Sebastian Gomes and his team at America Media produced a short (12 minutes) video of March’s gathering of bishops, theologians and other church leaders at Fordham University. The gathering focused on Pope Francis’ encyclical Fratelli Tutti and explored how the church can help cultivate a politics of communion and compassion. Full disclosure: I am one of the organizers of these annual gatherings.
Gomes’ video captures both the discussions about Fratelli Tutti and the unique nature of these annual gatherings. Fratelli Tutti has a lot to unpack but its core insight is that politics must start with human compassion if it is to be genuinely humane.
The video starts with bishops and scholars reading from the parable of the Good Samaritan, which plays such a central role in the encyclical and which elucidates this core insight. The video ends with Jesuit Fr. Mark Massa reading from Paragraph 70 of the encyclical: “Now there are only two kinds of people: those who care for someone who is hurting and those who pass by; those who bend down to help and those who look the other way and hurry off … it is the moment of truth. Will we bend down to touch and heal the wounds of others? Will we bend down and help another to get up?”
We all face such moments of truth and often fail. At least I do. But do we, as individuals and as a church, walk by on the other side when it comes to our political decision-making? How in the current political climate, when one party is indifferent to the unborn and the other is hostile to the undocumented, how do we make political choices?
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With thanks to the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) and Michael Sean Winters, where this article originally appeared.
