Back in the day, I wrote this here book here called THE WORK OF MERCY: BEING THE HANDS AND HEART OF CHRIST (available here, signed by me, or in Kindle format here, or as an audiobook here).
It was published in 2011 and was my first foray into exploration of the Church’s social teaching. Before that, I had primarily written in order to speak to Evangelicals from my own background and argue that being Catholic contradicted nothing in Scripture or reason. But by the early 2010s, partly due to my surprise at how people I thought were “faithful conservative Catholics”: seemed to have remarkably little familiarity with the Church’s social teaching, I decided it was time to raise the visibility of that aspect of the Faith.
Now I typically tend to focus, in my writing, on what I myself am learning about. I am one who deeply believes that if you cannot articulate the Church’s teaching in a way that makes sense to John Q. Public, then it is likely you don’t understand it yourself. I also am somebody who, when I learn some thrilling new insight about the Faith, draws tremendous energy from watching the lights come on for somebody else when they get it.
So as I started learning about the Church’s tradition of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, My first impulse was to write THE WORK OF MERCY to communicate it to my readers. I am, for most part, happy with the job I did in the book.
At the same time, I would note that this was my very first foray into teaching the Church’s social tradition and that both I and the culture have changed a great deal since then particularly as the American Church fell more and more deeply into the gravity well of what would become MAGA ideology and depart more and more profoundly from the Church’s teaching as it did so.
I did not, at the time I wrote this, fully appreciate how much my own worldview was still infected by thinking I would later come to recognize owed far more to conservative, and sometimes profoundly anti-Christian ideology than to anything in the gospel. However, on the whole, I think the book does a reasonable job of presenting the Tradition if you take those flaws and blind spots into account and chock it up to a sinner trying to learn new things and think in new ways, not always with success.
Anyway, over the next few weeks, we will take a look at the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, starting tomorrow.
Stay tuned!
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2 Responses
If we can see Christ in the face of a homeless man, we are moving in the right direction.
Thank you for this, Mark. I have a copy of your more recent book on my shelf and appreciated your articulation of CST. I’ve worked for over 30 years now in non-profit human services, the great majority of that time for the Society of St. Vincent de Paul and now a Catholic Charities agency. I can say that I’ve seen “up close” how the Church, through various means and entities, tries to build the Kingdom of God here and now among flesh and blood people. It is never perfect, of course, but every now and then we manage to serve people who otherwise might not have their basic needs met or their basic human dignity acknowledged, and we do not ask if they’re Catholic or Christian before we serve them. That’s between that individual and God. One of the more salient lessons I’ve learned is that this service to the poor is a non-negotiable for our own salvation, that we providing the service are the ones who are transformed. None of us gets into heaven without a letter of reference from the poor. Keep it up, please.