Bishop Kevin Farrell

The Chief Shepherd of the Catholic Diocese of Dallas

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We have eyes but will not see

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Empathy

It has been on my mind to write a blog on empathy, and David Brooks’ column in last Thursday’s New York Times pushed me out of my inertia. Brooks talks about the importance of going beyond facts and even understanding to empathy.

Brooks wrote: “The highest rung on the stairway to understanding is intimacy. Our master-teacher here is Augustine. As he aged, Augustine came to reject those who thought they could understand others from some detached, objective stance. He came to believe that it take selfless love to truly know another person. Love is a form of knowing and being known. Affection motivates you to want to see everything about another. Empathy opens you up to absorb the good and the bad. Love impels you not just to observe, but to seek union — to think as another thinks and feel as another feels. “

To understand is to comprehend what is happening; to sympathize is to be aware of what is happening and be touched by it; to empathize is to share another’s feelings, to suffer with them. When mothers heard of the kidnapping of young girls in Nigeria, they suffered with those Nigerian mothers. They more than understood and sympathized…their hearts ached for them.

It is so easy to isolate and insulate ourselves from the suffering of others in our society. Our gated communities and patrolled neighborhoods are safe and secure enclaves. Pope Francis went to Lampedusa, an island in the Mediterranean that is filled with refugee immigrants from Africa. He went where he could see them and smell them and weep with them over their loved ones and others who didn’t make it across the sea to safety. He said to those present, “Our society has forgotten what it means to cry with others, to empathize. It’s the globalization of indifference, which has taken away our ability to feel.”

The poor are not invisible by nature, but because we refuse to see them. We have eyes but will not see. (Mark 8:18) Globalizing our indifference is seeing faces in a crowd, not a suffering woman or child. When President Franklin Roosevelt was told during the depression that people in general had enough food, he replied, people do not starve in general, they starve in particular.

We are our brothers and sisters’ keepers; the love of Christ demands it.

 

Catholic citizenship means defending moral issues

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As we approach the election for president, the senate and congress, it is essential to remember that as the U.S. Bishops’ document on Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship states, Catholics’ political engagement should be “shaped by the moral convictions of well formed consciences and focused on the dignity of every human being, the pursuit of the common good, and the protection of the weak and vulnerable.”

Seeking the common good is basic to Catholic teaching on social justice, but the common good must always include moral consciousness. Reasonable people can differ but their ultimate decisions must respect the moral issues of life, marriage and dignity.

The Church always avoids party partisanship and manipulation but consistently addresses issues that refer to the moral fiber of our country. What are some of these issues? [Read more…]

Social Justice is not a bad word!

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On the contrary, it is a basic element of Catholic teaching based upon the concept at the core of the Gospel and ultimately expressed in Jesus’ quote from the Hebrew Scriptures (Leviticus 19:18) that we should love others as we love ourselves.

Fifty years ago Blessed Pope John XXIII wrote in his encyclical Mater et Magistra that “all forms of economic enterprise must be governed by the principles of social justice and charity.”

Last month, at a congress sponsored by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Pope Benedict XVI, referring to Mater et Magistra, said that “the social question today is without a doubt one of world social justice.”

Referring to the “internal imbalances of today’s globalization,” the Holy Father called for moral thought capable of overcoming the structure of secular ethics. Pope Benedict identified the harmful speculation in basic commodities, foodstuffs, water, land and energy resources as among those secular ethics. He also noted the vast sums spent on armaments and lands where the unbridled luxury of the privileged few stands in violent offensive contrast to the utter poverty of the vast majority.

A second key principle of Pope John’s encyclical is that man’s aim must be to achieve in social justice a national and international juridical order, with its network of public and private institutions, in which all economic activity can be conducted not merely for private gain but also in the interests of the common good.

Surprised? We should not be. The social teachings of the Church, like the Gospel of Jesus upon which they are based, have been around for a long time. Why is it that so many of us find it inconvenient to incorporate them into our daily lives? Maybe it is because they make us feel uncomfortable and a little guilty.

I am reminded of the story in which Erasmus was reflecting on the beatitudes in Matthew and was moved to observe that “either this is not the Gospel, or we are not Christians!”

The Gospel of Jesus is and always has been counter cultural. As Catholics and Christians we are called to conform the world (and our lives) to the Gospel. Too often we attempt to conform the Gospel (and our lives) to the world.