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Confounding the prognostication of oddsmakers and Vatican watchers everywhere, Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was elected as Pope Leo XIV on May 8, becoming the first pope in history from the United States. The new Holy Father served for many years as a missionary in South America and is a dual citizen of the U.S. and Peru. In his first remarks as pope, from the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square, he declared, “Together, we must look for ways to be a missionary Church” and called on all Catholics “to be missionaries.”
This is neither a radical agenda nor a new one. Missionary work has been at the heart of the Catholic Church from its earliest days. This has not usually been of the knocking-on-doors sort; Catholics tend to be “service missionaries” who mingle their faith with an earthly vocation. Catholic movements throughout history have typically formed in response to a pressing worldly need. Some missionaries in these movements have cared for the sick (for example, the Brothers Hospitallers), while others have taught young people (the Jesuits) or fed the hungry (the Missionaries of Charity). The ethos is to treat both bodies and souls. As a lay Catholic myself, I consider my secular writing, speaking, and teaching to be the principal way that I share my faith publicly.
As the new pope charges Catholics to be service missionaries representing a missionary Church, then, the question is this: What pressing need do we face? Leo named it himself at his inaugural mass: “Brothers and sisters, this is the hour for love!” To bind up the wounds in our families, nations, and Church is the mission we need today—a mission of true love for a suffering world.
Love is central to the Christian faith. In the Book of Genesis, God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness.” In the New Testament, the apostle John clarifies that likeness: “God is love”; thus, we are made to love. As to precisely what that means, Saint Thomas Aquinas provides a compelling answer in his Summa Theologiae, written in the years before his death in 1274: “To love is to will the good of the other.”
But as they say, the devil is in the details. Willing the good of others can take many different forms. Some might argue that in our messy world, a mission of love should emphasize simple empathy toward others, accepting people as they are without judgment. For psychologists, empathy means “adopting another person’s emotional state.” This is what leads parents to say “You are only as happy as your unhappiest child.” An attitude of empathy can even imply the coupling of brains through the activation of mirror neurons.
If empathy were Leo’s charge, then the mission of love would be to live and let live, without challenging views or behaviors that are at variance with natural law and Church teaching and without criticizing wrongdoing.
Leo is unlikely to take this path. Not that he lacks empathy—quite the opposite, based on his work and preaching. But he is also a canon lawyer, with deep expertise in the laws of the Catholic Church, which teach that mercy is incoherent without being accompanied by the recognition of right and wrong. Human suffering is very often the fruit of our own mistakes, and not all viewpoints are consistent with Church teaching. In these cases, what is needed is not just mercy but honesty. A faithful medical missionary would not neglect to give corrective advice about physical well-being; the same goes for moral well-being, even when correction is unwelcome. Getting along is great, but going along is not so great. As the Church has made clear, “the salvation of souls” is “the supreme law in the Church,” which is always “to be kept before one’s eyes.”
If you think this simply sounds like inflexible theology, consider that behavioral-science research has found little support for the hypothesis that empathy is the best way to help others. As I have written before, a truer, more effective expression of love is compassion. People tend to use the terms compassion and empathy interchangeably, but their meanings are very different. Compassion encompasses empathy but also requires understanding the source of another’s pain rationally and possessing the courage and forthrightness to name it and suggest a remedy, even if doing so might be difficult or unpopular. To see the difference, think of being the parent of an angst-ridden, rebellious teenager. Empathy imposes no rules. But compassion says, “These are the rules that will keep you safe. I insist on them because I love you, even if you hate me for doing so right now.”
Empathy is easier than compassion, but not better. In fact, research has found that it is far less beneficial to the helper. It might even cause harm to the sufferer, because it can prejudice us toward some people and against others. As the psychologist Paul Bloom, who has studied the topic exhaustively, puts it, “Empathy is biased and parochial; it focuses you on certain people at the expense of others; and it is innumerate, so it distorts our moral and policy decisions in ways that cause suffering instead of relieving it.” Love-as-empathy can invite us to share the mission of love only with those who are like us and encourage us to treat others as outsiders. Think of the political “my-side bias” so many people have today, which makes them very forgiving of the errors of people on their own side of an issue but utterly condemnatory of people on the other side. This is not at all the message of Jesus, and it makes ideological polarization worse.
True compassion means speaking forthrightly about faith and morality. And that’s where things get even harder: Imparting a difficult truth (as you understand it) to someone when you have no love for them is not hard; doing it with love is the challenge. You may have found, as I have, that when you are impelled to criticize someone for their conduct, whatever feelings of warmth you had toward them are diminished, perhaps as a way to maintain your resolve.
To criticize without love also tends to be counterproductive—for both parties. It usually increases unwanted attitudes and behaviors. Think how you are affected when someone with whom you disagree on an issue—say, the environment—contemptuously tells you how stupid your position is. You are very unlikely to think, Wow, they’re right—I do want to spoil God’s beautiful creation out of pure selfishness! On the contrary, it makes you double down on your own position, a phenomenon psychologists call the “boomerang effect.”
Missionary work requires using your values as a gift, not as a weapon. That means presenting these values with love and rejecting the culture of contempt that rewards insults with clicks, likes, and eyeballs. And remember: People are extremely adept at reading your feelings, so if you are bringing moral correction but are inauthentic in your claim that you care about others, they will know it.
The key to threading the needle of correction while maintaining love is found in one of the most famous passages in the Gospel, Jesus’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” As a commentary on the problem of feeling that love, Martin Luther King Jr.—a man with plenty of experience in moral correction of others based in love—said this in a 1957 sermon: “If you hate your enemies, you have no way to redeem and to transform your enemies. But if you love your enemies, you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption.”
Once again, what’s morally right turns out to be empirically correct: Praying for others increases your capacity to forgive them.
Achieving that mission of love will also serve the second goal Leo named in his inaugural mass: to build “a united Church, a sign of unity and communion, which becomes a leaven for a reconciled world.” To non-Catholics, that might sound like a bromide. I see it differently, as the pope’s acknowledgment that the Church itself has tremendous division and strife to overcome—as we have seen in the past decade’s bitter fracturing between its conservative and progressive wings.
If we can learn to love truly, which means to will the well-being of another, we can achieve unity. Some of my most treasured friendships are with people who disagree with me on politics, religion, and social issues but who care deeply about me as a person despite my possibly foolish beliefs. You can surely say the same for someone significant in your life.
And it all begins at home. My wife and I disagree on many things and even voted differently in the most recent presidential election. But our adoration of, and admiration for, each other; our shared love of our children and grandchildren; and our commitment to the Catholic Church make such differences shrink to insignificance. Love unites.
Judging by his first words as pope, Leo XIV might launch the love mission the Church needs. And a missionary Church of love could be just what the world needs.
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