It’s late in the evening in Al-Bireh, a city in Palestine about nine miles north of Jerusalem. High rise apartment buildings are immersed in an uneasy darkness again as mothers check on their sleeping children. Mays Astal, a Resiliency Field Officer with Catholic Relief Services in Palestine, takes a seat in front of her computer screen and logs into an online meeting. In seconds, a friendly face from almost half a world away appears on her screen. They exchange the greetings that instantaneously make the world a smaller place where peace is possible through the power of forgiveness.
The face on the screen is me, Tom Delaney, a Secular Franciscan in the St. Cloud Diocese, joining the meeting from my home in Becker Township. Since October of 2025, I have been training Mays Astal on an internationally tested and validated process for person-to-person forgiveness called REACH. The model has received attention at the Harvard University Catholic Forum, as well as Australian Catholic University’s Plunkett Centre for Ethics, and the de Nicola Centre for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame. REACH is being promoted worldwide by the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University, where Tom completed his own training in 2025 to become a REACH forgiveness facilitator and trainer.
REACH is a step-by-step process for working toward forgiveness of another person that involves feeling good about forgiving someone and forging a forgiveness that lasts. REACH stands for the key idea in each of those steps: Recall, Empathy, Altruism, Commit and Hold. Forgiveness is another place where our Catholic faith and science converge. Our Catechism teaches us the importance of compassion, mercy and forgiveness toward others for our faith, and scientific research confirms the benefits of forgiveness for our well-being, including our mental health.
I became involved with forgiveness work at Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Program in early 2025 because I was looking for a way to bring more and better hope to people who feel hurt or wounded. I had just finished studying the Catechism at St. Paul Seminary, and I’d had a personal focus on how the Catechism can lift people up out of suffering. One strong theme over and over again, is the power of forgiveness. The Rule of the Secular Franciscan Order requires Secular Franciscans to be “bearers of peace” and “messengers of perfect joy in every circumstance” that “seek out ways of unity…trusting in the presence of the divine seed in everyone and in the transforming power of love and pardon.”
I wanted to live the Secular Franciscan Rule more deeply in my life and just work at being the best Franciscan I can be, including being a messenger of forgiveness and peace the way they are in the Catechism. I got my chance when Harvard University invited me to complete their training program in forgiveness with an international cohort of faith leaders. I knew this was a lifetime opportunity, and my goal going into the program was to bring back something that real people in hard situations could use to find forgiveness and peace. I also wanted to honor “freely you have received, freely you will give” (Matthew 10:8) and do forgiveness work at no cost to other people.
Tom Delaney and Mays Astal visit online.
After completing the Harvard program in September, I had my own idea about how I was going to use my training but, as so often happens, I was quickly pointed in another direction where the need is great and I would have to take on bigger challenges than I thought I could handle. That redirection came through connection with Mays Astal, a humanitarian aid officer for Catholic Relief Services in Palestine, who saw forgiveness as an important and much needed effort at peacemaking in the communities she serves. Challenges included crossing language barriers and adapting approaches to forgiveness for the Palestinian cultural context.
For sure, at first I was thinking “How is this going to work?” Then I remembered the story of St. Francis of Assisi and the Sultan of Egypt meeting face-to-face in peaceful dialogue and seeking mutual understanding way back in 1219 during the conflict and carnage of the fifth crusade. I also learned that Franciscans have been caretakers and peacekeepers in the Holy Land, including modern day Palestine, since 1342 when Pope Clement VI entrusted it to them. I was deeply inspired by those traditions, and when Pope Leo XIV declared the Jubilee of St. Francis for this year, I figured the Holy Spirit is going to help me get on with the work.
Mays Astal finished REACH training with me at the end of January. The last part of the training focuses on how to get more people interested in forgiveness. Mays and I have communicated and met with leading scholars in the field of forgiveness in Middle Eastern cultural contexts, and have some ideas for what comes next. We are thinking about how the basic cell phones that people have in Palestine could be used as tools for bringing people together to learn about forgiveness and build communities of forgiveness. On-demand learning and helpful online guides are possible. Webinars are possible. Live online meetings of people in small groups are possible, including people speaking in Arabic. We can do these things with minimal or even zero cost. Like any other effort to make the world what God wants it to be, it just takes dedicated people who care — and we are that. We can do this.
NOTE: Pope Leo has declared 2026 a Jubilee Year for the Franciscans, observing the 800th anniversary of St. Francis’ death. Stay tuned for more stories highlighting Franciscans at work in our diocese.
Tom Delaney (O.F.S., Ed.S.) is a Franciscan educational psychologist who focuses on mental health education, wellness and spiritual formation. He serves on the Mental Health Ministry Team for the Diocese of St. Cloud and on several Minnesota state advisory bodies, including the State Advisory Council on Mental Health, the Behavioral Health Planning Council and the State Rehabilitation Council. He is active in the Secular Franciscan Order (O.F.S.), the International Association of Catholic Mental Health Ministers, and Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Network and forgiveness research initiatives.