Go, Rebuild ... with Mercy and Empathy

"... our love for our brothers and sisters is the measure of our love for God ... For the Christian, there is no ‘strange human being.’ He is in every instance the ‘neighbor’ whom we have with us and who is most in need of us. It makes no difference whether he is related or not, whether we ‘like’ him or not, whether he is ‘morally worthy’ of help or not...if the love of Christ lives in us, then we do as He did ..."

—Sr. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross [Edith Stein]

Immigration has been one of the most impassioned topics in the United States, not only for communities along the southern border but even in the northern regions of the U.S. As a lifelong New Englander, I cannot presume to understand fully the experiences of people who live in those southern border states; however, on this platform, it does seem fair to reflect on immigration briefly from a broadly Catholic perspective and as an example of societal conflicts in the pews as much as in the pulpits. More significantly, the rhetoric expressing those conflicts reveals a soberingly cheerless dimension of contemporary American Catholicism.

For example: a recent report in the National Catholic Reporter details the indefatigable efforts of the governor of Texas, Jim Abbott, and his attorney general, Ken Paxton, to close Annunciation House, a non-profit, all-volunteer-staffed, center in El Paso, Texas. It was founded by lay Catholics to offer care and assistance to the most vulnerable (i.e., undocumented) immigrants, notably families. Paxton is not Catholic, but Abbot boasts that he is a practicing Catholic. As governor, he has worked closely with Paxton to prevent immigrants from entering (and remaining in) Texas and, more widely, the United States, employing the rhetoric and acts of racism, classism and fearmongering. Some news accounts have even referred to the efforts of Abbott and Paxton as a “crusade” against immigrants. In a recent report about their attempts to shutter Annunciation House, Paxton was quoted as saying that the Catholic teaching of the “works of mercy” (based on Matthew 25:31f.), which informed the religious foundation of Annunciation House, are little more than “bohemian ideas” and constitute ideological problems. Abbott did not disagree: mercy and empathy for the plight of others are the problems.

In response, the Texas bishops (rather remarkably!) issued a fulsome statement that critiqued the immigration narrative and policies of Abbott by basing their remarks on Scriptural evidence and the tenets of Catholic Social Justice Teaching. However, in regrettable contrast, a majority of lay Catholics in Texas, as one report documented, did agree with the efforts and ideology of Abbott and his government, just as a near-majority of U.S. Catholics (with the exception of 18-34 yrs.) reject programs of mercy or conciliation for refugees and immigrants (and other marginalized communities).

The question then must be: whence the hardness—the exclusionary mentality—so many lay Catholics seem willing to embrace, even in a Church that is itself a church of immigrants? Of course, the topic of immigration is but one example: harsh language, cruel invective and mean-spirited rejection of any “other” are becoming characteristics of Catholic thinking and Catholicism, at least as has become evident in popular media. If being “Christian” means to “take on the Christ,” then mercy and empathy, not callousness and insensitivity, must flourish in the Christian soul.

In meditation on that truth, let us remember that the feast day of Edith Stein/Sr. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross is August 9, the day in 1942 when Nazis murdered her, her sister Rosa and thousands of others, mostly Jewish, in Auschwitz death camp. Prior to her conversion and taking vows as a Carmelite, Stein was a brilliant philosopher of phenomenology who wrote passionately about the virtue of empathy and the “logic” of living mercifully in the world with others and warned against an excessive individualism that can destroy such feelings of mercy and empathy. She wrote, “If we take the self as the standard, we lock ourselves into the prison of our individuality. Others become riddles for us, or, still worse, we remodel them into our image and so falsify historical truth.” For Stein, rampant individualism—so valued today—is more like a prison, separating the self from the other, and making the other an enigma and thus, someone to be feared. The empathic soul—the necessary condition of the Christian soul, following Christ—is open to the other, is willing to learn about the other, and so to dignify the personhood of the other. The merciful do not seek to win every contest, to vanquish others (by words or deeds) in every battle, but, as Stein taught, to acknowledge the reality of the other to be as worthy as one’s own.  

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June-Ann Greeley is a medievalist and professor of Catholic studies, theology and religious studies at Sacred Heart University.