How Franciscan Compassion Can Heal Our World

In the book I wrote in 2021, Crown of Thorns, I expressed my thoughts about how Jesus felt as they drove each thorn into his head, and what I felt each of those thorns represented. In the second half of the book, I asked readers to consider how those thorns were still painful for us in today’s world and what we might do to help remove the thorns of racial injustice, destruction of God’s Creation, political and social polarity, betrayal, loneliness, the unjustly accused, and despair. As I was asked to present an excerpt from this book at a class at my church, I concluded that these injustices still exist and maybe are even heightened in today’s world. But I also realized how the compassion shown by Saint Francis might help our world heal the wounds from these thorns.

Racial Injustice

Although we in our country and in our Church would like to believe that racial injustice is a thing of the past, reality tells us differently. In his book, Racial Justice and the Catholic Church, Father Bryan Massingale explains what racism looks like today and reminds us that is still very much alive even if is a different type of racial injustice than before the Civil Rights movement. I am old enough to remember segregation in the South and the sits-ins, protests, dogs and guns being used to quell racial disturbances. I will never forget Sister Thea Bowman’s stirring address to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in 1989, beginning with an emotional rendition of “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” (had Mother Church even abandoned the black community?) She ended with a powerful moment, in which all the bishops stood with her to sing “We Shall Overcome Someday.” But is that someday here yet? I don’t think so. You can find this stirring address on YouTube.

Father Massingale reminds us that racial injustice is as alive today as it was when Jesus was persecuted by his own people and by the Romans. He reminds us of the day Barack Obama was elected and his inauguration day, which made him, and I am sure many others, cry for joy. And yet, the detractors were there to hang the President of the United States in effigy, and to question his citizenship. Massingale also notes that Obama received more death threats than any other president, and that in some places even second graders were chanting, “Assassinate Obama.” Even in the Church, there were leaders who were afraid to speak out of for racial equality and who did not understand “white privilege.”

And now, more than a decade later, we still have racial injustice in our country. The Prison Policy Institute reports that the taken as a percentage of total population, blacks are twice as likely to be incarcerated, followed closely by Native Americans and Hispanics. We will talk more about this in the section on the Unjustly Accused, but knowing the percentage of blacks in prisons is five times the percentage of whites tells us something about how far we have not come.

We can ask ourselves two questions, “What Would Jesus Do,” and “What Would Saint Francis Do?” I suspect we can provide one answer to both those questions. Jesus showed us how little racial differences meant to him, by treating people of different cultures the same as he treated his own people—with love and compassion. The Samaritan Woman, the Gentiles, all were treated equally by Jesus, there was no “Jewish Privilege” in his vocabulary or his actions. And we can say the same for Saint Francis. You will hear more about this in the article on Franciscan Spirituality in Islam, but think about the people Francis reached out to with his amazing compassion—the leper, women, the poor. Although spending most of his life in Europe, he did not have as much opportunity to encounter people of different races until he went to Egypt, it is clear by everything he did and said, that he would have no room for racial injustice in his life or teachings.

In Peace and Good we hear the story of Francis’ time as a prisoner of war in Perugia, where he reached out to an embittered man shunned by his fellow prisoners. While this man was also likely a fellow resident of Assisi, and Italian, there was something that set him apart just like a black man might be bitter and shunned by white prisoners. In my own prison ministry, I have seen how sometimes racial divides can tear us apart. Francis would have had compassion for all prisoners and would not have seen the color of a fellow human being’s skin.

In my next newsletter I will continue talking about todays thorns and what we might do about them.