A stranger on the road

Columban Fr Warren Kinne offers some reflection on the second chapter of the Encyclical Letter, Fratelli Tutti of the Holy Father Francis on fraternity and social friendship.

Pope Francis lays out the scriptural anchor for his total presentation of the encyclical Fratelli Tutti in chapter two. It is the parable of the Good Samaritan. This story is constantly retold, and as Pope Francis says, sooner or later, we come across a person who is suffering, and the challenge in the parable is stark. As much as we might like to pass by with dark glasses and the hat pulled over the eyes, we cannot eventually avoid seeing someone in trouble. How will we respond? Will we join the passers-by? We could also be the injured party watching in disbelief how people respond to our plight. And I trust that people reading this won’t find themselves as the “robber” or perpetrator of the tragedy.

Last night I joined my usual Friday night group. It is basically a Catholic young adults group interested in questions about life and faith. They are predominantly foreign-born and well educated. I took along a young man on a bridging visa who had approached me after Mass. He is in the process of having a review of a rejected residency visa application. He says he has become a Christian while in Australia on a student visa and is concerned about the consequences if he returns to Turkey to his Muslim family. He says he is “non-denominational” and moves from Church to Church on a Sunday. He was baptized by evangelical Anglicans in Sydney who don’t like him coming to the Catholic Church. He has all the problems of finding work and surviving here while he awaits the hearing. I have met him a few times, and he is between a rock and a hard place. I am also in a conundrum about his case and rather hope that it will sort of disappear. His case on the surface seems weak enough. But who knows?

The issue of human relations is as old as the story of Cain and Abel. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” says Cain when asked by God where is his brother. Of course, the blood of his brother hasn’t yet dried on his hands. Cain rhetorical statement – am I my brother’s keeper - asks the question we all do when we encounter suffering, even when we didn’t initiate the situation as Cain did. The deeper truth is our inter-relationship with all. It takes a while to accept this fact. Perhaps it is only something we come to in faith. But when the truth strikes home, we are indeed our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers.

Christian communities can have their own issues. We are tempted, as Pope Francis states, to turn these communities into closed and isolated groups. But cozy communitarianism and the warmth that can be generated within is not an end in itself. The challenge is to build bridges to the stranger.

So many people are abandoned on the by-ways of life. They are the victims of injustices of one sort of another, or perhaps just of their own stupidity. But whatever the origin of their plight, self-inflicted or a systemic unjust kind, we are challenged to stop and help. However, we also have that temptation in the opposite direction “to ignore others, especially the weak” ¹. The Good Samaritan showed that “the existence of each and every individual is deeply tied to that of others: life is not simply time that passes; life is a time for interactions”²

Pope Francis asks us to start anew and that a better future cannot be expected solely from the efforts of those who govern us. There needs to be space for co-responsibility and creativity on the part of civil society.

There is our Saint Vincent de Paul Society, Rosies or the Salvos, and more recent movements of awakening such as women’s and first nations groups. In ways individual and collective, we work with our everywhere neighbour.

The Pope dreams of “neighbours without borders” which seems a pipe-dream, but the Samaritan was a hated outsider, and that person is our neighbour. We must heed the plea of the stranger. May that person be able to say: “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me” (Mt 25, 35). We are to “rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep” (Rm 12,15) - to recognize Christ in each of the abandoned.

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