In Let Us Dream, the slim 2020 volume from Pope Francis and Austen Ivereigh, the pope writes, “A concrete act of mercy is always an act of justice.” I have thought about that sentence often since first reading it. I think about it when people ask me why I’m Catholic, when I give cash to strangers on the train, when I consider the impossible scale of suffering in the world. Francis writes earlier in Let Us Dream, “[G]iving to the poor is just giving back to them what is theirs.” We often credit our successes to our worthiness and hard work, our failures to bad luck and circumstances outside our control. But for others, their success is luck, their failure deserved. Whatever we do for them, then, is merely an act of generosity toward someone who needs generosity only because of their own mistakes. Francis asks us to think otherwise.
He places his statement about mercy and justice as part of the second of three steps. The first step is recognizing and coming close to poverty. As Dorothy Day wrote, “We need always to be thinking and writing about poverty, for if we are not among its victims its reality fades from us.” This is a sharp contrast to the current political program of trying to push poverty out of view (by criminalizing homelessness or scapegoating and deporting refugees and economic migrants). Throughout his papacy, Francis roundly rejected that program of exclusion. He insisted that we see the poor, and then perform those concrete acts of mercy and justice for them.
But that’s not where Francis ends his instructions in the book. He urges us to “open ourselves to the necessary structural reforms” that would give the marginalized not merely a bite to eat but a seat at the table. But participating in these larger “necessary reforms”—voting for politicians and policies that benefit the poor, or using one’s platform (e.g., a small magazine) to advocate for them—does not exempt us from the small, individual acts of mercy and justice. And we should never scorn such acts because they are small.
This thinking has also helped me wrestle with the slow-motion emergency of climate change. As for the poor, so for the earth. It has often been pointed out to me that the carbon emissions of my cross-country flights to visit family or scale cliffs “wipe out” the effect of my compost bin and reusable straw and secondhand clothing. I would, of course, contribute less to global warming if I did not fly. But the orientation of my daily life is not a carbon scale. I refuse the utilitarian logic that denies the value of small, consistent work, that rolls its eyes at the justice and mercy in every concrete act. Francis’s exhortation to participate in larger acts as well as small ones saves us from mere greenwashing or posturing: taking a reusable straw with me on a trip is, indeed, less effective at addressing climate change than electing leaders who will pass good legislation and staff the courts with judges who are not in denial about our climate emergency. I am not doing my best to care for our common home if I consider only individual consumption. But it is right to take the reusable straw with me anyway, even if doing so won’t save the planet. In using it, I have acted with justice toward the earth—and I have helped keep the earth in my mind and my heart.
It can be especially difficult to keep the marginalized in our minds and hearts—the productive feeling of refilling a soap dispenser with eco-friendly tablets is simple, and the interaction on a smelly train car with someone who wants not two dollars but twenty is complicated. But both cases are hounded by the question of what is “enough.” Everything I have could not be enough to meet someone else’s need, and, at the same time, I’m not even willing to give up a significant amount—not my coat, not my cross-country flights. There is so much guilt tied up in the question. I am ashamed to walk past the person sleeping on the sidewalk and avert my gaze, to pretend I owe him nothing. Sometimes, my shame moves me to action. More often, it does not.
One of Pope Francis’s great gifts was his ability to write about these matters in a way that inspired not shame but hope. His writing is full of love and compassion, even as it plainly condemns the inequality and isolation in our society. When I read Let Us Dream, I did not feel like I was being rebuked for not having done all that I could. Instead, I felt like I was being told that my attempts to help others are both valuable and urgent—not only as gestures of goodwill, but as “what love demands.” Francis knew that, while we need to bear witness to suffering, we cannot be shamed into opening our hearts to the marginalized or protecting the earth. We are moved by the desire to do right by each other, and by the feeling that we actually can, not merely by the desire to avoid guilt and shame.
On Easter Sunday this year, while waiting for a train, I opened a box of leftover avocado toast. A woman pulling a blanket behind her came to sit next to me. She was clearly interested in my lunch (“What have you got there?”), so I gave her half. It was a slightly uncomfortable moment—it was difficult to understand her, because she didn’t have all her teeth—but it was also a nice one, because while we ate, we interacted as equals at the table. She told me that she loved guac, and we agreed there were too many pepitas on top of the toast. I asked her name. It was “Frances.”
