Emmanuel
FROM THE EDITOR
The beginning of a new year brings with it a sense of introspection
and reflection. We look within . . . and make “resolutions” to change
and improve ourselves. We look to the world around us . . . and hope
(and pray) that things might be better for the peoples and cultures
that inhabit our common home.
If I could change one thing about the present situation of our world
and church, it would be to make compassion grow.
Compassion isn’t much in vogue these days. The flood of refugees
from Syria and other war-torn countries of the Middle East found little
of it at the borders of Europe, nor have immigrants from the south felt
it at our doors despite America’s reputation for being welcoming and
philanthropic. We live in times of mind-boggling wealth for the 1% while
the poorest among us grow ever more desperate. Our political parties
and the machinery of government are paralyzed by partisanship and
ideology, with almost a year remaining before national elections. Even
the church is beset by battles between “liberals” and “conservatives,”
between those who espouse Vatican II and those who advocate for a
“reform of the reform.”
There is harshness and stridency in all of these realities. Is it any
wonder, then, that Pope Francis has called for an Extraordinary Jubilee
of Mercy?
The English essayist and poet Anna Letitia Barbauld wrote, “The well
taught philosophic mind to all compassion gives; casts round the
world an equal eye and feels for all that lives.” Shouldn’t the same be
true of the “well taught religious mind”?
Compas ͥ