The Good Samaritan

An afterword on † Francis and the Ordo Amoris

Most of you here probably recall that, in what proved to be one of his last letters, Pope Francis addressed the bishops of the United States. In that letter, he expressed concern over American policy toward migrants and responded to Vice President JD Vance’s invocation of the Scholastic theological concept of the Ordo Amoris with the model of the Good Samaritan. A great deal was written at the time about the Vice President, the Pope, and the Ordo Amoris; Val offered a magisterial treatment at WPI, and I served up a few words myself. Yet only since Francis’s death have I realized the brilliance of his response – and this despite having somehow materially absorbed Francis’s point.

Francis wrote:

The true ordo amoris 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.

…and I wrote, at the time:

[W]hatever I am to make of my relation to any more than a few thousand or so of the 340 million American citizens in the United States, the Afghani refugees who live across the street from me, three or four doors down, are definitely my neighbors. Whatever differences in culture, habits, beliefs, and practices, they are my neighbors; they’re right here. Same goes for the man from Chad who runs the small storefront African grocery at the other end of the street. He’s right here, same as I am – and for some of us, that seems to be the problem.

It was just recently, however, that I realized how much Francis’s teaching on the Good Samaritan sharpens and universalizes the same point for which I was fumbling. We have no reason to believe that the Samaritan of the parable was coursing the Jericho Road in search of waylaid travelers whom he could provide with assistance [1]; even less could we believe that his business in the city was part of a master plan to bolster the fortunes of Samaria. It is far likelier that, with whatever adjustments for necessary travel, he was simply going about his daily business, doing the regular things he would have been doing on any other day. It’s just that today there’s a man down by the side of the road. And he was there.

Of course, one might say, that takes away the complexity about what to do: there’s urgency; there’s crisis. We aren’t faced with such a pitch of human drama every day… or are we? I just mentioned my Afghani neighbors (who, alhamdulillah, are still there, although their kids no longer use the sidewalks to race slow-moving cars down the street); I cannot be sure what they would face, if they were sent “home.”

Besides, urgency isn’t even always enough for everyone, especially when ideology or dogmatism gets into the act. What were the priest and the Levite thinking, with a human being lying at their feet, possibly bleeding out by the side of the road?—perhaps exactly what they were seeing, for they likely were concerned with incurring ritual defilement and having to forego their Temple sacrifices. And perhaps this is part of why Jesus is depicted in the Gospel of Matthew quoting Hosea 6, 6 twice – I desire mercy and not sacrifice.

Despite what generations reading our Lord’s parable in the Scriptures have done to the word “Samaritan,” the Good Samaritan isn’t a “Samaritan,” some different kind of being; he’s just another human, moved by compassion at the suffering and vulnerable, ready to lend a hand. It is actually we ourselves, in our own time, many of us, who are different kinds of being – some so set on visions of global equity as to miss their suffering neighbor right in front of them, others so fixated on ideologies of kinship, heritage and homeland as to miss… ah yes, their suffering neighbor right in front of them.

This is why it’s so easy to go wrong here; this is why so few of the conflicts in the world are simple matters of right vs. wrong but are far more often one wrong vs. another wrong, one kind of wrong vs. another kind of wrong, or (like the current situation in Gaza) just so, so very wrong all around. The actual Samaria (still called “Samaria” to this day by some, albeit with a definite political agenda in mind) is part of the West Bank, and some of the aforementioned very wrong are ready to instigate there the same kind of horror we are already seeing in Gaza. Many of these invoke the name of God as justification. I have no reason to doubt their sincerity. Our ideals – humanitarian, patriotic and, yes, religious – are so often weaponized, against one another to be sure, but also against ourselves, weaponized like tear gas or a smokescreen to blind us to the suffering other in our midst.

Surely, someone might object, the leaders of nation-states have an obligation to look to the people in the midst of whom they live, before extending themselves to the far corners of the Earth to gather up the wretched? Isn’t there room for taking care of one’s own people first?

In his encyclical Fratelli tutti, Pope Francis offers an answer – one which is complex and somewhat subtle, but profoundly worthy of our consideration. Francis emphasizes that political charity “is always a preferential love shown to those in greatest need.” Yet this preferential love must not degenerate into the “soulless pragmatism” that would reduce those in need to their needs alone; citing an earlier document of his papacy, he adds: “[T]he scandal of poverty cannot be addressed by promoting strategies of containment that only tranquilize the poor and render them tame and inoffensive.”

Thus, he draws a middle course between the fallen human tendency to treat some persons as if they were intrinsically of more value than others and the utilitarian impulse to put “results” ahead of persons altogether; to ensure this, he invokes “the principle of subsidiarity, which is inseparable from the principle of solidarity.” If I may add an interpretation: Subsidiarity is the “how”; solidarity is the “why.” Solidarity tells us that our behavior must be shaped by respect for humankind, humankind which shares in the infinite dignity fully realized in the Son of God become one of us; subsidiarity tells us that this dignity may at times be better recognized in a word of kindness to a destitute person or an hour spent volunteering at a soup kitchen, than in the “effective altruism” of measurable sums of money and materials provided at a safe distance.

It is also worth noting that Fratelli tutti enjoins us to “act at the most concrete and local levels, and then expand to the farthest reaches of our countries and our world, with the same care and concern that the Samaritan showed for each of the wounded man’s injuries.” The encyclical devotes a full paragraph (142) to the necessity of balancing local and global perspectives – yet it has little to say about nation-states. Of course, it would be absurd to treat most modern nation-states as communities of neighbors; to attribute, as nationalists typically do, a unitary culture to a nation-state is at once an offense to the genuinely local and a blindness (willful or otherwise) to the corrosive, homogenizing, commercially generated tastes and habits, propagated by mass media, that characterize contemporary life. In practical terms, the nation-state is generally more of an administrative and ideological power structure than a community;[2] it is ironic how those who deplore such structures most heartily are often the most nationalistic.

As it stands, any nation that is in fact bringing strangers from afar is either dealing (generally reluctantly) with a bona fide emergency, acting in recognition of services rendered, or most likely both. As for the obligation to one’s own, the most natural and non-prejudicial way of reading “one’s own” is, once more, those who are right here.

For instance, I am an American citizen. I am also a citizen of the Republic of Ireland, and thereby of the European Union. Am I an American? Yes, obviously. Am I Irish?—it’s a much trickier question. I’ve never lived in Ireland. I’ve never worked there. I have no living relatives there closer than second cousins. Although I am grateful to the Republic of Ireland for its willingness to take a degree of qualified responsibility for me, I would have no just grounds for complaint, were they to rescind my citizenship, beyond their having offered it in the first place. Were the United States to rescind my citizenship, it would be another matter entirely; I’ve lived here almost my whole life. For whatever gripes I may have about it, it’s my home. Yet there are undocumented persons – “Dreamers,” so-called, but also others – who have as much connection to the United States as I do, and as little connection to the land of their citizenship as I do to Ireland.

What so many seem not to realize is how few people genuinely want to leave their homes – and that those who do so act primarily in response to grave crises and often migrate within their countries of citizenship or to neighboring countries. American conservatives, as a rule, seem to imagine that everyone, everywhere, would want to be Americans; sometimes it seems as if American progressives think that everyone, everywhere, would want to be Canadians or Scandinavians… and yet it is treated as news when a few of them actually move. Yet this is not even the point, except inasmuch as it is generally reasonable to assume that anyone who is somewhere, has sufficient reason to be there.

Which brings us back to the Samaritan. When you find someone in crisis, it may be of interest to ask why they are in crisis, or who bears the responsibility for their being in crisis; it is, however, urgent and imperative to help them get out of crisis. Everything else can wait. As I already noted, Pope Francis enjoined us to “act at the most concrete and local levels, and then expand to the farthest reaches of our countries and our world.” Yet the local initiative that is truly needed will come, not through exclusionary ideologies, but through the rejection of utilitarianism that, for me, was the philosophical lodestone of Francis’s pontificate; as Fratelli tutti states:

Politics too must make room for a tender love of others… this can help us realize that what is important is not constantly achieving great results… we should remember that, “appearances notwithstanding, every person is immensely holy and deserves our love. Consequently, if I can help at least one person to have a better life, that already justifies the offering of my life.”

---

[1] Not that there would be anything wrong with that; for a case in point, meet my personal favorite cardinal.

[2] Admittedly, there are some vestiges of localism among the nations. When I studied in Europe, I lived in the Principality of Liechtenstein (population c. 40,000, which is more than when I was living there). I also often rode through various countries in the car of a fellow student who had Luxembourg plates. At least at that time, any Luxembourgers who happened to drive by would smile and wave as they passed. Conversely, the very remarkableness of these examples only serves to highlight the gargantuan scale of the contemporary nation-state in most cases.