During the prayer vigil in Barcelona, several people shared personal testimonies. One of them came from a young woman whose father had tried to kill her mother. She asked Pope Leo XIV about faith and forgiveness. This was his response:
QUESTION:
Good evening, Holy Father. I come from a family in a very poor neighborhood of Barcelona. When I was little, my father tried to kill my mother, and she was saved because a young man stepped in and died instead. My father went to prison, and my mother turned to drugs. When I was ten, social services took me in and sent me to the “San José de la Montaña” juvenile detention center. At first it was difficult because I had built a wall around myself to protect myself by not letting anyone in. Little by little, I experienced family love for the first time, and my heart began to open up. There they told me about Jesus; I started to pray and was baptized. But during my teenage years, I rebelled against God many times. I was invited to a retreat, and there, for the first time, I experienced God’s love. But a few months have passed, and I still find it hard to forgive my father. And sometimes I look up to heaven and ask God, “Where were you when I was a little girl?” Holy Father, how can I forgive my father for almost leaving me without a mother? How can I truly be reconciled with God?
POPE LEO XIV'S RESPONSE:
Thank you for sharing your testimony and thank you also for your question about forgiveness. It is truly a sign of God’s grace that you have the courage to ask how to forgive those who have wronged us despite your past suffering. I would like to mention two things.
First, I would like to expand on what I said earlier about God’s presence in our times of suffering. Deep down, you are also asking this question in relation to your childhood. However, the context in which the events of your life have unfolded requires us to broaden the scope of our question. Should we ask “where was God”? Or should we ask ourselves about humanity, about how we are sometimes prisoners of evil, resorting to violence against others? How is it that we fail to cultivate love and respect for others’ dignity and freedom?
So many crime reports, even today, reflect a toxic climate in family relationships marked by abuse and oppression and, in particular, by violence against women, which unfortunately often leads to femicide. We are all called to address this dramatic reality, which has anthropological and cultural roots, both personally and as a society, because we are responsible for confronting it in all its dimensions.
We cannot attribute to God what has been entrusted to our responsibility; we cannot imagine that God, from on high, will automatically respond to our needs or miraculously prevent evil from happening. He has endowed us with intelligence and will, given us a conscience, clothing us in dignity and freedom, and above all has come among us in his Son, Jesus Christ, showing us the path to follow so that our lives may be fully human and so that justice, peace and fraternity may reign in our society. He has given us his own Spirit, precisely so that love may be the key to all our human relationships. If violence exists, if selfishness prevails, if even love among family members turns into hatred, we must question the dynamics of our society, the culture of individualism and the temptation of violence — but not God.
The second point concerns forgiveness. We must learn to view forgiveness — that powerful remedy for evil that heals our inner wounds — as part of a process and a journey. If we read the Gospel as a book of instructions, commandments and duties, we risk becoming greatly discouraged and frustrated because Jesus invites us to forgive, yet we find ourselves unable to do so. But that is not the case. Above all, we must seek forgiveness from the Lord. We must continually ask the Lord — perhaps for our entire lives — to expand the space of love within us, precisely where we have been wounded, that he can help us reconcile with ourselves and with that part of our past that has been marked by suffering, so that he may slowly transform resentment into mercy and compassion.
This is a long journey and a process that requires great patience. It is an effort we must make, both on a personal level and through other means of support, as well as inner reconciliation. We must not lose heart: we move forward in small steps toward forgiveness. Reconciliation with the past is gradual. Above all, we must not think that forgiveness always and in every case means returning to the previous situation or having a close relationship with those who have hurt us, especially when there was violence. We can maintain a good disposition of heart toward the person, reject all forms of hatred or revenge, strive to repair the relationship as much as possible and perhaps pray for him or her. All of this helps us to enter more and more into the dynamic of forgiveness and to be reconciled with God and with others. We are forgiven sinners; we are at peace, are able to forgive and are able to be peacemaker
