News - October 2020 RSS Feed

As you could see from the quote I used at the end of my last essay, the following is a meditation on the reality and practical applications of love.  Here, Pope Francis is following the lead of Pope St John Paul II, especially in the latter’s encyclical Laborem Exercens.  There John Paul wrote that there are only two kinds of human activity that require us to transcend ourselves even to the point of creating (or procreating) something other than ourselves—love and work.  Both involve production (or reproduction) that yields something unique and special.  And so Francis insists, “Our relationships, if healthy and authentic, open us to others who expand and enrich us. …we find that our hearts expand as we step out of ourselves and embrace others” (#89).  One important way of doing this, he suggests, is engaging in acts of hospitality, both as individuals and as nations.  Once again, this requires us to recognize the inherent dignity of the other as a person (or a group as a people).  Failure in authentic hospitality, he says, produces “existential foreigners,” including persons with disabilities, the elderly, and so on (##97-98). 

Chapter Two of the encyclical is titled “A Stranger On The Road.”  It comprises paragraphs 56-86.  I am suggesting that the rest of the document is an unpacking of the implications of this chapter, a meditation on the parable of the Good Samaritan.

This is a long encyclical letter; it’s why I’d like to summarize it for you and pull some important quotes for your consideration.  But first, I want to make a couple of clarifications.

…is the seedbed of the Church, according to the venerable 3rd century North African Father Tertullian.  And this coming Saturday we will remember one of the most important of the early martyrs—one who really made the mark of martyrdom the “standard of excellence” it is:  St Ignatius of Antioch.