Forgiveness Is Not Owed: Unpacking the Politics of Apologies with Kaya Oakes
A Whiplash Podcast Recap
This week on the podcast, we sat down with Kaya Oakes, a Catholic writer, educator, and feminist thinker, to talk about the fraught terrain of forgiveness, embodiment, and trauma in the Catholic Church.
In her latest book, Not So Sorry: Abusers, False Apologies, and the Limits of Forgiveness, Kaya confronts the predatory dynamics and power imbalances that so often distort the meaning of forgiveness — both inside and outside the Church. She examines how marginalized communities are pressured to forgive harm done to them, while institutions and individuals avoid true accountability.
Our conversation with her was as unflinching as it was illuminating, asking what forgiveness really means — and when it can actually stand in the way of justice and healing.
Content warning:
It was a poignant and powerful conversation on the podcast, and one that we want to explore further in this reflection piece, but before we do: take a beat and a breath. The episode Forgive and Forget? Not So Fast -- With Kaya Oakes and this essay features discussions of sexual abuse, conversion therapy, purity culture, family estrangement, cancer, and loss. Take care of yourself when listening and reading and take time to process Kaya’s words.
Forgiveness, just like healing, is not necessarily a fast, nor a linear process, and for the former--it’s not an obligation that privileged communities and people who have hurt us are owed. Protect yourself and hold your boundaries--this episode affirms that sometimes not forgiving someone is exactly the healing we need.
We invited Kaya to the podcast because of our own uncomfortable experiences with forgiveness — as people who’ve lived through family estrangement, loss, and purity culture. As Kaya shared, Christians and Catholics often expect those hurt by abusers, or by the wider institutional Church, to forgive. This expectation serves to absolve those with power of real accountability, relying instead on their privilege to maintain control.
Forgiveness is important, Kaya says, and can be a vital part of the healing process, but it’s not the responsibility of the person who was wronged to make the person who committed violence feel better. Often, as Max and Emma agreed, it feels like a performance meant to make the latter feel better, when in actuality this person has a moral and personal responsibility to not only attempt to right the wrong if possible but also stop themselves and others from causing future harm.
Strawberries, Suffering, and the Right to Celebrate
Emma reflected on how deeply Kaya’s essay about Pope Francis’s “strawberries on the cake” comment impacted her as a young queer Catholic. Growing up in purity culture, Emma internalized harmful ideals that erased her queer identity and pressured her to perform as an idealized cishet, sexually “pure” woman. Reading Kaya’s piece, just as she was graduating high school, gave her permission to question the institutional Church, forgive herself for not yet understanding who she was, and begin healing from the sexism and homophobia she had internalized. It also helped her see how past versions of herself had participated in perpetuating harm, and how forgiveness needed to extend to herself as much as to others and to the Church.
Kaya also reflected on how she was initially drawn to Catholicism because of its physical, embodied spirituality — the kneeling, bowing, receiving communion, laying on of hands — which made faith feel real and present in her body. She connects this to Teresa of Ávila’s insight that Christ’s body lives and suffers through us, but expands it: if the body of Christ can starve, be bombed, and displaced, then it can also be queer, trans, living with AIDS, or experiencing gender euphoria.
Catholicism should honor not only suffering but also joy and transformation in the body. Yet, the Church has historically told women and queer people that their joy — in being child-free, in being trans or queer — is wrong, and that their suffering is proof of their righteousness. This distorted glorification of suffering confines faith rather than opening it up, ignoring the reality that Jesus himself must have also experienced joy and celebration in his body.
Kaya critiques how purity culture and pronatalist ideologies reinforce this harmful dynamic, teaching women and queer people that enduring pain — even in abusive marriages or alienated lives — is a spiritual virtue. The Church’s overemphasis on suffering denies the full humanity of marginalized people by refusing to recognize their joy, agency, and capacity to feel God’s presence in their own embodied experience.
Breaking this pattern requires honest conversations, writing/journaling, and even difficult dialogue with clergy. Kaya points out that these conversations expose how the Church’s veneration of suffering often dovetails with its marginalization of those who deviate from cishet, pronatalist norms, creating a culture where women’s and queer people’s bodies are seen as objects to control and sanctify through pain rather than to celebrate as sacred in themselves.
Saint Maria Goretti and the Burden of Absolving Harm
One of the most well-known Catholic stories of forgiveness that we didn’t discuss with Kaya but is worth spending some time on here is that of Saint Maria Goretti (1890–1902), whose life and death have inspired generations of devotion. At just eleven years old, Maria was attacked by her neighbor Alessandro after she resisted his repeated attempts to sexually violate her. After exclaiming that she would rather die than be raped, Alessandro stabbed her 14 times. She succumbed to her injuries shortly afterward, but not before reportedly expressing forgiveness for her attacker. Alessandro himself initially showed no remorse, but years later, while in prison, he claimed to have experienced a vision of Maria offering him 14 lilies, which moved him to repentance.
After his release — aided by his youth at the time of the crime and Maria’s mother pleading for mercy — Alessandro sought forgiveness from Maria’s mother, attended Mass with her, and eventually joined the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin as a lay brother, dedicating the rest of his life to quiet service. Maria is now honored as the patron saint of forgiveness, remembered for her final words and her desire that Alessandro join her in heaven
Saint Maria’s story is a complex one--one that resonates with gender-based violence in the United States today. Max and I wrote a reflection for the National Catholic Reporter on the Netflix series Adolescence, a modern day story that echoes the themes of Maria Goretti’s story.
In Adolescence, a young boy deeply influenced by the misogynistic ideology of the manosphere — a network of far-right influencers, podcasters, and politicians who glorify patriarchy and assert men’s entitlement to women’s bodies — violently attacks a classmate after she rejects his advances and calls him an incel. Much like Alessandro’s story, the narrative begins with his act of violence and then follows his gradual reckoning, as he begins to confront the harm he inflicted and the lives he shattered.
In some ways, Maria’s story can create an expectation of victims of sexual assault forgiving abusers and perpetrators (we even touched on this in our podcast episode with Evelyn Lundy for Pride Month). Maria herself made that choice to forgive her attacker before she died, but for other young women and queer people who are more likely to experience sexual violence because of sexism, misogyny, and homophobia, they don’t have this choice.
They have an expectation. The violence they experience is excused or justified by their situation. What was she wearing? Was she asking for it? Why doesn’t she just forgive him? An accusation like that could “ruin a man’s life.”
As Maria’s case shows, the courts are shockingly lenient on young men, using these same justifications to argue that a man’s life shouldn’t be “ruined” because of one act--whereas for the person who was abused, this act can cost them their life (a literal saint’s life) or affect them for the rest of their life. It’s the expectation of forgiveness--the exaltation of forgiving abusers and conflating sanctity and sainthood with forgiving the people who commit violence--that is harmful and dangerous. In many ways, it furthers the idea that people who do not forgive are ungrateful, are stubborn, or are overreacting--all incredibly dismissive and wrong! Expecting an apology that absolves people of violence removes any expectation of accountability.
This expectation is not only unjust; it’s dangerous. It absolves perpetrators of accountability, shifts the burden of healing onto those already wounded, and sustains the same systems of violence and oppression that caused the harm in the first place. True justice does not begin with making abusers feel better — it begins with centering the dignity, autonomy, and boundaries of those they’ve hurt.
A related note: we’ve just launched a new series on Substack called High Control Catholicism, exploring the fundamentalist and sectarian tendencies emerging in Catholic spaces today.
If you have a story about your own experience with high-control Catholicism — in a parish, school, ministry, or movement — we’d love to hear from you. Your insights and voices are an essential part of this work. Feel free to reply to this email or reach out through Substack to share your story.
Well-Meaning Words Do Not Equal Accountability
Dynamics of forced forgiveness and misplaced responsibility often show up in deeply personal ways. During the episode, Max reflected on his own experience with family estrangement and the hurt caused by well-meaning Catholics and allies who have apologized to him — and then gone further, saying they are now “his family.” While likely intended as a gesture of care, this kind of language is paternalistic and deeply wounding. No one can replace the family he lost when he came out and transitioned. Yes, he has found people who love and support him, but that doesn’t erase the trauma of being rejected. Telling someone they can simply “fill the void” not only minimizes the loss, but also implies it’s his job to accept this substitute and assure everyone that “it’s okay.”
But it’s not okay. And expecting marginalized people to offer forgiveness — often to those who have done little to educate themselves or actively support queer and trans inclusion in their families, parishes, or communities — is another form of emotional labor imposed on those already harmed.
As Emma added toward the end of the episode, no one has a responsibility to educate others on how not to oppress them — unless they explicitly consent to that work and are compensated for it. As a disabled accessibility professional, she is not responsible for teaching non-disabled people how to be anti-ableist. Just as no person of color is obligated to teach white people to be anti-racist, no queer or trans person owes allies the labor of teaching them how not to be homophobic or transphobic. That burden belongs to those with privilege — and if they seek to learn, they should prioritize and pay those from marginalized communities who consent to share their knowledge.
Forgiveness, as Kaya affirms, is complex and personal — but it is not owed. Especially not to those who caused the harm, and especially not to those who have yet to take meaningful responsibility for repairing it. To demand otherwise is to perpetuate the very injustices forgiveness is so often invoked to heal.
Conclusion
Ultimately, what Kaya reminds us — and what we hope this reflection has also made clear — is that forgiveness cannot be demanded. It is not something owed to those who harm us, nor is it a condition for our healing or our sanctity. True forgiveness, when and if it comes, is a gift freely given, rooted in the agency of the person who was wronged. To pressure survivors into performing forgiveness — for the comfort of abusers, for the reputation of institutions, for the maintenance of an unjust status quo — is to misunderstand forgiveness entirely, and to compound the violence already done.
We cannot allow stories like Saint Maria Goretti’s, however meaningful to some, to be weaponized against survivors as a blueprint for how they should respond to their own trauma. Her choice was hers alone. It does not obligate anyone else to choose the same, nor does it negate the need for accountability, justice, and structural change. We honor her not by universalizing her choice, but by defending the right of every victim and survivor to make their own.
Forgiveness may someday play a role in our individual and collective healing — but only when those who have done harm have reckoned with the full weight of their actions, committed to repair, and ceased the behaviors that caused harm in the first place. Anything less is not justice, and anything less does not deserve absolution.
So if you have been hurt, and you are not ready — or never choose — to forgive, know this: you are not wrong. You are not “less holy.” Your boundaries are sacred. You do not owe forgiveness to those who have not earned your trust, your safety, or your healing. That is yours to claim, and yours alone to give — if and when you decide.
The podcast episode this essay is based on can be found below:
Thank you both again for the conversation and for all you do.