excluded and marginalized, the imprisoned and the unemployed, as well as victims of armed conflict, natural disasters, and all forms of slavery and torture.”5
“All of us want peace. Many people build it day by day through small gestures and acts; many of them are suffering, yet patiently persevere in their efforts to be peacemakers.”6 May we dedicate ourselves prayerfully and actively to banishing violence from our hearts, words, and deeds, and to becoming nonviolent people and to building nonviolent communities that care for our common home. ■
To access the full version and sources for this article, visit: bc.edu/c21reconciliation
Reflecting on Peace STUDENT VOICES
From September 22–24, 2024, the Sant'Egidio Foundation for Peace and Dialogue welcomed students from U.S. colleges and universities to join the 38th International Meeting of Religions and Cultures in Dialogue in Paris, France. Ever since Pope John Paul II held the historic World Day of Prayer for Peace in Assisi (1986), Sant'Egidio has taken up the pope's invitation to "continue to live the spirit of Assisi" by proposing an annual international meeting for dialogue between representatives of different faiths and cultures. This event, particularly needed in our current time of international wars, was attended by leading religious, political, and cultural figures.
Boston College (BC) sponsored four students to participate in the event in Paris, France. The students had the opportunity to participate in the high-profile opening and closing ceremonies, and attend panel presentations on a range of topics related to peace, threats to peace, and the role of religions in peacebuilding and reconciliation. Below are some of their reflections on this powerful gathering.
CONOR RICHARDS ’25 recently graduated from BC, majoring in management (with a concentration in finance) and philosophy.
The moment of the conference that surprised me the most were remarks by French President Emmanuel Macron at the opening ceremony. President Macron focused on this year’s theme— Imagining Peace—and how imagination is the only way to a just, lasting peace. Reflecting upon this moment later that night, I wrote in my journal:
“Imagination is an act defined by creation. To imagine peace, then, is to create something new. Peace can never be a return to what was. The solution does not lie in the past; it lies in imagination, creation. However, what is 'new' is always dangerous. In all things, we fear the unknown, and in all places, change is frightening to those in power. Thus, peace itself becomes dangerous, and imagining peace, a radical act. To imagine peace, our first duty is to rehumanize our gaze. We must recognize the right to live of those
who were yesterday our enemies. Peace is possible only when we live together, when we speak each other’s languages, both figuratively and literally. Only then can we begin to build something new. This reveals a dual nature to peace that is oft neglected. First, peace must arise interpersonally. No glossy accords can force peace upon a people who do not pursue it in their hearts. Second, peace is a continuous action. Danger arises when we allow peaceful structures to ossify. Macron pointed to NATO and the UN as examples. These organizations
photo credit
Boston College students at the Sant'Egidio Foundation for Peace and Dialogue's 38th International Meeting of Religions and Culture in Dialogue in Paris (2024).
were created to address the problems of a post-Second-World-War world. The world is different today —our challenges are different—and to persist in frozen structures is to enforce an unjust order. Each generation must imagine peace anew."
NELSON TEIXEIRA DA PEDRA ’26 is a student at BC majoring in theology and political science with a faith, peace, and justice minor.
It can be easy to dismiss the Prayer for Peace as unproductive to ending global conflict or as solely performative. This is not the case. The Prayer for Peace was not intended to be a Treaty of Versaillesesque negotiation that would establish world peace—this is a negative conception of peace that solely understands it as the absence of war. Rather, the Prayer for Peace and the work of Sant’Egidio are intended to demonstrate that regardless of religious or national affiliations, we share a desire to promote peace rooted in the intrinsic value of humanity. The conversations that I witnessed demonstrated that although we may disagree on how to reconcile conflicts, we can plant the seeds via the recognition of basic human dignity. Moments such as hundreds of individuals from across language and cultural barriers embracing each other in the rain, wishing each other “peace” in their own languages, and panels of speakers from all sides of a variety of spectrums holding an implied respect for each other and a desire to end violence resonated with me. Through dialogue, we can promote concrete peace. Sant’Egidio has worked to broker peace in Mozambique following a bloody and lengthy civil war and is actively mediating conflicts in South Sudan and the Central African Republic. We can also see the successes of dialogue in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South Africa and in the many historical diplomatic successes in de-escalating international tensions. These examples began and ended with words rather than weapons. Though dialogue may not resolve every conflict
immediately, the social cooperation and respect demonstrated at the Prayer for Peace exemplifies the groundwork toward peace offered by dialogue.
GRACE SNELL ’27 is a student at BC and a Gabelli Presidential Scholar, majoring in philosophy and Islamic civilization and societies.
We knelt on ancient stone, invoking God to bless each place that was riddled with violence. As we numbered each conflict, I saw the only way not to bow down to the despair of evil was to live out the small suffering of each day and offer that to God in prayer. As we spilled out onto the streets, I stepped out into the head of the procession, inadvertently walking with an ecumenical council: the scarlet zucchetto side by side with the kalimavkion, the black tippet abreast with alabaster klobuks. We each lived out a belief of God in vastly different ways, yet our purpose was one.
As a Catholic, I understood that the Church across the world was being built through the hidden lives of millions, that the newness of the Gospel must be lived out by us. We are the Church. Watching Tibetan monks sign documents with imans and shinshokus, I saw the strength of religious dialogue, the diversity of ideas and practices creating the impetus for human flourishing.
As I spent the week meeting community members who devoted their lives to marginalized groups, gathering each week to pray for international amity, and then living out Christ’s injunction to "love thy neighbor," my conception of peace changed into a vision of concord mixing with a robust charity. I heard of London groups starting weekly “schools of peace” for children who had no safe place to go, I listened to stories of homeless friends who had attended Sant'Egidio weddings, I visited a nursing home and saw the epidemic of loneliness amongst the elderly consoled. I saw Christ wherever I went, a Christ who ate with the poor and who transformed tradition into a message of renewal.
JULIA FRANCO ’26 is a student at BC majoring in international studies (with a concentration in cooperation and conflict) and minors in English and faith, peace, and justice.
The Sant'Egidio Prayer for Peace conference provided the community that I didn't know I had always been looking for. I met inspiring and accepting changemakers from all over the world, and still keep in touch with some of them today. Sant'Egidio showed me the meaning of nurturing an international family, and I will forever be grateful for that.
I learned that interfaith peacebuilding and reconciliation requires relationship-building and consistent encounter over time. Sant'Egidio is a fascinating organization because it positions itself in Track 1.5 Diplomacy by sustaining relationships with civil society and interfaith and government leaders. Not only does genuine and strong relationship-building occur between Sant'Egidio members themselves, but their peacebuilding work all over the world is characterized by the same high-quality connection and care.
Before the closing ceremony, religious ceremonies from Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam were held all over the city. I decided to go to a Cambodian Buddhist ceremony, and I was welcomed in with warm smiles and gestures. This was a beautiful moment for me to learn about and witness a spirituality that was different from my own. While I didn't know the prayers, chants, or how to behave so that I fit in, I reveled in their devoted energy and togetherness. While I may not be Buddhist, I was treated like another beloved member of the human family all the same. I was a participant in Sant'Egidio's interfaith exchange, and it was one of my favorite moments from the conference.
EDUCATION AND JUSTICE Supporting the Common Good
Patrick Conway and Michelle Brooks
I stand as I am, I am food for the future, my thought will blossom tomorrow, today, I plant roots
—Jimmy Santiago Baca, “I Am with Those”
The Boston College Prison Education Program (BCPEP) is at the forefront of an emerging field residing at the intersection of higher education and the criminal justice system. As one of the most robust college-in-prison programs in the country, BCPEP plays a critical role in serving as a model of what universities and colleges can do to respond to mass incarceration, one of the most pressing societal challenges. By combining academic instruction with a deep commitment to social justice, the program not only provides students with access to high-quality educational experiences, but also helps challenge traditional notions of who deserves such opportunities. Steeped in the Jesuit tradition, BCPEP offers exciting pathways forward both for individual students and our broader communities.
Mass incarceration in the United States reflects a profound societal failure to reconcile public safety with a vision of justice that extends beyond mere retribution and punishment. The carceral system has long prioritized punitive responses to crime, often disregarding or marginalizing those ensnared within its domain. Rather than fostering accountability, mutuality, and growth, incarceration isolates individuals from their communities, deepening existing social and economic disparities. The failure to provide meaningful pathways for incarcerated people to build better opportunities and healthier environments underscores the urgent need for alternative approaches to justice—ones that emphasize human potential rather than perpetual punishment.
Higher education in prison offers a powerful example of what becomes possible when communities embrace more humanized responses to crime and justice. By centering human
development rather than retribution, education challenges the traditional punitive framework and fosters meaningful connections to the outside world. When incarcerated individuals engage in rigorous academic coursework, they not only gain practical skills but also cultivate critical thinking, engage in non-prescriptive reflective practices, and retain a vital sense of agency within an environment often designed to deaden the human spirit. Prison education programs seek to reframe students as scholars and learners rather than mere “offenders,” offering opportunities for intellectual growth, healthier self-conceptions, and stronger interpersonal relationships.
The recent 2023 legislative reinstatement of Pell Grant access for incarcerated students marks a pivotal moment for the field. For decades, lack of federal support severely limited educational opportunities inside prisons. With Pell eligibility now restored, thousands of incarcerated students across the country once again have access to higher education. This shift signals a growing recognition of education’s role not only in personal growth, but also in broader social and economic mobility. It is an exciting time for the field, as institutions, educators, and policymakers collaborate to build sustainable, high-quality academic offerings within correctional facilities.
The impact of these opportunities, however, should not end at the prison gates. The next step is ensuring that policies and programs extend the benefits of program participation to life post-release. This is a core priority of the Boston College Prison Education Program. While education inside prison is invaluable, its full potential can only be realized when formerly incarcerated students are supported in the process of continuing their studies and applying their skills in the broader world. Transitioning from prison to campus or the workforce presents significant challenges, including financial instability, social stigma, and countless bureaucratic hurdles. Colleges and universities engaged in this work must recognize
the necessity of comprehensive reentry support—ensuring that students have access to continued education, career pathways, and community resources upon release. Without such support, the progress made inside prison risks being significantly diminished.
Far too many college-in-prison programs focus exclusively on education inside prison walls without considering the long-term trajectories of their students. While these programs may offer coursework and academic mentorship during incarceration, they often fail to provide pathways toward personal, interpersonal, academic, and career success post-release. This gap in support undermines the potential of higher education to serve as a lasting tool for social mobility and reintegration. True commitment to educational justice means ensuring that formerly incarcerated students receive the guidance, resources, and opportunities necessary to thrive beyond prison. Colleges, policymakers, and advocacy organizations should work together to build infrastructure that supports these students at every stage of their journey—from incarceration to reintegration to lifelong success.
Higher education in prison is not just about earning a degree—it is also about empowerment, agency, and keeping incarcerated populations within the broader fabric of our communities. As the field grows, it must evolve to meet the full needs of system-impacted students. By extending educational access beyond prison walls and into reentry support, we move closer to a justice system that prioritizes opportunity over punishment and human potential over perpetual marginalization.
Patrick Conway is the Ignacio Chair and director of the Boston College Prison Education Program.
Michelle Brooks is the assistant director of the Boston College Prison Education Program.
STUDENT REFLECTIONS
SUPREME HASSAN '26 is a BC student in the Woods College of Advancing Studies majoring in business.
The experience of incarceration presents significant challenges, yet the figure of St. Ignatius of Loyola exemplifies how adversity can be transformed into opportunities for profound spiritual growth. He understood that reentering society necessitates a committed dedication to personal development, impactful missionary work, and advocacy for social justice. His remarkable journey serves as an inspiration and guide for individuals seeking transformation.
Within the complex and often harsh realities of the U.S. carceral system, I encountered my substantial trials. For a grueling 23 hours each day, I was confined within a stark, dimly lit, 6-foot by 10-foot cell designated for segregation. In this isolating environment, enveloped in silence and the persistent echoes of my thoughts, I discovered a transformative truth: education would serve as my pathway to liberation—a means to reclaim my identity and empower my future.
Recognizing the necessity of confronting the deep scars of my past actions became a pivotal moment in my journey. Only by addressing the pain I caused could I aspire to restore my humanity and dignity. As Supreme Hassan,
identified by some as a Juvenile Lifer, I carry the significant burden of having taken the life of a nineteen-year-old Black male at the age of eighteen. This weight remains central to my quest for redemption and self-discovery.
The weight of my guilt compelled me to seek a public apology, desiring the opportunity to express my remorse and begin the process of making amends. After enduring five arduous years in solitary confinement, I was finally granted human contact. It was during this transformative interaction that I reconciled my self-inflicted wounds, ultimately declaring, "I am a responsible party."
My path toward reconciliation aligns with the principles of restorative justice. This philosophy emphasizes the voices of victims and those who have been harmed alongside individuals who have overcome trauma. Rooted in accountability, it fosters a process that amplifies the narratives of those injured while inviting the responsible parties to acknowledge their actions. One of its most significant practices is community engagement, which creates circles in which harmed individuals and those responsible for the harm can listen to one another. In these spaces, the voices of the injured resonate above all, guiding participants toward healing and mutual understanding.
My spiritual journey has represented a profound awakening, transforming my identity from a Juvenile Lifer to a
College.
Patrick Conway congratulating Alex Delgado, a graduate of the BCPEP, at the first-ever commencement ceremony held inside the prison yard at MCI-Shirley (September 23, 2024).
committed advocate for restorative justice. Through the Boston College Prison Education Program, I realized the power of advocating for healing and social justice within the confines of the carceral system, where formal education serves as an essential lifeline to a broader perspective on life. This experience has opened my eyes to the potential for service, enabling me to uplift not only myself but also countless others. I was inspired by Sr. Jean Girbaud, who instilled in us the foundational mission of Boston College, a heartfelt call to "Being men and women, for and with others," which continues to guide my commitment to community and compassion.
In collaboration with a dynamic group of peers and inspiring professors at the Massachusetts Correctional Institute-Shirley, I have fully embraced this principle. Despite our circumstances, we actively support one another and advocate for the inclusion of individuals striving to lead meaningful lives while incarcerated.
This program has created a powerful circle of support and accountability, serving as a lifeline for individuals like me returning from incarceration. There was a time when I felt lost and doubted my ability to achieve my dreams, but now I can see how they have come to life before my eyes.
photo credit : Courtesy of Lee Pellegrini, Boston
FRANK ROBINSON III '27 is a BC student in the Woods College of Advancing Studies majoring in applied liberal arts.
My educational journey was untraditional, to say the least. Education was a strong emphasis in my household, being raised by two college-educated parents. As an adolescent, it became more important to fit in than to stand out. Being one of the guys was more important than individual success. Failing to learn from the failures of others, I continued on a journey with no destination, no real purpose. My reward for my failures as man and as a father accrued a debt equal to the weight of the world. I had taken so many steps in the wrong direction, the journey home seemed insurmountable, a figment of my imagination. I refused to be defined by who I was rather than who I was becoming. With this mindset, I began the process of repairing harm through restorative justice practices. Restorative justice has allowed me the platform to address my trauma and take accountability for the harm that I’ve caused.
In 2012, I suffered a personal trauma which caused me to reflect on how I wanted the world to see me if given a chance. I’d lost my only son, who was emulating all the worst parts of
Valedictorian
Gregory Saunders delivers a speech at the first commencement ceremony for BCPEP graduates.
For more information on the BCPEP and to read extended versions of these articles, visit: bc.edu/ c21reconciliation
his father. Glorifying a lifestyle became his sacrifice and my motivation. I spent years searching for purpose and found community behind the wall, a community of men redefining their commitment to self-improvement and accountability. I began to retrace my footsteps. I never went to church, but I said more than a few silent prayers that fell on deaf ears, or so I thought. God has a way of showing up when you least expect, and I’m proof that God’s love is real. Tethered to the possibility of my example being my only legacy, I set out. It began with Project Youth. I found comfort in sharing my experiences with impressionable young minds, something that I wasn’t able to do for my own children. The next leg of the journey was training assistance dogs for American Vet Dogs. For the first time in my life, I was responsible for a life dedicated to service. Next, there was an opportunity to get a college degree. I was in line, like double Dutch, waiting for my turn. This was a blessing, a childhood dream deferred before my car flipped over on the highway of life. I’d earned thirteen years’ worth of setbacks on my parole eligibility, why would a prestigious school like Boston College want me? I was accepted. It was during class with Sister Jean that I learned of Saint Ignatius and things started making sense. God
loves everyone, the criminals and the backsliders; all are equal in the eyes of the Lord. This was proof that I could salvage this corrupt life. I began to develop faith in something other than myself and continued forward. I invested in the community as a responsible party to restore faith in humanity not for self, but society. This is my pledge. Every day I will work on creating the best image of myself.
My reward came in the form of a blessing—and the light returned to my mother’s eyes. Turning to education was likened to the return of the prodigal son. I achieved freedom when all I was seeking was salvation. My mind was free, my spirit got muscles. Boston College, true to its mission, has exemplified men and women for and with others. Together, we built a community behind the wall and codified the Boston College Prison Education Program Student Circle. The first student organization on the MCI-Shirley Campus utilizes restorative justice practices at its foundation. Through education, I found liberation of mind, body, and spirit. I once was a great leader for all the wrong reasons, now I’m a proud student dedicated to service. It was service and the goodwill of men and women for and with others that broke the chains that shackled my mind. Now I’m truly free.
photo credit : Courtesy of Lee Pellegrini, Boston College.
Toward a Reconciled World
Pope Leo XIV
Brothers and sisters, I would like that our first great desire be for a united Church, a sign of unity and communion, which becomes a leaven for a reconciled world.
In this our time, we still see too much discord, too many wounds caused by hatred, violence, prejudice, the fear of difference, and an economic paradigm that exploits the Earth’s resources and marginalizes the poorest. For our part, we want to be a small leaven of unity, communion, and fraternity within the world. We want to say to the world, with humility and joy: Look to Christ! Come closer to him! Welcome his word that enlightens and consoles! Listen to his offer of love and become his one family: in the one Christ, we are one. This is the path to follow together, among ourselves but also with our sister Christian churches, with those who follow other religious paths, with those who are searching for God, with all women and men of goodwill, in order to build a new world where peace reigns!
This is the missionary spirit that must animate us; not closing ourselves off in our small groups, nor feeling superior to the world. We are called to offer God’s love to everyone, in order to achieve that unity which does not cancel out differences but values the personal history of each person and the social and religious culture of every people.
Brothers and sisters, this is the hour for love! The heart of the Gospel is the love of God that makes us brothers and sisters. With my predecessor Leo XIII, we can ask ourselves today: If this criterion “were to prevail in the world, would not every conflict cease and peace return?” (Rerum novarum, 21).
With the light and the strength of the Holy Spirit, let us build a Church founded on God’s love, a sign of unity, a missionary Church that opens its arms to the world, proclaims the word, allows itself to be made “restless” by history, and becomes a leaven of harmony for humanity.
Together, as one people, as brothers and sisters, let us walk toward God and love one another.
An excerpt from Pope Leo XIV's homily at the inaugural Mass beginning his Petrine ministry, May 18, 2025.
photo credit : Courtesy of Lee Pellegrini, Boston College
