Chapter 8 argues that despite significant munificence to the compensation and redress schemes for historical abuses, the approach taken across a range of states misses the opportunity to transform the relationship between victim-survivors of historical abuse and the states and churches responsible for their harm. If the monetary and material dimensions of reparations are necessarily inadequate to the harms experienced, then the symbolic and communicative dimensions form a critical part of reparations as a response to historical-structural injustice. Rather than act as a form of settlement and closure of claims regarding wrongs, reparations can also serve as an example, to communicate ongoing commitments from states and churches to other aspects of transitional justice, that reflect a desire for a renewed relationship between victim-survivors.

Chapter 1 introduces the topic of historical abuses of states and churches. The chapter outlines the existing and related conceptions of justice that may inform a response to historical abuses and positions transitional justice as the dominant but flawed approach to addressing the violent aspects of the past. The third section considers the application of these justice approaches to the context of historical abuses of Western states and Christian churches. The final section previews the remaining chapters of the book.

Chapter 2 addresses early Christian justifications for organised violence and demonstrates the inherent risk of links between religion, politics, and violence. It then examines early justifications for colonisation, where conceptions of non-Christian inferiority justified expansion and transatlantic slavery. In that context, the chapter assesses the emergence of closed institutions run by church and state actors as a key development in how social orders responded to those individuals and groups that were deemed a problem, based on religious and secular motivations. The chapter concludes by documenting the available evidence and estimates of historical abuses available for harms that can today be recognised, if controversially, as gross violations of human rights.

Chapter 4 considers power as essential to understanding who is legally liable and who is socially and politically responsible, for addressing historical-structural injustices. The chapter outlines competing conceptions of power, preferring and applying political scientist Mark Haugaard’s four-dimensional conception of power to address the complexities of historical-structural injustices, namely power as agency, structure, epistemic, and ontological power. The chapter then examines the role of national and religious myths as justification narratives that maintain existing distributions and structures of power and construct limitations in addressing the past in transitional justice. As a result, it argues that changes in the distribution of power are central to addressing historical-structural injustices, which have coalesced to form national and religious myths that support the existing distributions of power and modern national and religious identities.

Chapter 10 argues the practices and discourses of reconciliation have tended to operate as a form of inappropriate and premature settlement or closure of the grievances of victim-survivors and their descendants. To encourage victim-survivors and a society to pursue reconciliation in the absence of addressing other elements of transitional justice may operate as a reaffirmation of the power structures of states and churches. While the experience of Canada and Australia contains an explicit reconciliation discourse and practice, in the absence of significant change in and imagination regarding power relationships in those societies, they join the United States, Ireland, and the United Kingdom in remaining deeply unreconciled societies. In addition, the reconciliation practice of the Catholic church regarding historical abuse demonstrates its inability to effectively self-critique in its processes of reconciliation.

Chapter 5 argues that emotions are a mechanism by which victim-survivors may exercise agency, and provide the symbolic and public means by which the states and churches themselves seek to respond in kind in addressing their legacies of gross violations of human rights, through the construction and practice of symbolic public facing emotions. In doing so, the chapter argues that political and religious leaders and official practices can perform emotions as symbolic representations of their communities and can subject victim-survivors to engagements that affirm and acknowledge their emotional states and needs or engagements that deny and dismiss these positions and emotions. This chapter argues that emotions are deeply enmeshed with the four dimensions of power and in particular that shame remains a key and problematic emotion in the modern responses from states and churches to historical abuse and greatly impacts the lived experiences of victim-survivors and their descendants today.

Chapter 7 argues that law’s framing of accountability results in an inevitably partial and fractured picture of wrongdoing for historical abuse. The chapter argues that despite a focus on accountability for historical child sexual abuse, non-sexual historical abuses, especially those authorised or ignored by law, struggle to achieve modern-day legal accountability against individuals, institutions, or states. Law’s claim to sovereign authority is unable to comprehensively address historical-structural abuses, which may challenge the legitimacy of the legal order created by states and churches. The chapter considers these challenges in the context of accountability mechanisms, including criminal prosecutions, civil litigation, and the use of canon law.

Chapter 11 concludes the book by arguing that absent consideration of structural injustice, power, and emotions, transitional justice may be used to legitimate structures of power and emotional narratives that continue to subordinate and marginalise historically abused groups and individuals. It concludes that a different conception of progress and transition is required to navigate the meaning of historical abuses for the legitimacy of Western liberal democracies and Christian churches. On this account, the book concludes, transition and transformation are matters of the character of progress itself, progress that lives in the tension between wrongs that ‘can never be repaired and must never be forgotten’.