n 15 July 2007, exactly one year before the Opening Mass of World Youth Day 2008, Pope Benedict XVI was on vacation in the mountains of northern Italy. The Pope broke his holiday to pray the Angelus with some local people and reflect with them upon the Gospel of that Sunday, the story of the Good Samaritan. The love of the Good Samaritan, the Pope said, is at the heart of Christian life. “In fact only love, aroused in us by the Holy Spirit, makes us witnesses of Christ.” This important spiritual truth is, he promised, “at the heart of the World Youth Day message for 2008”.

One year later, well over 100,000 young people from around the world will join a similar number of young Australians in Sydney for the Opening Mass of World Youth Day. It will be a chance for them all to see that they are part of something much bigger than themselves, their family, their school, their parishes, their country. One thing World Youth Day returnees regularly comment upon is their profound experience of the universality of the Church, that there are people just like them in every country of the world, it’s a universal faith and that the arms of our Church are, like the World Youth Day Cross, wide open to all. The faith and hope and love of the Good Samaritan goes out to people of every nation, every tribe. The Holy Spirit of Pentecost comes to people of every language and knits them together as one people under God.

WYD08 will be an extraordinary opportunity and experience in so many ways, but one will be the opportunity to examine the “in-groups” and “out-groups” in our communities, those bashed and left at the side of one road or another: the financially or spiritually poor, the abused, the asylum seeker, the drug-addicted, the grieving, the lonely, the marginal. 

“In fact only love, aroused in us by the Holy Spirit, makes us witnesses of Christ.”
This important spiritual truth is, he promised, “at the heart of the World Youth Day message for 2008”.

The Good Samaritan asks us: can we extend our moral imaginations and sympathies to them? Can we picture what they think and feel? The despondency, alienation, self-hatred? Does our notion of neighbor include them?

A number of recent books have attacked religion. Their authors claim that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, has made no contribution to human welfare. Though there is much to criticize in Christian history, this claim is certainly not fair. 

Inspired by the story of the Good Samaritan and the other teachings and actions of Christ, Catholics have through the ages established orphanages, hospices, hospitals, soup kitchens and schools for the poor. Sainted individuals (such as Blessed Mother Teresa and Blessed Mary MacKillop) and whole religious congregations have been devoted especially to the needy, as have lay associations such as the St Vincent de Paul Society, charities such as Caritas, and so many other projects. Each of these works is offered not only to ‘our own’, but to anyone in need. Indeed each of these works makes anyone in need ‘our own’. And each of these works, as a lived, contemporary story of the Good Samaritan, challenges us to exercise more moral imagination, sensitivity and response towards those who suffer. 

Each invites our identification with the suffering person, our compassion or fellow-suffering with them, and our immediate, active care. It was precisely this gut-churning compassion that was the driving force of Jesus’ mission. He cared: not just in the abstract, like the reader of a novel sympathizing with a fictional character; not like a bureaucrat devising a strategy; but as one who really laughs with those who laugh and mourns with those who mourn; one who feels with others, shares in their lives, has passion for their passions, suffers with their suffering, and is thus impelled to respond. 

The God described so often in the Psalms as “full of compassion and steadfast love” is the God Jesus knew in prayer, in liturgy, in his personal life as his Father-God. It was the God of love whose only love-child took flesh in Jesus. It was the love-God whom Jesus made known. The Good Samaritan is, of course, God in Christ, coming with healing balm and boundless generosity to a broken humanity, and to each and every example of broken humanity, every damaged and hurting person, every case of dire and desperate need. God in his Christ comes seeking no gratitude, no recompense, making no inquiry into how deserving the victim, how great their social contribution, how many others there might be in similar need, whether they have queued properly, whether they are too dependent, whether they brought their suffering on themselves… He just sees a crying need and he helps. 

And he says to young people in the 21st century: “Go now and do the same yourselves!”

Bishop Anthony Fisher, OP
Coordinator of WYD 2008 (from ePilgrimage)