Where charity and love prevail

“You keep using that word,” Inigo Montoya says to Vizzini in The Princess Bride. “I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Today, inconceivable as it may seem, one such misunderstood word is “compassion.”

Often, we use compassion interchangeably with related terms such as sympathy, empathy, and pity. When we consider compassion to be a mere feeling, such words can be seen as more or less synonymous.

But compassion is also a virtue, and as a virtue it is poorly understood. In today’s culture, and even in Catholic circles, what passes for “compassion” sometimes undermines its very definition.

Love in action

The word compassion comes from the Latin com patire, meaning “to suffer with.” The compassionate person truly “feels the pain” of the other. But the virtue of compassion is more than a feeling or emotion: empowered by love, virtuous compassion seeks to alleviate that suffering by addressing its root causes in a way that is oriented toward the individual’s ultimate good.

J. Budziszewski, philosophy professor at the University of Texas, describes the difference in this way: “The virtue of compassion is sympathizing in the right way, for the right things, and doing the right thing about it,” he writes on his website (boundless.org). “The feeling of compassion is sympathy period, and it’s not always right. When it isn’t, it’s called ‘false compassion.’”

For St. Thomas Aquinas, who used the Latin misericordia to indicate “pity” or “mercy” as well as “compassion,” the true virtue of compassion is exercised when an individual is so affected by the suffering of another that he is moved to alleviate that suffering guided by the virtue of prudence and right reason.

“Compassion gets involved,” Pope Francis said in a homily last year. “It comes from the heart and gets involved, and it leads you to do something.”

True compassion, then, results in action. The key to virtuous compassion is in what action one takes.

To be virtuous, compassion must be prompted by love. Authentic love wills the true good of the other, Aquinas said. The ultimate good for every soul is to lead virtuous lives on earth and to attain eternal happiness in the next. The virtue of compassion, then, impels one not simply to ease the pain or predicament of the one who suffers, but to do so in morally acceptable ways that are beneficial to that soul.

Counterfeit compassion

Compassion is “clearly the favorite” virtue in the contemporary world — but it tends to get isolated from all the factors required to keep it a true virtue, according to Donald DeMarco, adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, CT.

Often, a compassionate response is claimed when one seeks to avoid or end pain in the most efficient way but without regard for moral considerations, even for the dignity and sacredness of human life — for example, “compassion” can be invoked in advocating for a patient to choose physicianassisted suicide rather than experience the pain associated with serious illness, disability, or the dying process.

As a result, compassion “becomes an argument unto itself, so to speak, to justify abortion, sterilization, euthanasia, and sundry other actions that are aimed at reducing the amount of misery that currently afflicts mankind,” DeMarco writes in a Lay Witness magazine essay. “Separated from love, light, generosity, hope, patience, courage, and determination, compassion becomes nothing more than a code word whose real name is expediency.”

When compassion becomes a principle, he continued, “it ceases to be a virtue. As a principle, all it means is the easiest way out.”

Pope Francis also spoke to this confusion over compassion in a 2016 address to members of the medical profession as he decried the practice of physician-assisted suicide.

“Frailty, pain, and infirmity are a difficult trial for everyone, including medical staff. They call for patience, for ‘suffering-with,’” the pope said. “Therefore, we must not give in to the functionalist temptation to apply rapid and drastic solutions, moved by false compassion or by mere criteria of efficiency or costeffectiveness. The dignity of human life is at stake.”

'Compassion' as 'acceptance' of evil

Compassion also can lose its virtuous element when one chooses to be tolerant or “supportive” of someone regardless of their choice or perspective — and thereby refrains from speaking the truth, trying to reason with them, or objecting to a clearly unreasonable or immoral course of action.

Thus, in the name of compassion, one might simply but erroneously “accept” a friend’s decision to abort a child instead of deal with an unplanned pregnancy, or to pursue an illicit relationship when in an unhappy marriage, or to commit fraud when in a difficult financial situation.

Counterfeit compassion — compassion where truth bites its tongue and moral imperatives are ignored — is a cousin of moral relativism. British cultural commentator Zoe Dukoff-Gordon admits as much. “When looking at the issue of euthanasia, to me it is clear that relativism provides the most compassionate response,” she writes in an essay. “Relativism allows you to look at each situation individually and conclude the best moral decision in looking at the consequences of each decision. This is much more compassionate as it allows you to have a subjective view and allows each person to develop their own moral view. It gives respect to the personality of the individual and gives tolerance and respect to moral diversity.”

Catholic philosopher Alice von Hildebrand observed the creep of modern relativism and came to a more reasoned conclusion. The relativistic “climate” of our day and the influence of modern social sciences has led to acceptance of moral disorders such as homosexual acts and same-sex “marriage” in the name of justice and compassion. “All these grave aberrations have become more and more ‘acceptable;’ this is ‘requested by charity,’” she wrote in an essay a few years ago. “In fact, the secular world has discovered that its mission is to teach Christians what Christian charity is.”

Imitation of Christ

The model for the virtue of compassion is found in Jesus Christ, who took on our humanity in order to identify with our brokenness. He willingly suffered and died for us in order to free us from the bondage of sin and provide us a way to eternal happiness.

While the Revised Standard Version and New American Bible often use “pity” to describe Jesus’ response to human suffering, the older Douay-Rheims Bible prefers “compassion,” which more accurately suggests the virtuous compassion that Jesus exemplifies. “I have compassion on the multitude, for behold they have now been with me three days, and have nothing to eat,” Jesus said of the crowds who hear him preach, just prior to performing the miracle of the loaves and fishes (Mark 8:2).

Likewise, in Jesus’ parables, the Samaritan was “moved with compassion” to interrupt his journey in order to assist the wounded traveler (Luke 10:33), and the father was “moved with compassion” to rush forth to forgive his repentant son who was returning home (Luke 15:20).

Scripture also shows us something else about compassion: that our suffering, even our suffering with and on behalf of another person, can be redemptive if we unite it to the sacrifice of Christ — and that is a message of love that we can take to those who endure tribulations even as we accompany them, DeMarco states.

“For a Christian to share the suffering of another means that, by so doing, he brings a light into the pain and misery of that person’s life. He blesses the other person’s existence with a higher meaning,” he writes. “Christian compassion is thus bound up with the mystery of the Cross.”

GERALD KORSON, editorial consultant for Legatus magazine, is based in Indiana.