René Dentz: Is it Possible to Think of Forgiveness in a Decolonial Way? Forgiveness as Inseparable from Memory and Freedom. In: Ostium, vol. 22, 2026, no. 1. (study)
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This article explores the possibility of conceiving forgiveness through a decolonial hermeneutic grounded in the thought of Paul Ricoeur. Forgiveness, it argues, cannot be dissociated from memory and freedom, for its very reality depends on the ethical capacity of the subject to reinterpret wounded time. However, within colonial and post-colonial contexts—where freedom is systematically denied—the act of forgiving reveals its paradoxical fragility. Drawing on Ricoeur’s “capable subject,” this paper investigates how forgiveness might be re-imagined in light of decolonial epistemologies, which challenge the universality of Western metaphysics and its theological presuppositions. It proposes that a “God without absolutes,” as suggested by Ricoeur and later reinterpreted by Jean-Luc Marion, opens the horizon for a post-metaphysical theology of forgiveness—one that resists both moralization and cultural domination.
Keywords: forgiveness; decolonial hermeneutics; memory; freedom; Paul Ricoeur; postmodern theology; alterity; justice; Christianity; postcolonial theology.
Introduction
To speak of forgiveness today is to enter a field marked by colonial wounds, epistemic silences, and spiritual longing. The modern project—inseparable from conquest and the logic of the same—universalized a single grammar of reason, reducing other cosmologies to the margins of history. Within this framework, Christianity too was often instrumentalized: the Gospel of mercy became a moral alibi for domination. Decolonial theology, therefore, must not only critique doctrines but reinterpret the very conditions under which forgiveness can be imagined.
In this horizon, forgiveness is not an abstract virtue but a hermeneutical act—a re-narration of wounded memory that opens the possibility of freedom. Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the capable human being provides the anthropological foundation: to forgive is to recover the capacity to narrate one’s own history. Yet such capacity presupposes recognition and voice—precisely what colonial systems have denied. The task of a decolonial hermeneutic is thus to return narration to the silenced: to transform trauma into testimony and resentment into responsibility.
At the same time, forgiveness cannot remain confined to interpersonal ethics; it demands historical and structural transformation. The voices of Cleusa Caldeira, Carlos Mendoza Álvarez, and the pastoral theologies emerging from the Amazon insist that reconciliation involves the healing of memory—social, ecological, and spiritual. Caldeira’s teoquilombismo discloses a theology of remembrance born from the Afro-Brazilian experience of survival; Mendoza’s hermeneutics of resurrection redefines forgiveness as an eschatological praxis; and the Amazonian synodal vision calls the Church to “walk together” with indigenous wisdom, discovering the Spirit already present in creation.
The recent apostolic letter Drawing New Maps of Hope (2025) by Pope Leo renews this horizon, calling education itself to become a locus of reconciliation—an “ecology of learning” that restores relational freedom against the hyper-individualism of the digital age. In this intersection of theology, memory, and pedagogy, forgiveness emerges as the grammar of liberation: a practice through which humanity learns again how to dwell together in difference.
1 Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of Memory and Freedom
Ricoeur’s hermeneutics develops from a conviction that human beings are narrative agents: they become themselves through stories they tell and receive. The self, he insists, is not a substance but a “narrative identity” (Ricoeur, 1990, p. 150). This narrative mediation allows for the reconfiguration of the past—a work of remembering that liberates the subject from the tyranny of repetition. Forgiveness, in this light, is not the forgetting of evil but the re-writing of its meaning.
True forgiveness is inseparable from responsible remembrance. Forgetting imposed by power becomes complicity; only the memory assumed and interpreted can open the path to freedom. For Ricoeur, freedom is not arbitrary will but the capacity to act and to be responsible—the power to begin anew. It is within this dynamic of narrating, remembering, and acting that forgiveness takes root as a gesture of freedom.
Yet freedom is not evenly distributed. Colonial systems denied agency to entire peoples, reducing them to objects of history rather than subjects of memory. The hermeneutics of forgiveness, if it is to be decolonial, must therefore recover the silenced voices of the oppressed, restoring their right to narrate the wound. Here Ricoeur’s ethics of the “capable subject” meets the decolonial demand for epistemic justice.
2 The Decolonial Question: Whose Memory, Whose Forgiveness?
Decolonial thought—represented by thinkers such as Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, and María Lugones—contends that modern rationality established a “coloniality of power” that persists even after formal decolonization. This coloniality operates not only in political structures but also in epistemological hierarchies: Europe became the measure of truth, while other cosmologies were marginalized. Theology, in its turn, often baptized this hegemony, universalizing its own particularity.
In this context, to speak of forgiveness is to risk reproducing the asymmetry of power. If forgiveness is preached to the oppressed without justice, it becomes moral violence—a continuation of colonial logic. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014) notes, reconciliation without recognition perpetuates epistemicide. Hence, the decolonial hermeneutic of forgiveness must begin with the re-appropriation of memory as a political act.
Forgiveness cannot be demanded from the colonized; it must arise from within their narrative reconstitution. It is only when the victim becomes again a narrator that forgiveness can occur as an act of freedom. Otherwise, it degenerates into resignation. Ricoeur himself hints at this when he warns that “forgiveness cannot be commanded; it is a gift that comes in the wake of the impossible” (Ricoeur, 2000, p. 458).
2.1 Decolonial Forgiveness and the Teoquilombist Horizon of Memory
In this same decolonial horizon, Cleusa Caldeira introduces the notion of teoquilombismo—a theology born from the lived experience of resistance and spirituality within Afro-Brazilian and diasporic communities. As Caldeira writes, “teoquilombismo is the experience of God in the place of the wounded body, the faith that survives captivity and transforms pain into history” (Teoquilombismo: Corpo e Resistência na Teologia Brasileira, 2018, p. 62). Forgiveness here is not an individual act of moral virtue but a communal process of memory, one that restores the humanity denied by colonial Christianity.
For Caldeira, this process demands that the Church itself undergo a conversion of memory—a recognition that the Gospel, when lived from the margins, becomes a force of liberation. “Only when the Church remembers with the bodies of those forgotten,” she writes, “does it become truly Catholic—open to all, reconciled with its own colonial wounds” (Caldeira, 2019, p. 88). In this sense, forgiveness is not the erasure of difference but its celebration: a theology that remembers the other as indispensable to its own identity.
This teoquilombist hermeneutics resonates with the educational vision proposed in Pope Francis’s recent apostolic document Drawing New Maps of Hope (2025), which calls for an education that heals memory through encounter. Both perspectives converge in viewing forgiveness as formation—a learning to coexist through the remembrance of wounds. As Caldeira insists, “the memory of the enslaved is not resentment, but a pedagogy of resurrection” (2018, p. 73).
2.2 Pastoral Theology and the Amazonian Turn
The same call to reconciliation through memory and dialogue finds a powerful echo in the theology emerging from the Amazon region, where ecological, cultural, and spiritual struggles intertwine. The Synod for the Amazon (2019) and subsequent pastoral reflections have deepened the Church’s awareness that forgiveness and liberation must embrace both humanity and creation. Paulo Suess emphasizes that “to evangelize in the Amazon is not to bring God to the forest, but to discover God already present in the forest peoples” (Missão e Inculturação, 1995, p. 211).
From this Amazonian perspective, forgiveness becomes cosmic and intercultural: a process that heals not only human relationships but also the broken communion between peoples and the Earth. José Comblin reminds us that “the Spirit precedes the missionary; it is already working in the life of the people” (O Espírito Santo e a Libertação, 1989, p. 54). This pneumatological openness situates forgiveness within a theology of listening, where reconciliation begins by hearing the cry of the land and the voice of indigenous wisdom.
Such a pastoral theology insists that the Church’s mission in the Amazon is not conquest but companionship. It calls for what Pope Francis terms “an education in dialogue, a pedagogy of encounter that learns from difference”. Forgiveness, in this light, is not a concession but a method—a way of walking together (syn-hodos). It is the pastoral enactment of fraternity: a form of learning to live with the wounds of others as one’s own.
In this synthesis—Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of wounds, Girard’s anthropology of the victim, Mendoza Álvarez’s eschatological hope, Caldeira’s teoquilombist memory, and the Amazonian pastoral turn—forgiveness emerges as the grammar of liberation. It holds together memory and justice, faith and culture, human and ecological reconciliation. The Church, when it listens to these theologies from below, rediscovers its catholicity: not as universality of power, but as universality of compassion.
3 Theology after Empire: The “God without Absolutes”
One of the main theological obstacles to decolonial forgiveness lies in the metaphysical absolutization of God. Western Christianity, shaped by Greek ontology, conceived of God primarily as substance, pure act, and immutable perfection. This ontotheological model—criticized by Heidegger and Marion—tends to suppress alterity, since the absolute absorbs all difference.
In the later Ricoeur (Living Up to Death, 2007), however, God appears as the God without absolutes—a God who withdraws to make room for human freedom. This divine kenosis parallels the Lurianic concept of tsimtsum in Jewish mysticism, where God’s self-contraction creates the space of creation. Such a theology of withdrawal deconstructs metaphysical domination and allows a truly decolonial horizon: God is not the imperial subject who imposes forgiveness but the hidden source that invites relational freedom.
Jean-Luc Marion radicalizes this in his phenomenology of donation: “What is given is no longer what I can constitute, but what constitutes me by giving itself” (Marion, 1989, p. 296). Forgiveness, then, is not a human achievement but a gift that precedes us—a grace without control. Decolonial theology, grounded in such a notion of givenness, refuses to appropriate the divine; it listens to the excess that escapes all sovereignty.
This also means thinking Christianity beyond its Greek and Judaic roots, without denying them. A decolonial Christianity would not erase its origins but would “listen from the margins,” acknowledging that revelation always exceeds its linguistic and cultural forms. The “universal” of faith, then, would no longer be the expansion of one culture’s truth but the hospitality to many worlds within the same divine mystery.
4 The Hermeneutics of Wounds: Memory as Resistance
Forgiveness without memory is amnesia; memory without freedom is trauma. Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of wounds,” as developed in my own work, situates forgiveness precisely between these extremes. Every wound bears a narrative that demands interpretation; yet interpretation alone cannot heal—it must open toward freedom.
The task of a decolonial theology is to turn memory into resistance. The colonized body, as Frantz Fanon (1961) shows, carries both historical trauma and the desire for liberation. Forgiveness cannot bypass this tension; it must pass through it. To forgive, in this sense, is to transfigure wounded memory into a new relational grammar, one that refuses both vengeance and forgetfulness.
Decolonial forgiveness is therefore inseparable from justice. As Gustavo Gutiérrez (1971) already affirmed in A Theology of Liberation, grace does not eliminate the demand for historical transformation—it radicalizes it. Forgiveness, when stripped of its political dimension, risks legitimizing oppression. The work of remembrance must thus include reparative action: truth commissions, historical justice, and symbolic restitution are not optional preliminaries but intrinsic moments of the ethical process of forgiving.
Ricoeur’s anthropology of the “capable human being” (l’homme capable) provides a crucial bridge between ethics and politics. To be capable is to act, to promise, to take responsibility, and to forgive. In Oneself as Another, Ricoeur lists four capacities—speaking, acting, narrating, and being responsible—which together constitute human dignity (Ricoeur, 1990, p. 18). Decolonial theology reclaims these capacities for those whom history rendered voiceless.
Forgiveness, then, becomes a praxis of freedom. It is not imposed from above but emerges when subjects reclaim the power to tell their stories. This echoes Hannah Arendt’s insight that “forgiveness and promise are the remedies for the unpredictability of action” (The Human Condition, 1958, p. 236). In a post-colonial world marked by broken promises, forgiveness re-opens the possibility of future action.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, as I have written elsewhere, “forgiveness is the transformation of resentment into narrative responsibility” (Dentz, 2024, p. 212). To narrate one’s trauma is to free oneself from its unconscious repetition. This liberation, however, presupposes recognition—by self, by other, and by community. Where denial persists, no forgiveness is possible.
Thus, freedom in the decolonial sense is not abstract autonomy but relational capacity: the power to act with others in mutual recognition. Forgiveness restores this relationality; it is the ethical face of freedom.
Carlos Mendoza Álvarez deepens this horizon by describing forgiveness as a “hermeneutics of resurrection”, a praxis that transfigures historical violence into new symbolic life. For Mendoza, “forgiveness is not the erasure of history but its eschatological transformation” (Teología y praxis de la esperanza, 2013, p. 147). This vision aligns with Ricoeur’s narrative ethics and with Girard’s anthropology: both see in forgiveness the interruption of the mimetic cycle and the birth of a reconciled humanity. In a world marked by what Mendoza calls “colonial wounds of the spirit”, forgiveness becomes a theological resistance—an act that affirms life against the death-drive of historical domination.
This redemptive dimension of memory finds literary embodiment in João Guimarães Rosa, whose Grande Sertão: Veredas reveals that forgiveness is a journey through ambiguity, a “vereda” where good and evil intertwine within the human heart. Riobaldo’s confession—“o diabo não existe fora da gente”—exposes the mimetic struggle within desire itself. In Rosa’s poetics, the act of narrating one’s wound already begins the process of forgiveness: language, when it becomes story, opens the path of transfiguration. His mystical sertão anticipates what Ricoeur calls the narrative identity—the self reconciled with its own fracture through the telling of its history.
Paulo Freire, too, situates forgiveness within the horizon of liberation. For him, authentic education requires “love, humility, and dialogue” (Pedagogia do Oprimido, 1970, p. 72). Without these, there is no humanization. Forgiveness, in Freire’s pedagogy, is not passive resignation but critical tenderness—the courage to continue loving in the face of oppression. It restores dialogue where domination silences. To forgive, then, is a pedagogical act: it breaks the logic of fatalism and opens the space of hope.
When read together—Ricoeur’s capable subject, Girard’s renunciation of mimetic rivalry, Mendoza’s eschatological hope, Freire’s pedagogy of love, and Rosa’s poetic of interior reconciliation—they reveal forgiveness as a multilayered praxis: hermeneutic, political, aesthetic, and spiritual. It is not the forgetting of evil but the re-narration of it within a horizon of shared humanity. The decolonial subject, once silenced, becomes capable of speaking again—transforming trauma into testimony, resentment into responsibility, solitude into fraternity.
In this synthesis, forgiveness stands as the grammar of a liberated memory. It does not dissolve the demand for justice; rather, it gives justice a human face. As Mendoza Álvarez insists, “only a forgiven memory can become memory of hope” (La resurrección como acontecimiento ético, 2010, p. 201). To forgive, then, is to choose life—an act that, like Rosa’s sertanejo crossing and Freire’s dialogical pedagogy, turns suffering into the language of liberation.
Forgiveness without memory is amnesia; memory without freedom is trauma. Paul Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of wounds,” as developed in my own work, situates forgiveness precisely between these extremes. Every wound bears a narrative that demands interpretation; yet interpretation alone cannot heal—it must open toward freedom. The task of a decolonial theology is to turn memory into resistance. The colonized body, as Frantz Fanon shows, carries both historical trauma and the desire for liberation. Forgiveness cannot bypass this tension; it must pass through it. To forgive, in this sense, is to transfigure wounded memory into a new relational grammar, one that refuses both vengeance and forgetfulness.
Decolonial forgiveness is therefore inseparable from justice. As Gustavo Gutiérrez already affirmed in A Theology of Liberation (1971), grace does not eliminate the demand for historical transformation—it radicalizes it. Forgiveness, when stripped of its political dimension, risks legitimizing oppression. The work of remembrance must thus include reparative action: truth commissions, historical justice, and symbolic restitution are not optional preliminaries but intrinsic moments of the ethical process of forgiving. Ricoeur’s anthropology of the “capable human being” (l’homme capable) provides a crucial bridge between ethics and politics. To be capable is to act, to promise, to take responsibility, and to forgive. In Oneself as Another, Ricoeur lists four capacities—speaking, acting, narrating, and being responsible—which together constitute human dignity (Ricoeur 1990, p. 18). Decolonial theology reclaims these capacities for those whom history rendered voiceless.
Forgiveness, then, becomes a praxis of freedom. It is not imposed from above but emerges when subjects reclaim the power to tell their stories. This echoes Hannah Arendt’s insight that “forgiveness and promise are the remedies for the unpredictability of action” (The Human Condition, 1958, p. 236). In a post-colonial world marked by broken promises, forgiveness re-opens the possibility of future action. From a psychoanalytic perspective, as I have written elsewhere, “forgiveness is the transformation of resentment into narrative responsibility” (Dentz, 2024, p. 212). To narrate one’s trauma is to free oneself from its unconscious repetition. This liberation, however, presupposes recognition—by self, by other, and by community. Where denial persists, no forgiveness is possible.
Thus, freedom in the decolonial sense is not abstract autonomy but relational capacity: the power to act with others in mutual recognition. Forgiveness restores this relationality; it is the ethical face of freedom.
Into this dynamic we must now insert the educational imperative set forth by Pope Leo XIV in his Apostolic Letter Drawing New Maps of Hope, released 28 October 2025. In that document the Pope writes: “We are aware of the difficulties: hyper-digitalization can fragment attention; the crisis of relationships can wound the psyche; social insecurity and inequalities can extinguish desire.” He insists that Christian education must form “the whole person: spiritual, intellectual, emotional, social, and physical… [and measure] its value … on the basis of dignity, justice, and the ability to serve the common good.” In doing so, the document resonates profoundly with the logic of forgiveness proposed above: education must not be mere transmission of data or capacity for competition, but formation of persons capable of narrative, responsibility, and relational freedom.
What is at stake is precisely the transformation of memory into freedom, and education into a field of relational reconciliation. The Pope emphasises that “where access to education remains a privilege, the Church must push open doors and invent new paths, because ‘losing the poor’ is equivalent to losing the school itself.” In relation to decolonial forgiveness, this signals that educational institutions cannot be neutral: they must become laboratories of liberation where wounds are acknowledged, narratives reclaimed, and new promises made. The formation of the “capable human being” thus acquires a pedagogical dimension: to forgive, to narrate, to belong.
5 Forgiveness and the Decolonial Re-Imagining of Christianity
Christian theology has long oscillated between two tendencies: universalist soteriology (the cross as cosmic reconciliation) and historical exclusivity (forgiveness mediated by the Church). A decolonial re-imagining requires breaking this binary by retrieving the kenotic essence of Christianity: God’s self-emptying (Phil 2:5–11) as paradigm of de-centering.
If God withdraws to make space for the human, then theology must withdraw from imperial pretension to make space for other spiritualities. The decolonial gesture is thus profoundly theological: it mirrors divine kenosis. Forgiveness, in this register, ceases to be a moral command and becomes participation in God’s own self-limitation—the divine renunciation of power for the sake of relation.
This perspective also challenges the “Greek” obsession with truth as adequation. As I noted in The Silence of Evil, “a perspective of affirming truth would prove to be violent and mimetic” (Dentz, 2024, p. 19). Decolonial forgiveness rejects the violence of totalizing truth, choosing instead the vulnerability of dialogue. Its horizon is not the certainty of doctrine but the humility of listening—the same listening that underlies every genuine hermeneutic act.
Forgiveness as decolonial hermeneutic requires a re-thinking of alterity beyond the dialectic of master and slave. Emmanuel Lévinas offers the key: “the face of the other in its nakedness and misery is what obliges me before any contract” (Totality and Infinity, 1961, p. 75). This ethical priority of the Other subverts the colonial logic of possession.
For Lévinas, the infinite reveals itself not in metaphysical transcendence but in proximity—the face that demands responsibility. Such an ethics founds what I call “absolute alterity”: an encounter where the self relinquishes the power to define. In this sense, forgiveness is an event of infinite responsibility, not reconciliation through sameness but hospitality to irreducible difference.
Jean-Luc Marion extends this intuition with his notion of the “saturated phenomenon,” where excess of meaning overwhelms the capacity of intentionality (Marion, 2001, p. 182). Forgiveness is such a phenomenon: it gives more than we can comprehend. It is, as Derrida says, “the impossible that nevertheless happens” (On Forgiveness, 1999).
Decolonial theology, therefore, converges with postmodern phenomenology in affirming that the divine manifests not in control but in excess—in what escapes appropriation. The God who forgives is not the guarantor of order but the source of infinite hospitality.
To think forgiveness decolonially is to universalize responsibility, not dominance. It implies an ethics of global justice that acknowledges asymmetries of memory. Forgiveness cannot be proclaimed by those who have not suffered; it must be articulated by those who have known the silence of evil.
Following the insight of Joseph Edelheit, “absence reveals more than full presence” (Edelheit, 2022, p. 47). The absence of forgiveness in our world—its delay, its fragility—is itself revelatory: it exposes the persistence of unhealed wounds. A decolonial hermeneutic does not rush to closure; it dwells in this incompleteness as a space of responsibility.
Global forgiveness, then, would not erase difference but sustain it. It would mean transforming the memory of violence into a network of solidarity, without demanding uniformity of faith or culture. In this sense, forgiveness is not the opposite of justice but its poetic fulfillment—the space where reparation and grace meet without cancelling each other.
5.1 Universal Fraternity and the Imperative of Forgiveness
In Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis (2020) articulates the vision of a universal fraternity that transcends religious, cultural, and political boundaries. He insists that “no one can face life in isolation” (§8) and that the true measure of human progress lies in our ability to build bonds of reconciliation, rooted in forgiveness and compassion. Forgiveness here is not a naïve moral concession but a creative act that restores the possibility of communion and dialogue in a fragmented world.
This horizon is expanded in Laudato Si’ (2015), where Francis redefines fraternity not only in anthropological but also cosmic terms. The encyclical evokes “our common home” as a theological space where all creatures are interrelated (§92). In this sense, ecological conversion entails an ethical and spiritual conversion—a turning of the heart capable of recognizing in every being a brother or sister. Such a conversion presupposes forgiveness: forgiveness for the wounds inflicted on creation, on peoples, and on the poor.
Together, these encyclicals outline a hermeneutic of mercy that calls for interreligious openness. In Fratelli Tutti, Francis writes: “The Church values the action of God in other religions and rejects nothing that is true and holy in them” (§277). Dialogue thus becomes not a mere diplomatic gesture but a theological act rooted in the conviction that divine love is always prior to human separation. The act of forgiveness is the hinge of this universal dialogue—it breaks the cycle of resentment and reopens the horizon of mutual recognition.
In the face of global conflicts, ecological devastation, and cultural polarization, the union of Fratelli Tutti and Laudato Si’ calls humanity to a spiritual ecology of forgiveness, where fraternity is not only preached but embodied in social, political, and ecological relations. This vision resonates with a broader Christian anthropology: the human person is most truly herself when she becomes capable of forgiving and of recognizing the other—human or nonhuman—as a gift rather than a threat.
In this horizon of universal fraternity, the thought of René Girard offers a decisive anthropological key. In La Violence et le sacré (1972), Girard unveils the mechanism by which human communities have historically maintained cohesion through sacrificial violence—a collective transference of internal rivalries onto a chosen victim. The mimetic desire, by which human beings unconsciously imitate one another’s desires, inexorably leads to rivalry, envy, and conflict. Violence thus becomes not accidental but structural: it lies at the heart of human culture.
Christian revelation, however, introduces a radical rupture in this cycle. The crucified Christ, the innocent victim par excellence, unveils the falsity of the sacrificial system by refusing to respond to violence with violence. His forgiveness—“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Lk 23:34)—is not only an ethical gesture but a hermeneutical reversal of the human condition. It discloses a new anthropology in which reconciliation, not retribution, becomes the foundation of communal life.
From this Girardian perspective, the message of Fratelli Tutti and Laudato Si’ gains renewed theological depth. Both encyclicals reject any form of rivalry—economic, political, or religious—that structures humanity around exclusion and competition. Francis’s call to “forgive, not once but seventy times seven” (cf. Mt 18:22) resonates with Girard’s conviction that only forgiveness can dismantle the mimetic contagion that perpetuates social violence.
The Christian alternative to mimetic desire is not indifference but creative imitation—an imitation of the divine compassion revealed in Christ. As Girard notes, “The imitation of Christ is the renunciation of rivalry” (La Violence et le sacré, p. 313). This new mimesis—the mimesis of peace—liberates desire from the logic of comparison and places it within the horizon of fraternity. In this sense, forgiveness is not a weakness but a transformative force that reconfigures desire itself. It opens a space where the other is no longer a rival but a brother or sister, as Fratelli Tutti proclaims.
Thus, the dialogue between Girard and Francis reveals a profound continuity: both see the salvation of humanity not in the escalation of justice as vengeance, but in the conversion of desire through forgiveness. The cross, read through Girard’s anthropology and Francis’s social magisterium, is the ultimate interruption of the mimetic spiral—the revelation that true power is found only in mercy.
Conclusion
Forgiveness is real only when it is free. Yet freedom itself must be decolonized. To forgive from within structures of domination is not to forgive—it is to comply. A decolonial theology of forgiveness must therefore pass through liberation: of the subject, of memory, of language, and of God.
The act of forgiving is an act of re-creation. It reopens time, transforms resentment into narration, and transfigures the memory of trauma into ethical promise. Forgiveness is the “yes” of freedom before history’s wound—the gesture that allows life to continue despite the impossibility of closure.
Thus, to forgive decolonially is to affirm that memory is not imprisonment but resistance, that freedom is not domination but responsibility, and that God, in withdrawing, entrusts to us the fragile power to begin again.
In this horizon, forgiveness becomes the most radical form of decolonization: it liberates us not from others, but for others. It is the space where the colonized and the colonizer may meet—not in amnesia, but in truth; not in subjection, but in shared vulnerability. And from this mutual exposure, perhaps, a new humanity can emerge—capable of remembering, forgiving, and being free.
Forgiveness is the most fragile and the most revolutionary of human gestures. It disarms the logic of vengeance not by erasing the past but by re-interpreting it in the key of freedom. Yet freedom itself, as this essay has argued, must be decolonized. To forgive within oppressive systems is not to reconcile—it is to submit. Decolonial forgiveness requires the liberation of memory, of language, and of the divine image itself.
In this light, forgiveness becomes a teo-political act: it is at once memory, justice, and creation. Caldeira’s teoquilombist memory shows that forgiveness is born where pain is transformed into community. The Amazonian pastoral turn reveals that reconciliation must include the Earth and its peoples; to heal humanity without healing creation would be to repeat the colonial fracture. Girard’s anthropology of the victim exposes the mimetic roots of violence, while Ricoeur and Mendoza translate the same drama into hermeneutical and eschatological terms—the transformation of resentment into resurrection.
Education is part of this same theology of forgiveness: to teach is to reconcile memory with freedom. The classroom, the parish, and the forest are all sites where a new anthropology of relationship can be born. When the poor are excluded from learning, the Gospel itself is betrayed; when the Church listens to their stories, it rediscovers its catholicity as hospitality.
Forgiveness, then, is not the end of history but its reopening. It invites us to live beyond resentment, to remember without hatred, and to act without domination. It is the decolonial horizon of hope—where God’s withdrawal becomes the space of human responsibility, and where, through the fragile act of forgiving, the world itself may begin again.
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René Armand Dentz Jr
Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Brazil
Department of Philosophy
PhD Université de Fribourg / Switzerland
e-mail: dentz@hotmail.com
ORCID: 0000-0002-4842-0827