How to Forgive When One Has Been Gravely Wounded?

The first liberation is intellectual. Many people believe they have not forgiven, when they have already done the essential; others believe they have forgiven, when they have only repressed. Clarifying words avoids both traps.

Forgiveness Is Not Forgetting

"Forgive and forget" is a popular formula, but it is false and often cruel. You do not command your memory. A mother who has lost a child will never forget; a victim of incest does not have to pretend that nothing happened. The Catechism is remarkably honest on this point:

"It is not in our power not to feel or to forget an offense; but the heart that offers itself to the Holy Spirit turns injury into compassion and purifies the memory in transforming the hurt into intercession." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2843^[2]

Forgiveness does not erase the memory: it changes its venom. The wounded memory remains, but it ceases to be a wound that commands vengeance; it becomes a place where we pray for the one who did evil. To heal memory is not to erase it.

Forgiveness Is Not Excusing or Denying the Fault

To excuse is to say: "it wasn't that serious," "he couldn't help it." To forgive is exactly the opposite: we only forgive what is truly culpable. Where there is no fault, there is nothing to forgive, only to understand. Forgiveness therefore assumes that we look evil in the face, name it, and recognize that it was unjust. Minimizing ("deep down it is nothing") is not a Christian virtue: it is an escape that lets the wound fester in silence.

Forgiveness Is Not Primarily a Feeling

This is the most common — and most paralyzing — misconception. We wait to "feel" forgiveness — a warmth, an inner reconciliation — and, not feeling it, conclude that we have not forgiven. Yet Christian forgiveness is first an act of the will: the decision to renounce vengeance and to will the good of the offender, even when the heart remains wounded. Feelings sometimes follow, long after; sometimes they never fully follow, and that does not make forgiveness any less real. One can forgive truly while still hurting.

Forgiveness Is Not Reconciliation

To forgive and to be reconciled are two distinct realities. Forgiveness depends on me alone: I can forgive a dead person, an absent person, someone who asks for nothing and regrets nothing. Reconciliation, on the other hand, requires two people: it presupposes that the offender acknowledges the wrong, stops causing harm, and sometimes makes reparation. One can therefore be bound to forgive without being bound to resume a dangerous relationship. This distinction is crucial for victims of abuse (see below).

Forgiveness Is Not Giving Up on Justice

To forgive does not cancel the duty of justice or the right to protection. Saint John Paul II formulated this forcefully: forgiveness "is in no way opposed to justice," but "is opposed to rancor and vengeance, and not to justice"^[3]. One can forgive an aggressor and report him; forgive a swindler and demand restitution; forgive a violent parent and refuse to entrust one's children to him. Forgiveness frees the heart from hatred; it does not remove the duty to protect the innocent.

Forgiveness is not an optional counsel reserved for heroic souls: in the Gospel, it is a condition of Christian life, directly linked to the forgiveness we hope to receive from God.

"Seventy Times Seven"

To Peter, who asked whether he should forgive up to seven times — already rare generosity — Jesus answers with a number that means the unlimited:

"Lord, when my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive him? As many as seven times? Jesus answered him, I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven." — Gospel according to Saint Matthew 18:21–22^[4]

The number is not countable: it abolishes all accounting. The disciple must not keep a record of offenses received, because God does not keep a record of his.

"As We Forgive Those Who Trespass Against Us": The Fifth Petition of the Our Father

Every day, Christians pronounce a formidable phrase, that of the Our Father (liturgical version): "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." That small word — as — makes the forgiveness we receive dependent on the forgiveness we give. Jesus underscores it immediately after teaching the prayer:

"For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." — Gospel according to Saint Matthew 6:14–15^[5]

The Catechism draws a striking consequence from this:

"Now — and this is daunting — this outpouring of mercy can penetrate our hearts only if we have forgiven those who have trespassed against us." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2840^[6]

Obstinate refusal to forgive does not stop God from loving us; but it closes the door through which His mercy seeks to enter. A heart that holds onto rancor is like a clenched hand: it can receive nothing because it will not let go of anything.

The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant

To engrave this teaching, Jesus tells the story of a servant whose king forgives an immense debt — ten thousand talents, an unimaginable sum — and who, hardly outside, seizes by the throat a fellow servant who owed him a hundred denarii, a pittance, refusing any delay. Learning of this, the master hands him over to the torturers. The lesson is explicit: "So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart" (Mt 18:35)^[7]. The Catechism notes that this parable "crowns the Lord's teaching on ecclesial communion"^[8]. The logic is this: in light of the infinite debt God forgives us, no offense received from a fellow human is comparable. We always forgive less than what we have been forgiven.

All of this remains theoretical until we face the real difficulty: grave wounds. To forgive a sharp word is one thing; to forgive the one who destroyed your childhood, your marriage, your honor, or your faith is another. The Church does not ask us to pretend that such offenses are light.

Acknowledging the Gravity, Not Disguising It as Piety

The first mistake would be to "spiritualize" too quickly: "offer it to the Lord and think no more of it." Such evasion is not forgiveness; it is religious repression. The true path begins by naming the wound as it is: what was done, by whom, and the harm it caused. We do not forgive a fog; we forgive a specific fault. The psalm itself allows the believer to cry out his pain and sense of injustice before God, without disguising it.

"It Is Not in Our Power to Forget"

It must be said again, because it is liberating: the Church does not demand the impossible. You are not required to feel nothing anymore. Anger that resurfaces, the tightening when the offender's name is spoken, tears years later — none of this proves that you have not forgiven. A penitent's contrition does not suddenly remove his inclinations; a wounded person's forgiveness does not suddenly erase his memory. What God asks is not to feed the wound with hatred, but to stop feeding it — not to magically cease feeling it.

Forgiveness Is a Decision, Not a Mood

Since we cannot command our feelings, forgiveness is placed where freedom can act: in the will. To forgive is to decide, before God, three concrete things:

1. I renounce avenging myself and wishing ill upon the offender;
2. I will his good, including his salvation, even if I do not feel it;
3. I entrust to God the judgment of what was done to me.

This decision can be made before the heart follows, and even against what the heart feels in the moment. That is precisely what makes it possible on days when we feel no tenderness.

A Path, Not a Moment

For great offenses, forgiveness is almost never a single, definitive act. It is an act to be renewed, sometimes daily, sometimes each time the memory returns. Deciding to forgive on Monday and feeling rage rise again on Tuesday is not a failure: it is the normal condition of a heart that heals slowly. We forgive "week by week," redoing the act as often as necessary, until one day peace settles.

Here is a proven itinerary, drawn from the spiritual tradition and pastoral experience. It is not a mechanical recipe, but landmarks to return to at your own pace.

1. Name the Wound Before God

Before wanting to forgive, take time to tell God — in writing if necessary — what happened and what you felt. Hide nothing: neither anger, nor desire for vengeance, nor even reproach toward God for having allowed it. This truth laid bare in prayer is the ground on which forgiveness can grow. Forgiveness that skips this stage remains superficial.

2. Decide to Forgive — An Act of the Will

Then, without waiting to feel it, make the act: "Lord, by a choice of my will, I forgive N. for the harm he did to me. I do not feel it, but I will it. Heal my heart so that feeling may one day join my decision." Naming the person and the offense explicitly gives the act its substance. This act can be repeated as often as necessary.

3. Renounce Vengeance and Rancor

To forgive is to return to God the right to judge that we had claimed for ourselves. Saint Paul makes this the heart of Christian ethics:

"Beloved, do not avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God. For Scripture says: Vengeance is mine, I will repay to each what is due to him, says the Lord. […] Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." — Saint Paul, Letter to the Romans 12:19,21^[9]

To renounce vengeance does not mean to renounce justice; it means to stop taking justice into our own hands through hatred, and to entrust the outcome to the One who sees all.

4. Pray for the One Who Wounded You

This is the step that seems most impossible, and yet it is the most powerful. Jesus asks not only not to return evil; He asks to love and to pray:

"Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you." — Gospel according to Saint Luke 6:27–28^[10]

Saint Francis of Assisi sums up this love in his 9th Admonition, "On Love of Enemies," which may be paraphrased as follows: to truly love one's enemy is not first to grieve over the wrong one has suffered, but to grieve, for the love of God, over the sin the other has committed — and to prove it to him by deeds^[11].

To pray for one's offender — even a single sentence: "Lord, save him" — gradually draws the poison from the heart. We cannot long hate someone for whom we truly pray.

5. Receive Grace in the Sacraments

Forgiveness is a fruit of grace, and grace has privileged channels: confession, where we ourselves receive the forgiveness that makes us able to give it, and the Eucharist, where we commune with the Heart that forgives from the height of the Cross. Many people testify that they received, in Eucharistic prayer or after a good confession, the capacity to forgive that they had sought in vain by their own strength. To explicitly ask for this grace — "grant me to forgive" — is already a beginning of forgiveness.

6. Begin Again as Often as Necessary

Finally, do not be discouraged by relapses. The "seventy times seven" also applies to one and the same offense: we sometimes must forgive a hundred times the same wound, each time it returns to strike the memory. Each renewed act digs peace a little deeper. Perfect forgiveness is often at the end of a long road — but each step is already real.

Knowing the obstacles helps to get through them. The spiritual tradition has spoken of them at length.

Rumination and Wounded Memory

The first enemy of forgiveness is rumination: replaying the scene, rewriting the lines we should have said, maintaining the inner trial of the offender. Sirach warns against this rancor that turns against the one who harbors it: "Resentment and anger, these are abominable things in which the sinner is a past master… Forgive your neighbor the wrong he has done to you; then, when you pray, your sins will be forgiven" (Sir 27:30 – 28:2, liturgical translation)^[12]. Rancor does not primarily wound the offender — often indifferent — but the one who carries it.

"I Can't Do It"

Many judge themselves bad Christians because they cannot forgive a great offense. Two things must be said again to them. First, to want to forgive is already to forgive: the sincere desire to forgive, even seemingly fruitless, is forgiveness itself being born. Second, what we cannot yet do, we can ask for: "Lord, I cannot, but You can in me." This prayer, held with patience, obtains in time what seemed impossible.

Forgiving Oneself

A grave wound often leaves victims feeling guilty in their own eyes: "why did I let it happen?", "why did I say nothing?" This false trial against oneself is another face of refusal to forgive. Welcoming God's mercy upon one's own story — including one's cowardice, real or imagined — is part of healing. We forgive others better when we have let God forgive ourselves.

"Forgiving God"? The False Problem and the True Prayer

Some harbor a dull anger against God Himself: "why did He allow this?" Theologically, we do not "forgive" God, who commits no fault. But we can, in prayer, lay this revolt before Him instead of silencing it. The Book of Job shows a man who cries out his protest to God — and whom God ends by approving as having "spoken of me what is right" (Jb 42:7). Telling God our pain, even in harsh words, is better than drifting away from Him in silence. The question of evil suffered is treated separately in a dedicated article (see For Further Reading).

This is the gravest — and most legitimate — objection, especially for victims of violence, abuse, or crimes. Would forgiving require staying silent, giving up on justice, returning to one's tormentor? The Church's answer is clear: no.

Forgiving Does Not Require Putting Oneself Back in Danger

Forgiveness frees the heart from hatred; it does not abolish prudence or the duty to protect. A battered woman can forgive her husband and leave him to protect herself and her children. A victim of abuse can forgive his aggressor and report him to justice, including ecclesiastical justice. Reporting a crime is not a lack of charity: it is a duty of justice toward other possible victims. The distinction between forgiveness (which depends only on me) and reconciliation (which requires repentance and safety) finds its full importance here.

Forgiveness, the "Royal Road" That Does Not Erase Justice

Saint John Paul II, who himself forgave Mehmet Ali Ağca, the man who had tried to assassinate him in 1981, devoted his Message for the World Day of Peace 2002 to this subject, a few months after the attacks of 11 September:

"There is no peace without justice, and there is no justice without forgiveness." — Saint John Paul II, Message for the XXXV World Day of Peace, 1 January 2002^[13]

The Pope specifies that forgiveness "is in no way opposed to justice," but to rancor and vengeance; the broken order is fully restored only by harmonizing justice and forgiveness^[14]. Forgiveness is therefore not the abdication of justice: it is its crowning, what prevents justice from degenerating into vengeance.

Forgiveness of great offenses is not a theory: men and women have lived it to the end, often in blood. They are the best proof that it is possible — by grace.

Christ on the Cross: "Father, Forgive Them"

At the height of injustice — an innocent man tortured and executed — Jesus does not curse His executioners. He prays for them, at the very moment they nail Him:

"Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do." — Gospel according to Saint Luke 23:34^[15]

This is the absolute model and the source of all Christian forgiveness: we do not forgive first by our own strength, but by sharing in Christ's forgiveness, by letting His prayer become our own. Forgiveness is not a moral feat we offer to God; it is a grace we receive from the Cross.

Saint Stephen, the First Martyr

The first disciple to die for Christ also dies imitating Him even in forgiveness. Under the stones that crush him, Stephen kneels and cries out:

"Lord, do not hold this sin against them." — Acts of the Apostles 7:60^[16]

Among those who approved his death stood a young man named Saul — the future Saint Paul. According to a formula traditionally attributed to Saint Augustine, Stephen's forgiveness is the seed of his persecutor's conversion^[17]: the forgiveness of victims is often the gateway to the salvation of executioners.

Joseph and His Brothers

Long before the Gospel, the Old Testament offers a summit of fraternal forgiveness. Sold as a slave by his brothers, Joseph, having become powerful in Egypt, could have taken revenge. He embraces them weeping and says to them:

"You meant to do me harm, but God meant to turn it to good, so as to bring about what is happening today: to preserve the life of a numerous people." — Book of Genesis 50:20^[18]

Joseph does not deny the crime ("you meant to do me harm"): he names it. But he rereads it within God's design, able to draw good from evil. This gaze of faith is one of the deepest springs of forgiveness.

Saint Maria Goretti

On 5 July 1902, at eleven years old, Maria Goretti was fatally stabbed by Alessandro Serenelli, a twenty-year-old neighbor who was trying to rape her. Taken to the hospital in Nettuno, she lingered there until the afternoon of the next day, 6 July 1902, and explicitly forgave her murderer, declaring that she wanted him with her in Heaven^[19]. Alessandro at first remained without remorse in prison, until a dream in which Maria offered him flowers; he was converted, spent decades in repentance, and came on his knees to ask pardon from Maria's mother, who granted it because her daughter had already done so. He was then welcomed by the Capuchins, with whom he lived as a brother without ever taking vows, until his death in Macerata on 6 May 1970. The forgiveness of a child made a saint of a murderer (see dedicated article).

Saint John Paul II and Ali Ağca

On 13 May 1981, Mehmet Ali Ağca shot John Paul II in Saint Peter's Square. The Pope barely survived; from his hospital bed he declared that he forgave his attacker. On 27 December 1983, he went to his cell in Rebibbia Prison, sat beside him, took his hand, and spoke at length with him. This image — the victim visiting his executioner — went around the world as an icon of Christian forgiveness in the twentieth century, without ever preventing human justice from taking its course^[20].

Why so much effort? Because forgiveness is first a gift we give ourselves. To refuse to forgive is to bind oneself forever to the one who wounded us, to leave him permanent power over our peace, to reawaken pain with every memory. To forgive is to cut that chain.

The Catechism places this struggle at the very heights of the life of prayer:

"Christian prayer extends to the forgiveness of enemies. It transfigures the disciple by configuring him to his Master. Forgiveness is a high point of Christian prayer; only a heart in tune with divine compassion can receive the gift of prayer." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2844^[21]

And it adds that this forgiveness, in the image of God's, knows no ceiling: "There is no limit or measure to this essentially divine forgiveness"^[22]. There lies the final paradox: in forgiving what seemed unforgivable, the wounded person does not go down, he rises; he does not abase himself before his offender, he is raised to the heart of God, whose proper way is to show mercy. Forgiveness is the victory of love over evil — not because it denies evil, but because it refuses to let evil have the last word.

• How Can I Know if God Forgives Me? — receiving the forgiveness that makes us able to give it.

• How to Make a Good Confession? — the sacrament in which we receive and learn forgiveness.

• What Is Reconciliation with God? — the profound meaning of divine forgiveness.

• What Is Repentance? — what reconciliation between two people presupposes.

• Saint Maria Goretti — the child who forgave her murderer.

• How to Respond to the Objection of Sexual Abuse? — forgiveness, justice, and protection of victims.

• The Answer to Evil and Suffering — the question of evil suffered, treated separately in a dedicated article.