Two Flags, One Frame: The Poland-Ukraine Reconciliation Appeal and What Forgiveness Actually Does

A photograph from Kraków's Old Town shows Ukrainian women holding Polish and Ukrainian flags side by side. Neither flag is obscured. Neither identity is dissolved into the other. The image accompanied the release, on June 29, 2026, of a joint statement from Cardinals Mykola Bychok, Konrad Krajewski, Kazimierz Nycz, and Grzegorz Ryś, together with Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, calling both nations toward reconciliation amid what the signatories described as 'growing political and historical tensions.'[^1]

The cardinals were gathered in Rome for a recent consistory. They noted that they spoke 'in unity with Holy Father Leo XIV,' whose first year as pope, they wrote, 'has been marked by persistent work to build peace based on the common good and by resolute opposition to war in all its dimensions.'[^1] The statement arrives in the middle of active strain: Poland and Ukraine are divided over competing interpretations of World War II-era atrocities even as Poland has been one of Ukraine's strongest military and humanitarian supporters since Russia's invasion in 2022.

Among the statement's key lines: 'Following Pope Leo, we are convinced that the first step toward peace is the disarmament of language.'[^1] The signatories extend the claim beyond words: 'This applies not only to words but also to gestures, signs, and symbols. They can also wound, close the path to encounter, and generate fear.'[^1]

What language does to conflict

Researchers in intergroup psychology have documented a specific mechanism: when rhetoric reduces an adversary to a category rather than a person, stripping away what psychologists call attributed human emotions and moral standing, it produces more hostility rather than merely reflecting existing hostility. Language is one of the materials conflict is made from, not a passive record of it.

The Catholic anthropological tradition supplies an exact counterweight. The claim that every human being carries the image and likeness of God functions, among other things, as a cognitive correction to dehumanization. Seeing the other as image-bearer is a reordering of perception, not a sentiment layered on top of existing feeling. Read through this lens, the call for disarming language is a call to restore the full personhood of the adversary in the moral imagination of both peoples, which is precisely what intergroup conflict research identifies as the precondition for de-escalation.

Forgiveness before resolution

The appeal's theological backbone is the distinction it draws between reconciliation and political settlement. The signatories write that the question of reconciliation 'concerns not only relations between the two peoples but also the authenticity of our common Christian witness.'[^1] Poland's grief over the Volhynia massacre of 1943, in which tens of thousands of Poles were killed by Ukrainian nationalist forces, is a wound of real depth. A reconciliation appeal that ignored it would be incredible in the truest sense of the word. The fact that Catholic leaders from both nations signed jointly suggests the wound is being held, not bypassed.

Empirical research on forgiveness has established with reasonable consistency that forgiveness and resolution are independent processes.[^2] Resolution is transactional: it adjusts terms, assigns accountability, redraws lines. Forgiveness operates at the level of the interior life of the one who forgives. It requires neither acknowledgment from the offending party nor justice already served. When forgiveness occurs, the effects are measurable. Reductions in anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress symptomatology have been documented in controlled studies of interpersonal forgiveness, with extensions proposed to intergroup contexts.[^2]

The call for forgiveness in the Poland-Ukraine statement refuses to allow resentment permanent occupancy of the present, a psychologically precise position whatever vocabulary it arrives in.

The hatred that precedes the act

C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, identifies what actually blocks forgiveness in most people. It is not that they find it too difficult or demanding. As he puts it: 'It is not that people think this too high and difficult a virtue: it is that they think it hateful and contemptible.'[^5] The obstacle is moral revulsion, not incapacity. To forgive can feel like licensing the offense, betraying the harmed, or collapsing a distinction that justice demands be kept.

But Lewis presses further on what love of neighbor actually requires. He writes: 'Well, how exactly do I love myself? Now that I come to think of it, I have not exactly got a feeling of fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy my own society. So apparently "Love your neighbour" does not mean "feel fond of him" or "find him attractive."'[^5] Willing another's good, not warmth of feeling, is the operative act. This reframes what the Poland-Ukraine appeal is actually asking. The signatories want both peoples to stop organizing their moral imagination around contempt for the other — which is a different, and more achievable, thing than demanding affection across a century of bloodshed. The empirical research and the theological tradition converge here: forgiveness is a decision about how one orients oneself toward an offender, and it is separable from whether the offense was wrong or whether it has been adequately reckoned with.

Vitz and Mango's research on forgiveness processes maps this same terrain psychologically.[^2] The movement from denial and anger through depression toward acceptance — and finally toward looking forward rather than only reckoning with the past — requires exactly what Lewis describes: the refusal to let grievance define the relationship permanently, without demanding that the grievance be dissolved or declared illegitimate. In contexts of psychopathology, that movement can be blocked by narcissistic defenses or by the intensity of the wound itself. In national conflicts, it is blocked by the same dynamics operating at scale: political incentives that reward grievance, narratives that require an enemy, and leaders who have invested their authority in the wound rather than its resolution.

What Adrienne von Speyr contributes

Hans Urs von Balthasar, in describing his theological collaboration with Adrienne von Speyr, preserves a passage in which she reflects on what she called the 'absolute core' of Christian life: 'Thy will be done,' the yes to God from which, she wrote, everything else proceeds.[^3] Balthasar notes that Adrienne often did not understand what was happening in her own mystical experience, and that his role was partly to offer language where she had only the experience itself.[^4] The direction of movement was from encounter to expression, not the reverse.

The appeal names something — reconciliation, the disarmament of language, Christian witness — that most of the people it addresses have not yet experienced as a felt reality. Rather than reporting a consensus, the Church proposes one. It offers language for something that has not yet happened, on the premise that naming a possibility is part of what makes it possible. Von Speyr's theological instinct, that the willing yes precedes understanding, explains why this is not naïveté: speaking reconciliation into a space of conflict is itself a form of witness, not a description of a state already achieved.

The photograph

The photograph from Kraków — two flags in one frame — is already doing the work the statement describes. Both identities are present. Neither colonizes the other. The women holding those flags are practicing something that both pastoral accompaniment and clinical psychology work toward: the capacity to remain in tension without collapsing it prematurely into either conflict or false unity. The appeal asks two nations to do the same thing, at scale, over time.

Peace, in Catholic theological terms, is the presence of right relationship, not the absence of conflict. Disarming language is how that relationship begins.

References

[^1]: Katherine Matt, 'Catholic Leaders Urge Poland and Ukraine to Pursue Reconciliation, Disarm Language,' National Catholic Register (EWTN News), July 2, 2026. [^2]: Robert D. Enright and Richard P. Fitzgibbons, Forgiveness Therapy: An Empirical Guide for Resolving Anger and Restoring Hope (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2015); see also Paul C. Vitz and Philip Mango, 'Kernbergian Psychodynamics and Religious Aspects of the Forgiveness Process,' Journal of Psychology and Theology 25 (1997): 72–80. [^3]: Hans Urs von Balthasar, Our Task: A Report and a Plan (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), describing Adrienne von Speyr's account of 'Thy will be done' as an 'absolute core.' [^4]: Hans Urs von Balthasar, Our Task: A Report and a Plan (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), on the interplay between Adrienne's mystical experience and the language supplied through spiritual direction. [^5]: C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1952), p. 70.