By Andrea Tornielli

“Before being believers, we are called to be human.”

This is one of the central passages of Pope Leo XIV’s catechesis given on Wednesday, May 28, at his weekly General Audience in the Vatican.

Reflecting on the parable of the Good Samaritan, the Pope explained that in the encounters that make up our lives, “we reveal who we truly are” and that, when faced with the fragility and weakness of others, we can either “take care of them or pretend not to see.”

This is exactly what happened in Jesus’ parable: the two religious ministers, who had the privilege of entering the sacred space of the Temple in Jerusalem, did not stop in front of the man wounded by robbers and lying at the side of the road. It was instead a Samaritan—someone considered impure by the Jews—who felt compassion. He was the one who took care of the man whom religious tradition would have regarded almost as an “enemy.”

In his catechesis, Pope Leo XIV observed, “The practice of worship does not automatically lead one to be compassionate. In fact, before it is a religious issue, compassion is a matter of humanity!”

Being believers and practitioners, being ministers of God, does not guarantee compassion, nor does it ensure that we will allow ourselves to be “wounded” by reality, by encounters, by situations of need in which we find ourselves.

“Before being believers, we are called to be human.”

It is precisely this humanity, this being compassion, that becomes the opportunity to bear witness to the Gospel.

This idea was already noted in 1959, with prophetic clarity, by then Fr. Joseph Ratzinger, then a young professor of fundamental theology at the University of Bonn. In his essay “The New Pagans and the Church” (“Die neuen Heiden und die Kirche,” 1958–59), reflecting on the transformed conditions of secularized societies, he wrote the following about missionary witness, “The Christian must rather be a joyful person among others, a neighbor where he cannot be a Christian brother.”

In other words, someone who becomes a “neighbor,” like the Good Samaritan.

“I also think,” the future Pope Benedict XVI added, “that in his relations with his non-believing neighbor, he should be above all and precisely a man—not someone who annoys with constant conversion attempts and preaching… he must not be a preacher, but rather, in beautiful openness and simplicity, a man.”

Fr. Ratzinger understood clearly how the Church is born and reborn, namely from the witness of men and women drawn to Christ, able to bear witness to Him through their lives—in compassion, in being companions along the journey of anyone they meet.

On the other hand, the future Pope Benedict XVI was already well aware of the illusion of trying to halt the decline of Western Christianity by retreating into a fortress, reducing faith to traditionalism, to an identity glue for group membership, or to an ideology supporting certain political projects.

It is this, ultimately, that is the key to mission, namely the strength of the announcement in our epochal change: people called first and foremost to be human, open and compassionate.

Christian men and women who do not feel superior to others, knowing that often it is the “distant ones,” those we regard as “impure,” who bear witness to compassion, just like the Good Samaritan of the Gospel.