Center for Civic Friendship: Must We Forgive?

Mary Jane Rein

Guest Writer

In Jan. 2025, ’First Things’ published a statement on forgiveness that grew out of conversations between Catholic and Jewish intellectuals. “Forgiveness,” the statement observes, “is not a sentiment but a discipline of hope.”

To forgive is not to excuse wrongdoing, rather it is a practice that creates the conditions for people—and societies—to move forward productively. Forgiveness aims at restoring relationships and the communities they sustain.

Across faith traditions and throughout human history, reconciliation and repair have been necessary for social life to thrive. As part of the Church’s Jubilee Year 2025 celebration, the Center for Civic Friendship has organized an interdisciplinary faculty panel to reflect on this timeless question: Must we forgive?

In the Hebrew Bible, the Jubilee marked a sacred time of release and renewal. The sabbatical year (every seven years) was prescribed as a time to let the land lay fallow. And every seven sabbatical years in the fiftieth year, the Israelites celebrated the jubilee, which called on them to forgive debts, free captives, and restore land to its original stewards—an act of communal healing and moral balance.

The Catholic Church carries this vision forward in its Jubilee years, which renew the call to forgiveness, reconciliation, and justice. The Jubilee tradition situates the question of forgiveness not only in personal morality but also in the life of the community. It reminds us that forgiveness restores relationships between individuals, and between society and its ideals.

In modern times, forgiveness emerges as both a moral and societal challenge. Simon Wiesenthal explores its complexity in recalling his experience as a concentration camp prisoner in his autobiographical account ‘The Sunflower’.

Wiesenthal describes being called to the bedside of a dying Nazi soldier who sought forgiveness for atrocities he perpetrated against innocent Jews.

Wiesenthal listens but is unable to forgive a crime that he did not personally suffer. His silence raises a difficult question: Can anyone forgive on behalf of others?

By contrast, Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s work in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission presents forgiveness as a public practice that enables communities to move forward together. “Without forgiveness,” Tutu wrote, “there is no future.” For him, forgiveness was not forgetting or excusing wrongdoing but a courageous act of repair—an acknowledgment of truth that makes renewal possible.

Recent public expressions of forgiveness have brought these themes to greater awareness. Amanda Knox, who as a young exchange student in Italy was wrongfully accused of murdering her roommate, recently forgave the Italian prosecutor who imprisoned her.

She saw forgiveness as a means of reclaiming her own agency. Erika Kirk, after the murder of her husband Charlie Kirk, publicly forgave his killer, grounding her response in Christian faith. Her words inspired many while also prompting debate about whether forgiveness should precede repentance—and at what emotional cost.

To ask: ”Must we forgive?” is to confront a profound human question: How do we live together after injury, injustice, or loss?

Between Wiesenthal’s silence and the mercy expressed by Tutu, Knox, and Kirk lies a wide moral landscape—one that reveals both the cost and the promise of forgiveness. Forgiveness may not erase the past, but it shapes the future. It allows individuals and communities to move forward without surrendering truth or justice.

In that sense, forgiveness is not only an act of mercy but also an act of civic imagination—one that invites us to see beyond grievance toward the possibility of renewal.

Professors Christopher Gilbert, Angela Kaufman-Parks, Ty Monroe, Smriti Rao will present their ideas on forgiveness from their individual disciplinary perspectives. Professor Jeremy Geddert will serve as respondent.