Religious and family trauma; forgiveness and its counterfeits

Homily for Tuesday of the First Week of Lent, 2025

Photo by Jacob Bentzinger on Unsplash

This homily was preached at Our Lady of Lourdes parish in West Orange on Tuesday, March 11, the first day of the Novena to Saint Joseph ending on March 19, the Solemnity of St. Joseph. My thanks to my friend Paul Fahey, a Catholic counselor specializing in religious trauma, for his work in general and for specific support while writing this homily.

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How fitting that in this Jubilee year 2025 the Novena to St. Joseph, foster father of Jesus and a patron of all human fatherhood, should begin with Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount giving his disciples the Our Father.

In our Lord’s mission of revealing to the world in a new way the heart and character of the One who made us, few of his words are more transforming and revolutionary than these six words: “Pray, then, like this: Our Father.” In those six words God the Son, eternally begotten of the Father, invites and authorizes the likes of us—creatures of dust and ashes—to call his Father our Father! To regard ourselves, not just as creatures of an omnipotent Creator in heaven, or servants of a sovereign Master in heaven, or even sheep of a vigilant Shepherd in heaven, but sons and daughters of a loving Father in heaven.

This title for God, “Father,” for Christians is an indispensable icon, a window into heaven, revealing God’s essence. Yet for countless Christians it can be as much an obstacle as an icon—depending on the character of one’s own earthly father and one’s relationship with him.

Even the best human fathers aren’t perfect. St. Joseph wasn’t perfect, and how often he must have felt unworthy and unequal to the unfathomable responsibility for which he had been chosen. For that matter, many ordinary fathers feel something similar! Ah, but what about those who don’t? What about the father who is always right, who believes he always knows best? Who seeks to control every important decision his offspring make about their lives, or punish them for what he considers incorrect decisions? What about fathers whose expectations are never met: who offer only criticism, never praise?

Pope Francis, in his apostolic letter on Saint Joseph, patron of the universal Church, warns against this distortion of the calling of fatherhood. In the process he offers a surprising interpretation of St. Joseph’s traditional title “father most chaste”:

Being a father entails introducing children to life and reality. Not holding them back, being overprotective or possessive, but rather making them capable of deciding for themselves, enjoying freedom and exploring new possibilities. Perhaps for this reason, Joseph is traditionally called a ‘most chaste’ father. That title is not simply a sign of affection, but the summation of an attitude that is the opposite of possessiveness. Chastity is freedom from possessiveness in every sphere of one’s life. Only when love is chaste, is it truly love. A possessive love ultimately becomes dangerous: it imprisons, constricts and makes for misery. God himself loved humanity with a chaste love; he left us free even to go astray and set ourselves against him.

Parental love that “imprisons, constricts, and makes for misery” can impede our relationship with God—a difficulty Jesus is well aware of. Far from glossing over it, he confronts it head-on, later in the Sermon on the Mount. Encouraging his hearers to pray with trust, he points out to them that they themselves, even if they’re evil, still know enough to give their children food—bread and fish, not stones and serpents! It’s a low bar, and even so not all parents clear it. Yet for Jesus even this low bar can become a narrow window showing us something of God.

It’s not only parents. Priests and deacons, religious instructors, older siblings, overbearing spouses, and others, through their failings, and, sometimes, their evil, can create obstacles between us and God. Emotional baggage and religious trauma connected to the misdeeds of authority figures in our lives can be a burden that people carry for years, decades, sometimes indefinitely. An obstacle, to be clear, for us—not for God! This suffering also Christ took to himself in his passion, and God is never closer to us than when he feels distant in our suffering. As today’s Responsorial Psalm proclaims, “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted, and those who are crushed in spirit he saves.”

Spiritual and emotional healing are absolutely possible, but even the paths of healing are sometimes subverted by the distortions of religious truth. Take the prominent theme in this Gospel, particularly appropriate to a jubilee year, of forgiveness.

On the one hand, on no subject is our Lord more insistent than on the demand of forgiveness. Over and over he tells us to forgive, that we may be forgiven; if we do not forgive, we will not be forgiven. And not just once or twice a day; seven times a day, seventy-seven times, or seventy times seven—in short, without limit.

Forgiveness is not optional. But what forgiveness is is often profoundly distorted. People tell us to “forgive and forget”—a phrase found nowhere in the Bible or the Catechism. Forgiveness can be wrongly conflated with reconciliation and even with absolution from consequences and accountability. The duty to forgive can be weaponized by people who think forgiveness and reconciliation are owed to them, even if they’ve taken no responsibility for the harm they’ve done.

In his encyclical Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis warns against “calling for forgiveness when it involves renouncing our own rights.” He continues:

Forgiveness does not entail allowing oppressors to keep trampling on their own dignity and that of others, or letting criminals continue their wrongdoing. Those who suffer injustice have to defend strenuously their own rights and those of their family, precisely because they must preserve the dignity they have received as a loving gift from God.

Forgiveness can mean very different things in practice, depending on many factors. Above all, whether the offender is truly sorry. Other factors include the gravity of the offense; the nature of the relationship; whether the offense was isolated or part of a pattern of behavior; whether the offender is in a position to hurt us again; and whether they are alive or dead.

Forgiveness can mean reconciliation and a return to how things were, or how they would have been if the offense hadn’t happened. Without reconciliation, where would any of us be? Whatever hopes we have in this life of happiness and peace and love depend on forgiveness and reconciliation!

But forgiveness is never opposed to truth or justice. It certainly doesn’t mean papering over the offense or minimizing it. On the contrary, forgiveness presupposes that we at least, if not the one who hurt us, have faced up to the wrong that’s been done to us. We cannot forgive what we don’t fully acknowledge.

One way to define forgiveness is this: Forgiveness entails the choice at least to begin to seek, as far as possible and by the grace of God, to love the one who offended us—to will their good—and to be, for our own part, at peace with them, or regarding them. This doesn’t necessarily mean ever seeing them again. It does mean choosing not to indulge in resentment and bitterness. What forgiveness means can change over time. It’s not a single decision. It’s a process, a journey—a “pilgrimage of hope.”

Jesus’ call to forgive all offenses is the necessary corollary of his great commandment to love your neighbor, and even to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:44–45).

St. Joseph, father most chaste, pray for us!