Meghan J.
Meghan J.
Clark
Clark
The Gospel parables, Pope Leo recently reminded us, “are an opportunity to change perspective and open ourselves to hope.”[1] This 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time, we return to Jesus’s most famous parable: “The Parable of the Good Samaritan” and the ethics of compassion.
In the first reading from Deuteronomy, we hear Moses imploring the people to “heed the voice” of God and “return to the Lord, your God with all your heart and all your soul.” As we listen, we too are being called back into relationship with God and neighbor– not by a thundering voice from above but by one emanating from within our own hearts. The task before us is “already in your mouths and in your hearts; you only have to carry it out.” All too often, we know the right thing to do but we struggle to act.
At its core, the Parable of the Good Samaritan is a story of compassion which reminds us it is more than a feeling. An ethics of compassion requires concrete, appropriate actions in response to need or suffering. In the narrative, the Samaritan does not just feel mercy, he pours wine to disinfect, oil to soothe and coat, and attends to the long-term recovery of the wounded man.
Recently, Pope Leo preached that the parable is also a deeper metaphor. “Life is made up of encounters,” he explains, in which “we find ourselves in front of others, faced with their fragility and weakness, and we can decide what to do: to take care of them or pretend nothing is wrong.” The temptation to keep walking, to ignore the needs of our neighbor drives what Pope Francis called the globalization of indifference.
In the parable, three encounter the wounded man but only the Samaritan allows his perspective to shift. The shift he makes, according to Dr. King, Jr is from being concerned with what would happen to himself to ask what will happen to the wounded man if I do not act?[2] Our moral obligations to respond to our neighbors in need is tied to both actual need and our ability to act. It is an individual and a communal question. Dr. King preached on the Good Samaritan while urging solidarity with striking sanitation workers.
Today, we need to ask ourselves this question on a global scale. Over the last few months, I have spent a lot of time explaining and defending USAID- the US Agency for International Development. As Americans, USAID was an example of practicing compassion, a collective response to global poverty. For decades, its largest non-governmental grant partner has been Catholic Relief Services. As Catholics in the United States, CRS is our official ecclesial response to global poverty and development. In over 100 countries, CRS delivers emergency humanitarian assistance, maternal & child health programs, like ones I saw in Northern Ghana, addresses hunger, and much more. Compassion and solidarity lived out through partnerships and community building. Practicing compassion and solidarity is not weakness, it is a sign of our common humanity.
Millions of our poorest neighbors relied on the USAID funding for addressing basic needs like food, clean water, and medicines. While it was only 1% or less of the federal budget, in the last 20 years, the Lancet estimates that USAID’s work saved 92 million lives in 133 countries.[3] As of June 30th, USAID no longer exists.[4] Among the humanitarian projects canceled are many CRS projects on global health and development. Only 11% of USAID maternal and child health projects survived the cuts. If these cuts are not restored, Lancet estimates that as a result 14 million people, including 4.5 million children under age 5 will die by 2030.
God calls to us from the depths of our own hearts. Christ calls to us in our neighbor. How then can we together advocate for compassion and resist indifference, resist pretending nothing is wrong? That is the message I hear a new as I return once again to the parable of the Good Samaritan.
[1] Leo XIV, General Audience, 28 May 2025, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/audiences/2025/documents/20250528-udienza-generale.html
[2] MLK, Address to the Sanitation Workers, Memphis, TN April 3, 1968
[3] https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2825%2901186-9
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/22/us/politics/usaid-foreign-aid-trump.html
Meghan J. Clark
Meghan J. Clark
Meghan J. Clark, Ph.D., is a professor of moral theology at St John’s University (NY). At St. John’s, Dr. Clark engages students inside and outside the classroom on diverse topics in moral theology and Catholic social thought. In 2015, Dr. Clark was a Fulbright Scholar to the Hekima Institute for Peace Studies and International Relations at Hekima University College, Nairobi, Kenya. She has conducted fieldwork on human rights and solidarity in Sudan, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Tanzania. In May 2018, she was a Visiting Residential Research Fellow at the Centre for Catholic Studies at the University of Durham (UK).
She is author of The Vision of Catholic Social Thought: the Virtue of Solidarity and the Praxis of Human Rights (Fortress Press, 2014) and co-editor of Public Theology and the Global Common Good: The Contribution of David Hollenbach (Orbis, 2106). She contributed the commentary on Caritas in Veritate in the 2nd edition of Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations (Georgetown University Press, 2017). She has published in Theological Studies, the Journal of Moral Theology, Journal of Catholic Social Thought, Heythrop Journal and others. Active in public theology, she writes for US Catholic magazine , as well as, for America and NCR.
In 2022, she was Assistant Coordinator for North America for the global theology project “Doing Theology from the Existential Peripheries,” a project of the Migrant & Refugee Section of the Holy See’s Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development. Currently, she is on the Catholic team for the Dicastery for Christian Unity’s Conversations with the Salvation Army. A senior fellow at St. John’s Vincentian Center for Church and Society, Dr. Clark also serves as a faculty expert for the Holy See’s Mission to the United Nations. From 2010-2013, she served as a Consultant to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Domestic Justice. She received her Ph.D. in Theological Ethics from Boston College (2009) and her BA summa cum laude in cursu honorum in philosophy and theology from Fordham University (2003).
Other Videos of interest from Dr. Clark:
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