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Continuing Education

Continuing Education by Mary

Editor’s Note: As she completes her Formation, newly commissioned lay missioner Mary Liston Liepold, OFS reflects on justice and reconciliation on global and personal levels.


As a little girl at the movies, I cried when the cartoon heroes got hurt, and I also cried for the villains. Mom gave me hankies (some of which I still have), and told me I was too sensitive and needed to toughen up. I didn’t, though.

Bad things happen to “good” people. And doing bad things to “bad” people doesn’t make them “good.” My faith, my reading, and my life experience had led me to both of these conclusions by the time I was ten. I started calling myself a radical about a decade later. Slowly, as the decades go by, I have been privileged to meet people and systems that mesh with my own counter-cultural, biblical (Matt. 5:44 and Lk. 6:27) worldview.

As a mom, I resolved not to punish my children. On the best days, I found better ways to promote household justice and peace. I knew there had to be something between impunity and punishment—between passive-ism and answering harm with more harm—in the greater world as well. Learning about the South African Truth and Reconciliation process put one piece in the puzzle. Restorative justice gave me another one. 

Various traditional cultures practice ways to repair the harm that fractures right relationships rather than multiplying it. They began to be studied and named in the U.S. by the mid-1970s, and they crossed my threshold a decade or so later. Though they still haven’t reached the mainstream, they are used fairly widely in dealing with juvenile offenders.

Retributive justice, the punishing approach we usually use to address damage, sanctions the offender with no benefit to those offended against—with no direct accountability. Does our world-beating incarceration rate make survivors of crime better off? Are civilians in Ukraine and Israel better off today because their government—and ours—have spent billions on retribution? The answers seem obvious to me, though clearly not to the powers that be. 

The first step to remediating injustice is acknowledging the harm. In recent decades, many of us have learned more than we knew about the long, racist project of colonialism and its enduring impact on colonized peoples, including our own indigenous and descendants of the enslaved. Truth and reconciliation processes have given some survivors the dignity of being heard. But reconciliation does not automatically follow upon truth. Justice requires restoration and repair: nonviolent accountability. The growing movement for reparations is an essential next step. 

On this hungry planet where war eats first, we can’t look to our governments for more than token responses. But just as we are counseled to be the peace we wish to see in the world, we can also begin to be the justice. Our churches and faith-based nonprofits can and should lead the way. A 2023 book by Duke Kwon and Gregory Thompson, Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair, makes the case clearly and powerfully. 

After months of preparation, my FMS mission will begin soon. I have been seeing it as a privilege and a gift since I was accepted for the program. Now I am also seeing it as a chance to make reparations—my own small, personal piece of the peace and justice puzzle. God willing, I’ll take my little, 80-year-old, sensitive self to El Paso/Ciudad Juarez and find out what our good God has in store for me. I’ll keep you posted!

Question for Reflection: How do you foster justice and reconciliation in your family, workplace, ministry, or community?

Mary Liston Liepold, OFS is a DC native with Midwestern roots, a professed Secular Franciscan, a great-grandmother, an on-the-cheap foodie, and a passionate reader. She holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from Catholic University. Before her very active retirement she enjoyed a two-stage career as mom/daycare mom, then editor/writer/fundraiser for nonprofits, including the National Science Teachers Association, the American Catholic Lay Network, and two women’s organizations, Peace Links and Peace X Peace. Her longest stint was 15 years at the Child Welfare League of America, where she developed and edited the magazine Children’s Voice. She prays and works stubbornly for peace on and with the earth and for healing from racism, sexism, ableism, hetero-normativism, and all the other forms of violence that afflict our common home. In FMS service, by the grace of God, she looks forward to putting her whole self in, seeing the world from outside the U.S., and becoming a more contemplative activist.