This week, Catholic New World staff writer Michelle Martin talks with Precious Blood Father Robert Schreiter, a professor of doctrinal theology at Catholic Theological Union.

Precious Blood Father Robert Schreiter took his first teaching job at Catholic Theological Union 29 years ago and never left. But his career, especially his interest in the spirituality and strategies of reconciliation, has taken him around the world. Schreiter first became interested in the topic while lecturing in Chile in the late 1980s, when dictator Augusto Pinochet allowed for a plebiscite on his rule. At the request of the bishops, he gave a lecture on reconciliation—“It wasn’t very good,” he said—and was asked by a young priest active with the resistance, “How do you reconcile with people who don’t think they’ve done anything wrong?” That sparked his interest, and led to a 1991 series of lectures for the Boston Theological Institute, which led to his first book on the topic, “Reconciliation: Mission and Ministry in a Changing Social Order.”

In 1995, he began working as a theological consultant on reconciliation with Caritas Internationalis, the umbrella organization for Catholic relief agencies.

The Catholic New World: So how do you get people to reconcile when one or both sides don’t think they’ve done anything wrong?

Father Robert Schreiter: When we think of reconciliation ordinarily, we think that the wrongdoer has to repent of wrongdoing, and then apologize to the victim and then the victim forgives the wrongdoer and there’s reconciliation, but that rarely happens.

The insight that I developed, and it’s based on St. Paul, is that God begins the reconciliation process with the victim, helping the victim heal from whatever wrong has been done to them. There’s a kind of short definition I give of individual reconciliation, when the harm has been done to an individual, that God restores the humanity of the victim that’s been taken away from them in the act of wrongdoing.

It’s because the victim heals that the victim is in a position to create the space that makes it possible—if it’s possible—for the wrongdoer to repent. We see this happening, for example, when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission met in South Africa. The number of victims who came forth to tell their stories, or the survivors of victims, who had already forgiven the wrongdoers, even though the wrongdoer had not asked for forgiveness … If that were not possible, then the victim would be held hostage to the wrongdoer forever.

God is the one who leads the reconciliation process, not us. We participate in God’s process. When you get into social reconciliation, civil reconciliation, often the amount of damage is so horrendous that first of all, it’s almost impossible to imagine how this can ever be healed. Three quarters of the time, reconciliation efforts aren’t successful.

TCNW: Where does that number come from?

FRS: Just out of experience.

What happens to a lot of people, if you think you are the source of reconciliation, you’ll burn out under those circumstances, because you’re a failure so often, or only partially successful. You make one step forward and two steps backward. The idea that it’s God leading the process and we participate in it—the basis for that is in Scriptures. In 2 Corinthians 5:17-20, St. Paul says we are “ambassadors for Christ’s sake” when he talks about reconciliation. In other words, we participate in God’s action of reconciling the world.

TCNW: How does that work with people who don’t have the same conception of God?

FRS: All you can do in those situations is offer what you have.

A lot of reconciliation situations are interfaith situations. Look at Palestine and Israel as one example. Or it can be with people who have no faith at all.

So you do bring what you have in terms of understanding of reconciliation. My experience has been that if people want reconciliation badly enough, they’re willing to get help wherever they can. They may understand it on their own terms. For example, go back to South Africa. Nelson Mandela is not a believer. But the pattern of what happened to him while he was in prison conforms to the Christian pattern of reconciliation. He obviously worked closely with the Christians in terms of trying to heal the situation in South Africa; he made Archbishop Tutu the head of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Generally, in these situations, people look for ways to collaborate if they really are seeking reconciliation and healing.

TCNW: Is it necessary for people to be really seeking reconciliation? You can’t make someone reconcile if they don’t want to.

FRS: Initially, it’s necessary for the victims. The victims have to want to be healed—and that’s not true of all victims. Sometimes they want to stay victims. But most victims do (want to reconcile). That can create an environment that makes it safer for the wrongdoer to seek reconciliation. People who know they’ve done something wrong are often fearful of the reprisals if they admit to their wrong.

TCNW: It sounds like you need general agreement on who the victim is and who the wrongdoer is, and you don’t always have that.

FRS: Yes, for example in these civil conflicts, one area where I’ve worked is in the Balkans, between the Serbs and the Croats. Both have been victims and both have been wrongdoers. In the Second World War, the Croats killed upwards of three quarters of a million Serbs. Most recently in the 1990s, the Serbs retaliated. You often get those kinds of situations where people are both wrongdoers and victims. Usually the best way to approach that is to begin with the victimhood of each side. Once they understand that, they can perhaps be freer to move to seeing their own wrongdoing. But it’s a very, very difficult thing. When you have conflicts that have gone on for a long time, or in families, we know that people who abuse their spouses or children probably were abused as children, so you get that same pattern ... probably the only way to break through it is to begin with the victimhood.

TCNW: How close of a parallel do you see between the individual situations and the societal situations?

FRS: There are remarkable parallels. The major difference is what constitutes healing. In a social reconciliation situation, the definition I work with is reconciliation is the moral reconstruction of a society, so that what happened in the past can never happen again. For that to work, you generally need people who have experienced individual healing. What happens is when healing takes place, our common sense understanding is, “If we could only go back to the way things were before the misdeed took place.” But we can never go back. Things are unalterably changed by what happened. So we have to go to a new place. That’s what the experience of reconciliation is: People end up in a new place that they hadn’t expected. Paul in that same passage says, “We are a new creation,” and that’s what we are under those circumstances.

TCNW: Why not just go on being mad at each other?

FRS: Two reasons. One is being angry all the time is not a happy state. The other is, as long as you’re tied to that event of the past, you’re held hostage to the past, and you can’t change. There’s a whole branch of study in American psychology today called “forgiveness studies,” because psychologists believe it is healthier to forgive than to hold on to the grudges of the past. People don’t want to be held hostage to their own pasts, and that urges them to seek something different.

TCNW: What is forgiveness?

FRS: Forgiveness, essentially, is coming free from the past. There are a lot of popular misconceptions of forgiveness. What that means is we get a different perspective in the wrongdoer. It’s not that we condone what the wrongdoer did. There’s that popular phrase, “Forgive and forget.” It’s not in the Bible and its bad advice, because you can’t forget. The only way you can forget is to diminish yourself, saying either what happened to you was not nearly as serious as you think it was, or you’re not important enough. When you forgive, you don’t forget, but you remember in a different way, and that kind of removes the toxic character of what happened in the past. It doesn’t mean that the wrongdoer still shouldn’t be punished. Often, what it means is to be able to see the frailness of the wrongdoer as well. Take the case of abuse in families and alcoholism, etc. Say I had a parent who was an alcoholic, and as a result of that, harmed my upbringing. At a certain point, I can say this is a frail human being too, and I can have compassion, without forgetting what they did.

Usually we push people to forgive too quickly, before they’ve dealt with their own feelings. Forgiveness really has two moments. The first is the decision to forgive: “I want to forgive, but I’m not able to do it yet,” sometimes called forgiveness of the head. The second is the decision of the heart. We often push people too quickly to forgive before they’ve even figured out how they’ve been hurt.

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