Transformative love, passion for justice belong in vocation ministry

It is a joy to be with you today. I thank you for this invitation. One of my commitments as a theologian is to be of service to leadership groups in the church. So it is an honor to accompany you in this way as you guide and help discern future leaders and servants for the people of God.

Father Bryan Massingale outlined what the shift into a global world has meant, especially for those left behind; and he exhorted vocation ministers to tend to issues of racial reconciliation and justice in their own ministry.

I bring with me 27 years of priesthood and 14 years of ministry as a seminary professor, vice rector, admissions committee member, spiritual director and formation advisor for women and men preparing for ordained and lay ecclesial ministries. Yet my primary ministry is that of a social ethicist—examining, exploring and expanding the implications of our faith beliefs for presence, witness and action for the sake of social transformation on behalf of the poor, voiceless and marginalized.

So, I wondered why you would ask a social ethicist to address a conference of vocation ministers. Clearly, I could tell you about the moral ambiguities of globalization and the challenges they pose for Christian reflection and action. But it seems that you would want and need more than that. Given a global world, church and nation—and we have yet to unpack and develop the meaning of “global”—who are we to be as men and women religious? Whom are we to seek, and how are we to form women and men for such a world, church and nation?

So let me begin with the questions that haunted me as I pondered this address, and that I will leave you as a concluding challenge: How do we cultivate a stance of unease with the world in which we live? And how do we facilitate a transformative love for the other?

These questions came to me as I pondered the words of the Uruguayan theologian, Juan Luis Segundo who, in speaking of the challenges of faith reflection in the midst of pervasive poverty, observed:

If you are at ease with the world as it is, if you feel morally at ease within it, you will never understand what we are about, for we are not satisfied with the way the world is, and we do not feel morally at ease with it. We see too much misery, too much exploitation, too many children with bloated stomachs, too many wretched slums, too many parents unable to care for their children, too many poor whose lives and deaths are determined by too few rich.¹

Thus, my questions:

• How do we cultivate a stance of unease with the world as it is?

• How do we facilitate a transformative love for the other?

To me these seem to be the challenges that arise for vocation ministers as we move more deeply into becoming what we already are— that is, a global church, a global world and a global nation. Taking these questions seriously will affect who we are to be, whom we are to seek, and how we are to form servant leaders for church and society.

I will develop my presentation in four movements or stages. First, I will present a more “visceral” account of globalization, one that stems from a retreat experience I had two years ago. Next, I will present a more formal overview of “globalization” and provide a summary of its salient characteristics as they are found in the theological literature. Then I will reflect upon the global church that we already are yet do not fully appreciate ... or even value or desire (truth be told). Finally, I will examine some implications that a global church, world and nation pose for vocational ministry and discernment—and indeed for religious life itself.

The cross over the globe

Two years ago, I made my annual retreat at the Jesuit Retreat House in Oshkosh, WI. At the front of the main chapel, there is a prayer corner, where a globe sits beneath the outstretched arm of the Crucified Christ. I often pondered Christ’s agony as the shadow of the cross fell across the globe at various times of the day. As I prayed I became ever more aware of the abundance of misery, want and fragmentation which afflict the human community. Christ’s agony and our human anguish became mirror reflections of each other as I took the globe in my hands and moved them over its surface.²

Over Darfur and Sudan, I pondered in sorrow the crucifixion of genocide. My mind reeled as I tried to comprehend how humanity could yet again allow such mass horror to unfold with such little outcry and so much indifference.

As my hands passed over Greenland, I became conscious of environmental crucifixion, as the melting of its ice shelves became a symbol of the ecological crisis. I grieved over our irresponsibility and shortsightedness with regard to creation itself.

Over Kenya, I remembered my visits to Turkana, in northwestern Kenya, and a village there where half of the children die before the age of 10, mostly of hunger (and yet in 2010 up to half of America’s children struggle with obesity). Other children in that Kenyan village die from diseases such as polio and malaria, which have been eradicated or are unknown in the West. I also recalled a visit to a famine camp. Overwhelmed by the squalor and destitution of the place, I turned to my missionary friends and exclaimed, “How can this be! Doesn’t anyone know or care?” My friend explained that people in the Kenyan government, the U.S. State Department and the United Nations knew of this camp and many others besides. He added: “But nobody gives a damn about Africa.”

My hands moved over Congo, and I recalled a chilling story told by a Congolese sister at an AIDS conference. She related the severe social stigmas imposed upon those infected with this disease. (In my prayer, I struggled with the fact that last year over two million died in Africa of AIDS, while in the U.S., this disease is rapidly becoming a manageable chronic illness). But the real horror came when she concluded by saying, “We don’t have gay people in my country. We kill them.” My eyes filled with tears at that memory. For the Congo is not the only place where those who love differently are demonized ... scapegoats of deep-seated anxiety and rarely examined fear.

As my hands passed over Cuba, I thought of Guantanamo Bay, the unspeakable reality of torture, and the nameless and faceless victims who endured state-sanctioned brutality in the name of national security, otherwise known as fear. I reeled before the mutilated body of Christ Crucified and the broken bodies of the contemporary crucifixions that are being perpetrated in our name.

Over Israel and the Middle East, I pondered the enduring power of ancient hatreds, as those who have a common geographic origin and even shared faith roots are locked in bitter acrimony, intractable hostility and cycles of reprisal and revenge.

Destitution in many forms

As my hands embraced Asia, Africa, and India, I tried to wrap my mind around the fact that I live in a world where two billion people live on less than $2 a day. I couldn’t do it. I wanted to escape the reality that some of these two billion make the clothes I wear and produce the food I eat in abundance—and sometimes waste so casually. Their exploited labor is the price of my enrichment.

My hands passed over the border between Mexico and the United States. I wondered, “What boundary would be visible from space? Is the Rio Grande so significant that it should determine the life fortunes of so many?” My fingers touched the Arizona desert, and I prayed for the many who died there in the search for a better life, a life of opportunity. I pondered these questions, “What desperation would drive someone to risk everything? Why should a river be the demarcation between opportunity and despair? Who are those who would wall out the desperate and have so little compassion for those who perish in a desolate desert?”

My fingers touched Milwaukee, Chicago, and East St. Louis. East St. Louis: one of only two cities whose condition was so dire that I wept. A city where there was not even a McDonald’s. Sex clubs are a major source of employment, venues for a largely white and wealthy clientele (so-called “pillars” of church and society) who stream across the Mississippi River seeking exotic and forbidden pleasures from the poor and women of color, who bear the ostracism of being called sex workers, prostitutes and “ho’s.” I imagined the beams of the cross splitting our nation’s cities, separating neighborhoods of despair and violence from enclaves of privilege and opportunity by a chasm of indifference.

My fingers paused over New Orleans, a city I know well, having taught there for many summers. The last time I taught there was only a month before the affliction of Katrina, whose storm waters revealed the silent crucifixion of racism and poverty so pervasive in our cities, the result of decades of accumulating and compounding social neglect, callousness and abandonment—all of which allowed this disaster to both unfold as it did and endure to this day.

This is the portrait I offer, a snapshot of a broken and divided world. It is a world of horror and misery for most, but of comfort and even extravagance for a few. Yet it is but one world, for the two worlds are more intertwined than they first appear. The misery of one is the result of the other’s affluence. The desolation of one is the price of the other’s comfort.

This insight echoes the teaching of Pope John Paul II . After surveying the many social divides in our world—he used the word, “gaps”—he declared: “One of the greatest injustices in the contemporary world consists precisely in this: that the ones who possess much are relatively few and those who possess almost nothing are many.”3 This is the “global” world in which we live ... to which we are called.

After this more visceral portrait of our world, we can now move to a more formal consideration of the reality of globalization.

Globalization more formally considered

To speak of a “global” world, church and nation immediately brings us into complex discussions that surround globalization. Truly it seems to have become one of the major “buzzwords” in religious circles, and for that reason, it is almost trivialized and ignored. I offer the following salient points that are emerging in Catholic social ethical reflection on the reality and ambiguity of globalization. There are four:

First, globalization, simply put, “denotes the expanding scale, growing magnitude, speeding up and deepening impact of trans-continental flows and patterns of social interaction...”4 In other words, globalization represents an acute compression of time and space and an unprecedented relativizing of national borders and boundaries, driven chiefly by two factors: 1) the economic integration of the world’s financial markets (e.g., the mobility of capital and labor); and 2) technology, in particular, the mobility of information transfer through an unprecedented and accelerated communications revolution (e.g., remember when a phone was primarily for making phone calls instead of accessing e-mails in the middle of a wilderness?).

Thus it is important to remember that globalization is as much a communications revolution as an economic one. Global connectivity, now available on an unprecedented scale, is key and essential to an expanding and intensifying global consciousness. As an example, look no further than the global outrage and political crisis created when an obscure fundamentalist minister in a rural backwater of Florida threatened to publicly burn Korans on the anniversary of 9-11. We have always been a global church and world. But now we have the means to be far more aware of it, as the globe impinges itself on our awareness.

Second, globalization has many positive effects, among them being this increased consciousness of being one world; the ready availability of information; the democratizing of information access and production (e.g., the phenomenon of blogging, whereby anyone can become a pundit and broadcast one’s views, discoveries and vices to the entire online world); and the fact that human rights language has become the de facto ethical Esperanto, that is, the common ethical framework for discussing moral issues.

BUT ... (and it’s a big “but”), third, there are major negative effects as well. Many commentators note that “transcontinental flows” of social interaction “do not necessarily prefigure the emergence of a harmonious world society. . . . Not only does the awareness of growing inter-connectedness create new animosities and conflicts, it can fuel reactionary politics and deep-seated xenophobia.”5 Let me repeat and underscore that point: global social interaction can fuel reactionary politics and deep-seated xenophobia.

In making the world more present to us, globalization challenges our familiar, comfortable, taken-for-granted social identities that are often formed “over against” some other group: “We are not like them; they are not us.” But now, the “them”—“those people”—butt up against “us” more constantly and insistently. This fuels “reactionary politics and deep-seated xenophobia.” Consider the vilification of foreigners (that is, anyone not indisputably “American,” that is, white) often heard in our country during the just concluded political campaign: “He (meaning President Obama) doesn’t see America the way we do” (as if it is selfevident who “we” are and how “we” see America); “We need to take back our country” (from whom is left unspecified, as well as who the “we” is?); and the comments of my Senatorelect from the state of Wisconsin, who responded to Obama’s call to transform America: “That’s when I decided to run for office. I don’t want to transform America. I want to reclaim America.”

Thus among the negative effects noted in Catholic social reflection upon globalization are: an insensitivity, even callousness, to human suffering; inattention to ecological sustainability; economic and political polarization between and within cultures (e.g., the gap between the poorest and richest nations has been growing, not declining, and in our own country we have experienced the greatest transfer of wealth between the richest and the poorest in our history); and indeed the triumph of tribalism over a concern for the common good. As one author notes, “The buzzword is globalization, but we live in a divided world.”⁶

Fourth, and finally, the global world in which we live is one of acute paradox. The world is more integrated and interconnected than ever before ... and yet there are many so-called “lost societies” that are almost completely left out in a kind of globalized apartheid. For example, “less than one percent of Africans have ever used the Internet, and Tokyo has more telephones than all of Africa.”⁷ And while many lament our national unemployment rate of 10 percent, few seem to notice or care that the unemployment rate for working age African American men in Milwaukee hovers around 53 percent. Thus, a global world and nation is marked by gross disparity and structural violence ... and a callousness or indifference to the silent despair and hidden misery that afflict the vast majority of the world’s inhabitants ... and an everexpanding portion of our own population.

A global church?

I call your attention to the question mark in this section’s title. In one sense, it would seem obvious that the Catholic Church is “global.” It is one of the largest multinational institutions in the world, with “outposts” and “establishments” in every known country and territory. Its diplomatic corps is as far-flung as any nation’s. Its creed and beliefs are taught in languages that range from the commonplace to the obscure. Yet, there is more to this so-called “global” community than meets the eye.

I want to approach this through considering what I call “the browning of the church.” A global church is a “browning” church. This is the term I use to describe the facts that 1) the vast majority of the Catholic Church now lives in the Southern Hemisphere; and 2) the majority of Catholics in the United States are no longer white Anglos (or in the language of the Census Bureau, the majority of U.S. Catholics are now “Hispanic or nonwhite”). Every Sunday in this country, Mass is celebrated in dozens of languages; among these are English, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Korean, Hmong, Vietnamese and Polish. By God’s grace, the church in the United States is now a microcosm of the world’s peoples. In other words, we do not have “diversity in the church” (as an office of the Bishop’s Conference is named). We are a diverse church.

And yet, the diversity of the Catholic faith community is not always seen as a cause for celebration; too often it is a source of tension and division. Many U.S. Catholics resent having to pray in multicultural or multilingual ways. So often one hears complaints such as, “Why do we have to sing in Spanish?” “Don’t they have their own church?” (That “they” again!) “Gospel music isn’t really Catholic, is it?” Such unease and resentment over our global Catholicism received a dramatic and painful expression during Pope Benedict’s May 2008 Mass in Washington, DC. After the Prayer of the Faithful and Presentation of the Gifts marked by diverse languages and spirited Gospel and Spanish singing, a noted Catholic commentator remarked: “We have just been subjected to an over-preening display of multicultural chatter. And now, the Holy Father will begin the sacred part of the Mass.”⁸

Moreover, although the majority of its members are persons of color, the power of the church still resides in the Northern Hemisphere (as evidenced in the predominance of Europeans recently named as cardinals by Pope Benedict XVI ). And the vast majority of U.S. Catholic Church leaders —the conference of bishops, the members of diocesan staffs, the senior executives of Catholic agencies and organizations, the major superiors of religious orders and the faculties of Catholic seminaries and educational institutions—are white. As in the world, this “global” church is marked by gross disparities of power and influence.

In other words, despite the deep “browning” of the church, the Catholic Church remains a “white” institution, marked by the pervasive belief that European aesthetics, music, theology and persons—and only these—are standard, normative, universal and truly “catholic.” Only European aesthetics, theology and persons are truly Catholic, despite the Church’s actual demography and rhetorical commitment to universality.⁹

The challenge, to put it bluntly, is this: a “white” church is not and cannot be a “catholic” church, much less a global one. This is the challenge that faces the church of the present Massing ale, Transfor mative Love and future: the difficult acknowledgment of its captivity to the idol of “whiteness,” and a conversion to a genuine cross-racial solidarity that would enable us to actually become, as well as profess to be, a “catholic” faith community.

Thus in the church, as in the world, globalization is a mixed blessing. We are far more diverse in language, culture and color than ever before ... and also more conflicted and torn and divided as well.

Implications for vocation ministry

I return now to the two questions with which I began, hoping that the reasons for them are now a bit more apparent: How do we cultivate a stance of unease with the world in which we live? And how do we facilitate a transformative love for the other?

In a global world and church, with its potential for good and yet threatened by an encroaching tribalism, isolation, apartheid and callous indifference, I believe that women and men religious are called to be agents of social reconciliation, healing a divided church and world and witnessing to the compassion of Christ for the outcast, despised and ostracized. To do that, religious need a cultivated stance of unease—a deep sense of visceral distance, outrage, lament and grief at the state of the world and the church—rooted in a deep transformative love for the outcast, despised and ostracized ... a transformative love that the Christian tradition calls “compassion” and that Catholic social teaching calls “solidarity.”

If this vision is true, then what are its vocational implications? I offer three main points here.

1) Relate equally to people of color

First, as a negative criterion and absolute minimum: If candidates for religious life are unwilling or unable to relate to people of color and other socially stigmatized groups as equals—and not just as paternalistic benefactors—this is an indisputable sign that they do not have a vocation to serve the church as it exists today.

This criterion is harshly expressed and deliberately so. It is necessary for the credibility of the church’s identity, for the happiness of the candidate in her or his future ministry and for the harmony of the community’s own life. Your own commissioned study of young religious showed that those in initial formation are more likely to come from nonwhite or non-Anglo backgrounds. As one male religious remarked to me: “We aren’t a community of O’Briens and O’Malleys anymore.” Those days are gone forever, given the demographic shift that is occurring in society and that has already happened in the church. For your own integrity, communal well-being, and for the sake of service to a global world, church and nation, a candidate who cannot thrive in a multiracial and multiethnic environment and relate to the “other” as an equal is unfit for religious life.

I know that this is a hard sell to a group of vocation ministers and perhaps especially for many of your communities. Many of you face the pressure of numbers, as you are constantly asked, “How many do we have?” But we don’t need numbers, we need witnesses! We need agents of healing for a divided church, world and nation. If our candidates are not up for that challenge, then no “number” of them will be adequate for our mission and identity.

2) Tackle the issue of unconscious racism

Here is a second vocational implication that flows from my thoughts. Vocation discernment and formation programs in a global world, church and nation will have to develop ways to help candidates name and struggle against their unconscious racism. Unconscious racism connotes how race can operate as a negative—yet not conscious, deliberate or intentional— decision-making factor, due to the pervasive cultural stigma attached to dark skin color in Western culture. We have all been socialized, in tacit and hidden ways, to associate dark skin color with danger, stupidity, incompetence, immorality, promiscuity, criminality and—to be honest—exotic thrill and erotic excitement. Through our socialization in U.S. society, we have learned at a preconscious level to attach negative associations with dark skin color which induce negative feelings about nonwhites. We know better; yet, for example, we still tense up as a black man or Latino approaches us. We then react with shame and embarrassment, wondering, “Where did that come from?” Such associations are transmitted through unconscious socialization, the “tacit understandings” that are expressed in “what everybody knows” but won’t publicly admit.

Such unconscious racism also manifests itself in the spontaneous surprise that arises in the face of black ability and accomplishment. For example, after a presentation for a group of women religious, one of them came to me and said:, “Father, you are so intelligent and articulate. You must have been taught by one of our sisters.” I responded, “No, I was taught by my mother and father.” She looked at me with confusion, so I explained, “Sister, would you have ever told a white priest, ‘You are so intelligent you must have been taught by one of us?’ Didn’t you assume that the only way I could be so intelligent was because a white person taught me?” She didn’t speak to me for the rest of the conference.

But note: I was not calling her a “racist”—not in the sense of deliberate or callous bigotry. She did not deliberately, consciously, intentionally set out to malign, denigrate or insult me. She had been malformed and deformed by being in America, by absorbing the racial “code” of our society, in ways she never realized or was even aware of.

My point is that such unconscious racism is both unavoidable in candidates from the dominant culture ... and a serious impediment for ministry in a global world, church and nation. Awareness of one’s malformation in U.S. society, and thus for the need of on-going repentance and conversion, are essential for authentic vocational flourishing and commitment in today’s world and church.

3) Change begins with compassion

A third implication of our globalized world and the injustices within it is this: the antidote for such culturally-induced callousness or indifference is the cultivation of transformative love, also known as compassion. The Gospels relate how Jesus was often moved with compassion by the anguish and misery he encountered. The Greek word for compassion often used in this context, splanchnizesthai, connotes a visceral response of profound feeling and strong emotion; it emanates from one’s bowels or guts.10 Compassion, then, is the response stirred within one’s deepest humanity when confronted with human agony or need.

The Gospels further relate how such compassion is the motive for many of Jesus’ miracles and parables. Jesus raises the only son of a widowed mother, out of compassion not only for her human grief, but also for the severe social vulnerability to which the death of her only male protector exposed her. The Samaritan comes to the aid of a sworn enemy, because he was moved to compassion at the sight of injury and violation. An elderly father hastens to welcome his estranged son, being moved to compassion by his humiliation and outcast status.

In each of these situations, the Gospels say that compassion is the motive for moving beyond the social boundaries decreed by culture and custom. They describe compassion as something visceral, as an inner stirring and a movement of one’s innards. This profound emotion and deep Massing ale, Transformative Love visceral reaction is the hallmark of authentic compassion. Moral outrage and indignation are essential components of biblical compassion. Compassion arises not through an avoidance of suffering, but from a deeper entering into it. Compassion is a gut-wrenching response to human suffering and anguish which propels one to act beyond the limits of what is considered reasonable and acceptable. As Maureen O’Connell rightly notes, “Compassion overrides social, cultural, racial, economic and religious boundaries.”¹¹

Seen in this light, compassion is an essential dimension of racial reconciliation and justice making. Insofar as racism is characterized by a systemic indifference or social callousness based on skin color differences, compassion is its polar opposite.

I believe compassion is a decisive Christian attitude. Without it, the Jesus story is incoherent, and a life inspired by the Gospels is impossible. I also believe that without a stirring of compassion, without a deeply-felt response to the agony of racial crucifixions and the scandal of social ostracism, we will not be moved to justice and the repair of social divisions. We act justly, not because we are intellectually convinced, but because we are passionately moved. Compassion moves the will to justice. Compassion makes one profoundly ill at ease within the world, and thus opens one to the possibility of living authentically in a global world and church.

Therefore, vocational ministry and formation programs for a global world, church and nation have to assess the candidate’s ability and potential for authentic compassion. Do they have a capacity for righteous anger? Can they be moved interiorly at the plight of the “other?” (I know that many of you are saying, “We don’t need any more angry people in our community!” But Thomas Aquinas would remind us that we need to distinguish healthy from unhealthy and even immoral angers, and that a deficit of anger in the face of injustice is sinful, because anger is the passion that moves the will to justice).¹²

Granted, such compassion is uncommon in our society, but it is not unknown. I meet young women and men every day at my university who possess the rudiments of compassion and a genuine desire for solidarity with the outcast. Our task is to make our communities attractive places for them to consider. That task requires another talk on the future of religious life (and I’m willing to make a return trip to address that subject!).

Called to be the compassion of Christ

I began by recounting my retreat reflection, considering our world under the shadow of the Cross. During that meditation, as I pondered the chasms of suffering that wound the human community, I asked myself: “Where is the compassion of the Risen Christ? Where is the compassion for the world’s griefs, despair, fear, guilt and sorrow? Who gives a damn about Africa?”

Then the answer came from within: the compassion of the Risen One continues in the women and men who intervene to bring reconciliation, hope, truth, consolation, food, care and attention to the world’s hungers, pain and anguish—people like Desmond Tutu, people like Helen Prejean, people like me ... and you ... and us all.

Our faith calls us and empowers us to be the compassion of the Risen Christ, who even now moves among us, in us and through us, making us agents of reconciliation in healing a divided world, church and nation.

And so, I conclude with two messages of faith. The first is taken from the Eucharistic Prayer titled, “Christ, the Compassion of God,” where the presider prays on behalf of us all: “Let your Church be a living witness to truth and freedom, to justice and peace, that all people may be lifted up by the hope of a world made new.” “The hope of a world made new:” a world reconciled, healed and made one through the power of the Risen One at work in us, moving us to depths of compassion and acts of justice we hardly believe possible. Our task and our joy as vocation ministers is to seek and call forth women and men who radiate the hope of a world made new.

This leads to my concluding word of hopeful faith, the words of the apostle Paul. As we go forth from this conference, let us return home inspired and sustained by this confidence: “To him whose power now at work in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine—to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus through all generations, world without end” (Ephesians 3:20-21).

Let the church say, AMEN!

1. I am unable to trace the exact source for this citation. It is consistent with many of the thoughts contained in Juan Luis Segundo’s Signs of the Times. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993.

2. A earlier version of this section appears in my article “Healing a Divided World,” Origins 37:11 (August 16, 2007), p. 161-168. Here those thoughts are expanded and used to a different purpose.

3. Emphasis in the original. See John Paul II , Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987), #28.

4. David Held and Anthony McGrew. Globalization/Anti-Globalization. Madden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. 1. Cited in Globalization and Catholic Social Thought. John A. Coleman, author and editor, and William E. Ryan, ed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001. 14. I am much indebted to Coleman’s presentation of globalization in Catholic social reflection.

5. Held and McGrew, p. 1; cited in Coleman, p. 14.

6. John A. Coleman, writing in Globalization and Catholic Social Thought. Madden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. 13.

7. John A. Coleman and William Ryan. Globalization and Catholic Social Thought. Madden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. 13.

8. This moment is important because EWTN is the selfstyled “media presence” of the U.S. Catholic Church. That such a remark could be aired on a network renowned for its orthodoxy, and that it was not officially repudiated or challenged suggests that standing against racism is not a major marker of Catholic identity, and that cultural products other than European ones cannot truly mediate the divine. In other words, as I argue in my book, Racial Justice and the Catholic Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010) in the U.S., “Catholic” = “white.”

9. I develop this point at length in chapter 2 of my book, Racial Justice and the Catholic Church.

10. Maureen O’Connell. Compassion. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2009. p. 68; also Joseph A. Fitzmeyer. The Gospel according to Luke I-IX. Doubleday, 1981. p. 658-659.

11. O’Connell. Compassion. p. 70.

12. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. I-II , Q. 47, a. 2; and II -II , Q. 158, aa. 1, 2 and 8.

Father Bryan Massingale is an associate professor of theology and associate director of undergraduate studies at Marquette University in Milwaukee and a professor in the Institute for Black Catholic Studies at Xavier University of Louisiana. He is the author of Racial Justice and the Catholic Church (Orbis, 2010) as well as numerous articles. In addition, he is a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and convener of the Black Catholic Theological Symposium.