Sister of Charity Stanislaus Malone of New Orleans was often asked why she offered help to everybody, even criminals. She pointed out that there is only one individual in all the gospels to whom Jesus promised a place in paradise: the thief nailed to the cross next to His own. Unlike Christ, that thief was not there despite a life of holiness; he was nether a martyr nor an innocent victim. By his own account, he had been condemned justly and received the usual sentence for his crimes.

Is he not the very image of the “undeserving poor” that Bishop Untener so movingly describes in the essay printed in Serving in Hope, Module IV? “They are the ones,” he says, “who have made the bad choices, or failed to make any choice at all. They are the ones who have been helped before – and it didn’t help.” Yet because of Christ’s mercy, and despite his own life choices, we know the thief on the cross as “the good thief.”

Sometimes it seems so obvious that the neighbors’ troubles are of their own making that we can’t logically justify offering assistance that seems likely to be wasted. We convince ourselves that they are bound to repeat the same decisions which led to their current troubles. Blessed Frédéric called this way of thinking “that excuse familiar to hard hearts, that the poor are so through their own fault, as if the lack of light and morality were not the most deplorable of miseries and the most pressing for societies which want to live.” [To Good People, 1848]

We don’t even realize that the despair we are giving in to is our own realization that so much deprivation and poverty is beyond our ability to “fix”. We allow ourselves to forget that our first calling is to serve Christ, and to bring His hope to the neighbor – to alleviate not just hunger and cold, but the “lack of light” as Frédéric called it, by our loving presence and friendship. Maybe that’s why, when we find a neighbor “undeserving,” we so often feel a tug in our hearts urging us, in Bishop Untener’s words, to “help them anyway.”

Perhaps that prick of conscience is a sliver from the cross, piercing our souls to remind us that the logic of God is mercy. That the good thief brought his crucifixion on himself, through his own decisions and actions, did not cause God to abandon him. He sent His Son, and the Son sends us.

The way to salvation is through the cross, and if we wish to truly draw our neighbor closer to Christ, then rather than condemning him again to the cross he already bears, let us instead begin by helping him carry it.

Contemplar

Do I offer my love and mercy to the “good thieves” I encounter?

By Timothy Williams,
Senior Director of Formation & Leadership Development
Society of St. Vincent de Paul USA.