Ave Explores Series | Faith in Action | Week 1
The Catholic Church is a Field Hospital for Divine Love
by Rev. Kevin Sandberg, C.S.C.
There’s no more meaningful time to talk about putting faith into action than the present moment—the COVID-19 pandemic. Any crisis can test our faith. This crisis does so in degrees we’ve not experienced in generations. As unemployment reaches depression-era levels, livelihoods have been upended. Even more significantly, hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost worldwide. All in the span of less than six months.
People of faith are used to springing into action when life is threatened. We refer to this response as charity or justice; love is the wellspring of both. Each of us is called to one form or another of these responses based on our talents and our circumstances. But to prevent the spread of the virus, most all of us have been told to refrain from interacting with one another. The message has been as straightforward as #StayHome to help save lives. What are we to do?
Though it makes sense in the context of coronavirus, staying home doesn’t look much like Jesus going here and there to heal the sick, touch the leper, give sight to the blind, not to mention raise the dead. For the follower of Christ, even passive action should feel a little uncomfortable. If we aren’t uncomfortable with that, then perhaps our faith is at present more an idea in our head than a heart filled with the Spirit. This happens to us every once in a while—our faith slips into inaction, even action that has adverse effects on others. That’s why we know it is important to be reminded of the example provided by the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). That’s why it makes sense that scripture otherwise reminds us to “be doers of the word and not hearers only” (James 1:26). Every once in a while, we need to be reminded of Jesus’ command to love one another as he loved us (John 13:34). The pandemic might be just such a moment to contemplate what that could look like on a society-wide basis.
Fortunately, if we’re unsure about how faith includes action, or even if we are skeptical that faith requires action, Pope Francis has provided us with a metaphor that fits the times in which we find ourselves. The metaphor is that of the Church as a field hospital. In the first year of his pontificate, the Holy Father said, “The thing the Church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful. . . . I see the Church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else.” As the vessel of faith, the Church is necessarily a place of action, not just worship —actions that heal, reconcile, and transform individuals and society through service and education.
Though the field hospital metaphor isn’t addressed specifically to the present pandemic—as a place where people congregate close to one another, the Church has had to play its part in slowing the spread of coronavirus—it comes as a correction to what the Church had been focused on. Unfortunately, the tender healing touch of Jesus, at least in the view of Pope Francis, was no longer at the forefront of the Church’s activity. Why might this have happened? The Church, Pope Francis is afraid, has for too long perceived itself as one of the wounded, especially as a victim of secularization.
Secularization is the process by which society tacitly discourages faith, granting it license to be practiced only in private. In this rejection of faith, the action, or good works, that demonstrate and bolster faith can suffer setback. It seems only fair to recognize, too, that in the face of secularization the Church has suffered a wound to its ego. Its bishops, after all, were once power brokers across the great cities of civilization. And it’s possible, too, that the Church, when it has turned inward to nurse that wound, has neglected to communicate that the heart of its mission is to serve the wounded, the lost, and the forsaken.
The Church may have also forgotten the witness of the first followers of Jesus in this mission. In the Acts of the Apostles, for instance, we see the post-Resurrection disciples assailed by authorities just as Jesus was. Against threats of persecution and expulsion from their communities of origin, they persist to offer healing and welcome as they saw Christ do and as he had done for them. To the crippled man at the Beautiful Gate of the temple, Peter says, “I have no silver or gold, but what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk. And he took him by the right hand and raised him up; and immediately his feet and ankles were made strong” (Acts 3: 6-7).
Martin Luther King Jr. made a similar argument to that of early believers—at the cost of his life. Clergy in Birmingham, Alabama, including a Catholic bishop, had judged the civil rights marches he was leading to be, as they put it, “unwise and untimely.” In his famous 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King replied that he was not only following the law of God, which superseded the law of man, but he was also doing what the Church had always done. He called this being “thermostatic.” The Church, King argues, was not historically a “thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.” A thermometer simply reads the temperature. It doesn’t react to the data; it just reports it. A thermostat, on the other hand, makes the adjustments necessary to the temperature to bring about a new condition, one in conformity with the demands of the gospel.
To the point of putting faith into action, the Roman Catholic Church has been particularly thermostatic since the end of the nineteenth century through Catholic social teaching, a symbol of faith ready to be put into action. St. Pope Paul VI described it as the Church’s inspiration to action for social justice. It’s the teaching that stands behind countless efforts at social regeneration, from a parish’s local St. Vincent de Paul ministry, that provides person-to-person opportunities to assist people in need, to diocesan Catholic Charities and the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.
The propensity to identify with people in situations of need exists not because our own situation is similar to theirs, but because we realize the dignity under threat is a dignity in which we participate. It deserves as much protection as our own. Since our empathies place demands on our hearts, they beg for a fuller accounting. We want to know their origins and their trajectories—not just what upsets us, what concerns us most, and what injustices are especially disconcerting to us, but why and what we can do about them. We want to know why our empathies upend our value system, shake us from our complacency, and set our lives in motion.
Jesus has been described as the empathy of God. When we see Jesus in action—for example, feeding the multitudes in a deserted place even when the disciples would send them away (Mt. 14:16)—we see the empathy of God for us. In Jesus, we see that God has been moved to act on our behalf. For our part, Pope Francis sums this up nicely. He says, “You pray for the hungry. Then you feed them. That’s how prayer works.”
And that’s how divine love works. Simply put, it acts on love, in love, and through love. The Pope might just as easily have said, “You care that people are not injured in battle. When they are, you open a field hospital to care for the wounded. Because that’s how the Father works, that’s how the Church and faith work.”
In offering us the metaphor of the Church as a field hospital, Pope Francis is calling us to be a Church modeled on divine love: what the Father observes, he judges against the standard of the kingdom, and acts in Jesus, the Spirit, the Church, and our faith. By its very nature, the divine life extends itself to tend to those in need. Faith in action is modeled on this divine behavior. Because Jesus is the Father’s “action,” our own faith will come to fruition in action—whether in acts of mercy, charity, or justice based on our circumstances or calling—when we dare to see and act in the ways of Jesus, the empathy of God.
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, our ability to care for neighbor and stranger alike turns our action somewhat inward. If our faith chafes against this, then we have a good sense of how crucial action is to faith.
Download this article as a PDF here.
Rev. Kevin Sandberg, C.S.C., is the Leo and Arlene Hawk executive director of the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concerns.
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