Reflecting on the parable of the Good Samaritan at the weekly General Audience on 28 May, Pope Leo XIV challenges everyone to not let our busy lives “prevent us from feeling compassion” towards others.
Only a Samaritan, “someone from a people traditionally despised,” stops to help the wound-ed man. The Samaritan helps, not out of a religious requirement, but because “he is one hu-man being in front of another human being in need.”
Compassion, Pope Leo stressed, takes form through concrete acti-ons, because in order to help someone, “you can-not stay at a distance.” To be compassionate, you have to get involved and be prepared to “even get dirty, perhaps take risks.”
The Samaritan is an example of compassion because he physically takes care of the woun-ded man. The Pope underlined that truly helping someone “means being willing to feel the weight of another’s pain.” He pointed out that only when we reco-gnize that we ourselves are the wounded man can we truly feel compa-ssion.
