The Christianity and Society Center, integrated in the School of Theology of the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross (Rome) and the Confederation of Businessmen Coparmex (Mexico), are proposing a congress entitled “Common Memory and Collective Forgiveness”. The activity is sponsored by the Dicastery for Evangelization (Holy See) and will take place within the framework of the Jubilee activities for entrepreneurs in Rome, on May 6 and 7, 2025.
For Christian believers, the Jubilee is a year of remission of sins and reconciliation. In the biblical world, the Jubilee had a strong social dimension, as it represented liberation from negative dependencies established by humans among themselves (slavery, usury, domination, offenses, revenge, etc.). The Jubilee year already offers today an opportunity to reflect and prepare ourselves to live this special period by exploring new horizons and new paths to achieve peace in our contemporary society, wounded by interpersonal relationships and torn by social tensions and, in too many cases, outright armed conflicts.
Among its various consequences, shared memory enables the initiation of a desirable dynamic in which those who have been forgiven pass on this experience to others, as an act of purification of memory and liberation from resentment. The memory of an offense is relevant to forgiveness, but it should not make an individual—or a community—a prisoner of pain and vengeance. Instead, it should contribute to discovering the vulnerability of oneself and others. From memory can arise the impulse to renew relationships and achieve possible reconciliation.
The multiplication of cases of collective forgiveness and collective apologies since the early 1990s raises a series of questions that deserve deeper examination. Collective forgiveness is not simply the forgiveness of any group, as it requires a structure in which the group of people constitutes more than just a sum of individuals. These collectives possess distinct qualities as a whole, received from each individual member. More importantly, they typically have formal organizational structures that allow them to make decisions and take actions jointly on behalf of the group. Among the groups that are the subjects of such acts of collective forgiveness are, for example: nations and states, the Church, universities, companies, and others, including ethnic groups or collectives whose unifying characteristic is shared suffering caused by the same type of offense.
In any case, collective forgiveness is modeled on interpersonal forgiveness. Specialists (philosophers, jurists, theologians, historians, sociologists, etc.) study a variety of issues, such as: the very possibility of collective forgiveness, the offense, memory, truth, responsibility, justice and its limits, guilt, intergenerational solidarity, narrative, reparation, and the public use of history. Collective forgiveness has also renewed attention on the institutions of our world, their mechanisms of representation, and the loss of trust in them by citizens. These are themes that affect the health of relationships at all levels, the lack of peace and reconciliation in society, families, and between individuals—not only because the culture of forgiveness has waned among citizens, but also because evil is not always recognized as such, and thus there is no repentance. Finally, shared memory and collective forgiveness touch upon the structures of society that safeguard justice and law, either facilitating or hindering the creation of contexts that foster the possibility of forgiving and asking for forgiveness.
The conference aims to carefully reflect on how an organization can initiate processes of recognizing shared memory and collective forgiveness, in pursuit of the peace our contemporary society needs. Ultimately, these processes stem from the awareness of God's forgiveness toward each of us (theological dimension), the awareness of belonging to a community where mistakes need not be final (philosophical and relational dimension), and the creation of new processes that make it easier to forgive and seek forgiveness (institutional, judicial, and legal dimension).
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