The Ursuline Sisters of Cleveland have vocally opposed the death penalty for more than 30 years. But that long-standing advocacy ratcheted up over the past year in hopes of ridding Ohio of the practice once and for all. Governor Mike DeWine has called a moratorium on executions, so the sisters have put powerful and coordinated pressure on the state legislature to pass a law abolishing capital punishment before the term-limited governor leaves office.
Sister Laura Bregar, president of the community, says that when she contacts an elected office, she prefaces her comments saying, “We are covictims. . . . We know what this feels like.”
This is in reference to the horrific events of 1995, when a man named Daniel Pitcher raped and murdered Ursuline Sister Joanne Marie Mascha in the woods outside the community’s motherhouse. Pitcher was arrested the next day, tried, convicted, and sentenced. Prosecutors pushed hard for Pitcher to be put to death, against the overwhelming protests of the sisters, but ultimately the jury didn’t recommend the death penalty. The judge sentenced him to 50 years to life.
Over the subsequent 30 years, the Ursulines, true to form for Catholic sisters, transformed the horror of that especially egregious crime into raising awareness of violence against women and girls, as well as fervent advocacy against the death penalty. But in late 2024, an unexpected twist brought the trauma of that time right back. Pitcher, still in prison, wrote a letter to the sisters asking for the community’s forgiveness for what he had done to Mascha.
“I was just stunned,” Bregar says. But amid the flood of thoughts and emotions that the letter tore open, her response was also instantaneous: “Of course we have to forgive him.”
On its surface, the story of sisters forgiving a man who raped and murdered one of their community members paints an inspiring picture that many people associate with the power of faith and a seemingly heroic embrace of Jesus’ command to forgive. But especially in the United States, where mass incarceration keeps nearly 2 million people behind bars, with roughly 200,000 people serving life sentences and about 2,000 people on death row, the culture’s relationship with forgiveness is complicated. Despite these numbers, U.S. culture also has a tendency to demand forgiveness, especially from vulnerable survivors toward powerful oppressors.
When wealthy and powerful men make headlines for misdeeds ranging from inappropriate behavior on movie sets to appearances in the FBI files documenting the crimes of billionaire sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, half-hearted non-apologies (or no acknowledgment of their misdeeds whatsoever) seem to suffice for turning the page and moving on. Meanwhile, socioeconomically disadvantaged men go right into the prison system, with little hope of ever emerging.
Both realities, however, speak to an absence of avenues for authentic restorative justice. And the journey of the Ursuline Sisters of Cleveland offers insights into what that path entails. The approach reflects a view of punishment as a process moving toward reconciliation, in which entire communities, not merely individuals, can find actual healing.
Journey to wholeness
Linda Harvey of Lexington, Kentucky was working on family mediation issues such as child custody and divorce when she was drawn to restorative justice. Harvey, who in the decades since has started more than 60 organizations in secular and religious spaces dedicated to restorative justice work, says that once she learned about it, the way forward was clear.
“I decided that the best way to do this was to go into prisons and deal with offenders who have committed homicide,” she says. Kentucky has 10 federal prisons.
Harvey developed a group of volunteers who organized programming such as bringing in victims and family members of victims to share with inmates the personal impacts that crime had on them and their families.
“[Incarcerated people] don’t normally like talking about crime or being held responsible for it,” Harvey says. “This brought a lot of healing to the inmates and the victims.”
Harvey also worked on mediated cases between victims or families of victims and offenders. But this work drove home that restorative justice is a process, usually a long one. A mediator has to develop relationships separately, preparing the offender while also working with a victim. The process can go on for a year, especially in working to ensure that the offender does not retraumatize the victim. And mediators must respect that some survivors do not wish to forgive those who harmed them.
Harvey reflects on how some offenders emerge with a sense of newfound freedom: “There is this healing component to it. That’s what drew me to this process, because it involves reconciliation.”
Caitlin Morneau, director of restorative justice at Catholic Mobilizing Network, a national organization that advocates for the abolition of the death penalty, says what sets restorative justice work apart is that it “recognizes crime as harm that violates human dignity and relationships.”
She says, “This is actually the practical expression of a broader approach to justice,” one that also exists within a framework right out of Catholic teaching. “A theology of reconciliation understands accountability as facing the truth of one’s actions, repentance, expressing remorse, and taking action in the service of repair.”
Show your work
The work of atonement helped prompt the Ursuline Sisters of Cleveland’s response to Pitcher’s request for forgiveness. Sister Maureen McCarthy, president of the congregation at the time of Mascha’s murder, recalls her reaction to the letter: “I realize that he’s had all these years to really reflect on what he did. And I think at this point in his life he’s taken responsibility for his actions, and that is why he started to ask for forgiveness,” she says. “I felt when I read this letter that it was maybe time for us to be more forgiving too.”
Bregar, the current president, even consulted with the Office of Victim Services in Ohio’s Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. “They [said] we have no reason to think that this isn’t genuine from him,” she says.
McCarthy says, “If he had been executed, he wouldn’t have had time to do that.”
Morneau at Catholic Mobilizing Network affirms that the sisters’ work reflects the consistent Catholic teaching that “we don’t need the death penalty to keep society safe, and any legal sentence must have a window of hope, leaving open the possibility of redemption. The complete condemnation of life eliminates any possibility of redemption, and it has to end.”
It’s not surprising to Morneau that a lack of restorative justice avenues would in effect deny offenders, powerful or not, a chance at reconciliation. “Our legal system was not designed to elicit genuine accountability,” she says. “It was designed to encourage denial or silence lest risking incriminating oneself further.”
Power differentials
When approaching restorative justice, Kaya Oakes sees a rush to forgiveness as substituting magical thinking for the grace of healing. Oakes, author of Not So Sorry: Abusers, False Apologies, and the Limits of Forgiveness (Broadleaf Books), says, “We sort of put forgiveness first before the process that leads people there, and that’s backward in a lot of ways.”
In contrast to all parties putting in the work, Oakes notes how the forgiveness narratives of rich and powerful men accused of wrongdoing consistently lack an important step.
“It tends to be this kind of, I’m going to go work on myself, like in air quotes, without a lot of concrete outlining of actions that will be taken,” she says. “Where is the actual transformation internally, rather than just externally . . . go to rehab, go to sex addiction therapy, or whatever? They don’t talk about what they’re going to do as a result of that.”
Oakes says that the system also serves to protect the powerful and “punish people more harshly who come from lower-income backgrounds.”
While Pitcher is white, his traumatic childhood, including abuse and a great deal of time in foster homes, reaffirmed the Ursuline Sisters in their advocacy against the death penalty in his case.
McCarthy recalls meeting Pitcher’s father at his trial. “You couldn’t help but have some empathy for him. . . . He was a nobody in our society. And his father was so proud of the fact that he had managed to hold a job for a while and was living independently,” she says. “You just think, he was starting to make a change in his life. What happened to him that day that had him turn against Joanne? When you read the gospels, how can you not be forgiving?”
What did Jesus really say?
Bregar says that the Ursulines’ decision to forgive Pitcher “doesn’t make us wonderful. That just makes us trying to respond to the gospel. It’s what we’re supposed to do, and I mean that freely.”
But the idea of freedom raises a question for Oakes. She cites the survivors of the 2015 Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church shooting in South Carolina and how they publicly forgave unrepentant shooter Dylann Roof in the aftermath of the massacre. She asks if this reflects inspirational mercy as much as it does people of faith who believe their very salvation is threatened if they don’t forgive. As power dynamics go, she says, this is ripe for spiritual abuse, in which offenders—or those protecting them—pressure victims to forgive the people who’ve harmed them.
Troubled by inadequate frames for forgiveness, Oakes sought out experts, including rabbis, as she researched her book. She learned that the word Jesus would have used meant “to put distance between yourself and the person who harmed you,” while a word used in the Hebrew Bible carried the meaning “the account is closed,” as in the forgiveness of a debt.
A more modern interpretation of the former might be allowing the person who did the harm some space to work on themselves, to think about atonement. After all, atonement comes from the Hebrew Bible, the idea that a person has to actively atone for their wrongdoings.
“Jesus is not saying let go and move on. He’s saying let’s take time, or as Gen Z would say, let’s hold space,” Oakes says. “In the language of spiritual direction, we would call it discernment process.”
As religious orders excel at discernment processes, she says, this would make it likely that the Ursuline Sisters of Cleveland have covered the necessary ground, even while carrying the trauma. But even then, perhaps Pitcher’s prison sentence even created the distance for both parties to work and ultimately get to a place where the account can be closed.
If this feels strange in a U.S. context, Oakes says, “We need to think of forgiveness as a process, not a product.”
Precious Blood Father Robert Schreiter’s extensive work on reconciliation also did not see forgiveness as a product. However, rather than placing it at the end of the reconciliation process, he stressed forgiveness by victims as key to opening the way toward reconciliation, in effect as an openness and invitation to God’s grace.
In his book The Ministry of Reconciliation (Orbis Books), he clarifies that rather than failing to “honor the terror and the pain of the experience of violence,” this openness is essential because “reconciliation always takes us to a new place. It does not simply transport us back to where we had been before the trauma occurred.”
“A reconciling vision of God’s justice implores us to think beyond punitive defaults that drive our carceral system,” Morneau says. “Restorative justice charts those pathways, and the use of its practices from individual cases to systems-level change is a testament to what’s already possible.”
Enter the community
Another component of restorative justice that clashes with a U.S. context is its insistence on involving entire communities in its processes, since harm is not merely an individual experience but also a communal one.
In the case of a family or a community of sisters, this is especially evident. “One of the things that Daniel’s apology did was to bring about healing to individual sisters,” Bregar says.
But the expanding circles of community don’t stop there. The practice is taught at the parish level and on college campuses, as well as implemented in some school systems to mediate disputes between students.
“It really does have a large impact in dealing with offenses and conflict,” Harvey says.
In the school context, Oakes says, the wider affected community means not just two students fighting and their parents, but also the students who have to witness the fighting, those who break it up, and the teachers dealing with the issue.
“It opens up the conversation between just ‘you did wrong’ and ‘you have to apologize’ and ‘I’ll forgive you,’ ” she says. Instead, it involves sitting down “with a whole group of people and having a participatory communication.”
The need for healing can manifest at any level of society. This includes countries—such as the processes undergone by postwar Germany and post-genocide Rwanda—and cities. In the United States, one example could be Minneapolis, which has experienced community-wide harm in the past several years—from the 2020 police murder of George Floyd through the 2026 ICE crackdown that resulted in many immigrant detentions and the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens by masked officers.
Another example is Charlottesville, Virginia, where the 2017 Unite the Right rally saw white supremacists march on the city and ram a car into a crowd, killing counterprotester Heather Heyer. Nichole Flores, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, described in a 2023 interview with NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice how “so much great work” was happening in the city as a long-term response to the “summer of hate.”
These included: “responding to instances of white supremacy, successfully campaigning to remove Confederate statues that mark public space in our town as unsafe for Black and brown people, providing support and community for migrants and refugees, and advocating for better zoning laws so more people can afford to live with dignity in the city where they work.”
She says the “movement has really unfolded and been committed to making Charlottesville a better place to live in a broader, more comprehensive way.”
Left untried
Despite the many possible applications for restorative justice work in fostering reconciliation and forgiveness in the United States, the reality remains that people’s cases get dumped into a system built on punishment and incarceration.
“Definitely there’s a vacuum,” Harvey says, despite her decades promoting restorative justice. “People are very afraid of people different from themselves,” is her assessment, to which she sees the need “to get people educated and provide programs that bring them together and bring healing and other resources.”
But rather than working around and within the current system, the question remains open as to what the widespread renewal of the U.S. legal system in the model of restorative justice might possibly entail.
“I think that the United States actually has ample pathways to do this—the question is: Are we clear-eyed enough to see them and courageous enough to chart them?” Morneau says. “Looking forward, embracing restorative justice in U.S. society requires willingness to [have] difficult conversations in the spirit of accompaniment and patience for the long haul. No one of us can do it all, but we can all do our part.”
And one required part is prayer. McCarthy has committed to pray for one Ohio death row inmate every day. She says she prays that he becomes a better man than when he went into the prison system, a petition rooted in hope for the possibility of renewal. That prayer traces directly back to her community’s journey with Pitcher.
“His letter really did have an influence on me,” she says.
This article also appears in the November 2026 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 91, No. 11, pages 20-23). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Unsplash
