“But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’ ” — Luke 10:29

One thing that has never been in question when it comes to Gospel teaching is the commandment — part of the “greatest commandment” — to not only love and care for our neighbors, but to love them as we love ourselves. It’s not easy to live out day to day. It requires a sacrifice that sometimes pushes up against our human tendency toward self-preservation and comfort. I speak from the personal and not just the universal here. Caring for and loving strangers, those in the shadows of our society, is part of what makes the Gospel so radical. It was radical when Jesus preached it; it is radical today.

Jesus answers the above question in the Gospel of Luke with the Parable of the Good Samaritan, an impossible-to-ignore story about the righteous who choose to do the wrong thing and the one who is despised by society but does the right thing. We like to imagine ourselves in the role of the Good Samaritan, remembering times we may have donated to a food drive or helped out at a soup kitchen or maybe even literally helped someone up off the ground. But we don’t have to dig too far to uncover the fears and built-in biases that often prevent us from committing ourselves fully and without condition to what Jesus demands.

In our society today, we can look around our own towns, cities and larger country and see the many men, women and children who are figuratively — and in many cases quite literally — on the side of the road in need of mercy. We take cover in the broad brushstrokes that attempt to cast all of the marginalized as criminals and cheats. We convince ourselves that our willingness to look away is grounded in preservation of orderliness. Like the priest and the Levite in the parable, we rush by, clutching our convictions and hoping someone else will fulfill the Gospel mandate for us. But what if we are the people we are waiting for?

Pope Francis, in a recent letter to the U.S. bishops, said: “Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity. Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. …The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ‘ordo amoris’ (order of love) that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

The pope’s powerful message calls us back to who we are not just as individual Catholics but as a universal Church, as the Body of Christ at work in our broken world today.

We take comfort in Jesus’ shared humanity with us, in his understanding of our suffering. For many of us who live with the privilege of security and relative safety, it’s often easy to overlook Jesus’ experience, along with Mary and Joseph, as a refugee fleeing violence, as displaced people dependent on the kindness of strangers in a foreign land. If we see that as just a story and not a fundamental truth in our history, it allows us to look away from those who are similarly persecuted.

What would Jesus do? Well, we don’t have to imagine; we know. And not only do we know what Jesus would do, we know what Jesus expects us to do:

“Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.” (Luke 10:36-37)

This column first appeared in the Feb. 20, 2025, issue of The Evangelist.
Photo copyright Mary DeTurris Poust, Rome 2010

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Of course, my Irish relatives did the same, escaping oppression and famine only to land in a place where “Irish Need Not Apply.” Both the Irish and the Italians were considered less-than by earlier immigrants to this nation, whose birth we celebrate this month. And to this day, despite progressive attitudes in many other areas, it is still socially acceptable to joke about Italians as mobsters and Irish as drunks. Because we humans seem to find our power in demeaning others rather than lifting each other up.

The players may be different today, but the reality is the same. People who look or speak or worship differently from us are “other,” and in finding a common enemy—someone we imagine threatens the status quo—we seek to strengthen our own position and power. At least, that’s how the world sees it, but as people of the Gospel, the Way of Jesus Christ, we know better, or at least we’re supposed to know better.

I feel heartbroken as I look at the division and hatred that seems to grow with each passing day in our country. Like tentacles reaching out in every direction, it threatens to choke out everything we hold dear if each and every one of us is not willing to take a hard look at ourselves and a compassionate look at our neighbors. It is so easy to see someone at work, down the street, in a store and think we know that person’s story. They’ve got it made. Look at that house, that car, that job, that family, that vacation. Easy street. But we all have stories, a history that has shaped us over generations.

My Italian grandfather was an upholsterer, with a ridiculous commute from Brooklyn to Haverstraw long before there was a Palisades Parkway. My Irish grandfather was a machinist in the Dexter Paper Company in Pearl River, even though he had aced all his Regents exams and wanted to go to college. Their struggles are glossed over now by subsequent generations whose lives seem filled with relative ease, but we all know (or hope) that 50 or 100 years down the road, God willing, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will look back at our own struggles and wonder how we did what we did to get through the challenges life threw us.

If only we could look into the eyes of every person we meet and recognize the unseen struggles that live there. Our problems begin when we forget that others suffer, too, and think that we are the only ones forced to deal with challenges, injustice, loss, heartbreak.

The day I sat at a table laden with homemade pasta, just-caught seafood and local wine as I looked out over the Mediterranean Sea, I was overcome by the reality of the sacrifices that were made by the people before me so that I might have a better life—even though there would be no “I” for many years to come. Because we don’t always sacrifice for our own good; we sacrifice for the good of others, for those who are not yet born, for the future, and we are called to do that as one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

This column originally appeared in the July 15, 2020, issue of Catholic New York.

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Click the link below to watch for yourself. My favorite part was when he asked if they spoke Spanish and they all prayed the Our Father together.

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