Paper: The Compassionate Person

Lecturer: Peter McVerry

Abstract

This paper reflects on three issues. The first is what do we mean by a person of
compassion. Secondly, how do we produce people of compassion. And thirdly, what
are the consequences for ourselves in trying to produce people of compassion.

Often we define compassion as a feeling of distress at the plain or suffering of other

human beings, which impels to do something concretely and immediately to alleviate
that suffering. We certainly want students who have that compassion for those who
are poor and marginalized in our societies, but we want them to go further. We want
them to commit themselves to analyzing and challenging the structures which create
and maintain poverty and marginalization in our societies and in our world. We want
them to go beyond compassion for the poor to a solidarity with the poor; we want
them to have a passion for justice. How do we do that?

When using the “see, judge, act” format: first, we have to offer our students the
opportunity for an intensive experience of being with the poor, as Saint Ignatius and
Pope Francis constantly remind us. Second, we have to offer them the opportunity
to reflect on that experience: that requires us to invest time and energy in our own
teachers, so that they will have the commitment to solidarity and that passion for
justice which will enable them to be supportive of the students’ reflection. And third
we have to offer them the opportunity to act on that reflection

This may have profound consequences for our own schools.

Our schools should reflect in their own structures, the solidarity and passion for
justice which we are trying to instil in our pupils. Otherwise our schools will be at
best ineffective, and at worst, a contradiction to what we claim we are trying to
achieve. To produce people of compassion is a challenge, a challenge not just for
our students, but a profound challenge also for ourselves.

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 The Compassionate Person

A commitment to producing pupils who are compassionate towards the poor and
those on the margins of our societies may have enormous consequences for some
of our educational work. A commitment to producing pupils who are more than
compassionate, pupils who have a passion for building a more just world, and who
are committed to solidarity with the poor, may have radical consequences for some
of our educational work.
In this paper, I want to ask:
• What do we mean by “a compassionate person?”
• How can we educate our pupils to be compassionate persons?
• What are the implications for our educational structures themselves?

My context

I have worked all my life with homeless people. They have totally and radically
changed me, they have challenged my values, revealed to me some of my
prejudices, changed my understanding of God, and changed my relationship with
God. My commitment to people on the margins of society arose when I went to live
and work in the Inner City of Dublin in 1974, then the most deprived community in
the whole of Ireland.

I am not an educationalist, nor a theologian (as will become obvious in the

next few minutes!), but I am reflecting on the Jesuit educational system, as I know it
in Ireland, from the perspective of working with homeless people. I went to an elitist
Jesuit Boarding school, in 1956, at the age of 12 and, while I received an excellent
education there in terms of studies, sport and cultural activities, social justice was
never mentioned. Today, Jesuit schools in Ireland, which continue to be largely for
middle and upper class children, have a strong social justice component. Students
take part in various activities in which they work with people on the margins, fund-
raise for various good causes and listen to talks from representatives of different
charities. A scholarship scheme is in place which offers a Jesuit education to a small
number of poor students. The inclusion of social justice modules or experiences,
and the development of the scholarship scheme, developed following Pedro Arrupe’s
speech to the Alumni of Jesuit schools in Valencia, “Men and Women for Others”,

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(during which many in his audience walked out), and, of course, GC 32 which
defined the mission of our Society as the service of faith, of which the promotion of
justice is an absolute requirement. This brought about a lot of soul-searching within
all our Jesuit ministries in Ireland, but it challenged our educational ministries to the
core. Each ministry was asked to justify itself in terms of the mission of the Society
as enunciated in GC 32 and to report back to the Provincial. As the educational
apostolate was the single biggest Jesuit ministry in Ireland, it had the potential to
divide the province: there were those who resisted the scholarship schemes and,
indeed, any change in the way we educated young people, and those, including
myself, who wanted the elitist schools closed down and Jesuits to transfer their
expertise and commitment to educating those who were poorest in society.
Fortunately, the Province did not divide and today there is widespread commitment,
amongst both Jesuits and teachers, to the innovations that were introduced.

Irish people are, by and large, a very compassionate people, as evidenced by

the money donated in times of crises, such as the Syrian war, tsunamis and
earthquakes in various parts of the world: Ireland comes out near the top of the
international table for donations per head of population. Yet, despite the fact that
Irish Jesuits have educated, and continue to educate, many key people in the
various professions, including the legal profession, as well as a significant number of
politicians and several Prime Ministers, Ireland remains, in my view, a very unjust
society, with little appetite for – indeed sometimes strong opposition to – the
structural changes necessary to make it a more just society. With some notable
exceptions, students from Jesuit schools are not to the forefront in seeking to make
Ireland a more just and equitable society.

I would like to reflect on why this might be so. I would use the experience of
one young man from a financially comfortable family who was studying in one of our
Jesuit schools in Ireland and who came to our drop-in centre for homeless people for
two weeks ‘social experience.’ He was one of many students, 15 or 16 years old,
some from a very privileged background, who spend a week or two in our drop-in
centre for homeless people and drug users. The core of the week is listening to the
stories of homeless people and talking to them. Even in a week, they develop
friendships and get behind the label, “homeless person,” “drug addict,” and meet the
real person. Some of them describe it, at the time, as a life-changing experience.

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 In fact, what happens to those young people is very instructive: on the
Monday, they want to know what they do for these homeless young people; by
Friday, they have come to realise that they had nothing to give these homeless
young people, but those homeless people had so much to give them.

But I would like to read a report which was written by this particular student,
two years later.

“On the first day, to be honest, I was a bit scared. There were people I wasn’t
used to meeting or talking to everywhere I looked; people with deep scars on their
faces, torn clothes, worn shoes without soles and carrying sleeping bags from the
night before. They looked rough.
As we sat there, we all started chatting, and I changed. I saw how open,
friendly and accommodating they all were. We were, after all, a pair of South side
‘poshies’ (Irish slang for ‘wealthy lifestyle’) intruding on them. Within one minute,
they had a cup of tea ready for us and were including us in their conversations and
telling us stories.
We began asking Mark (one of the homeless men) about his past and he told
us how he’d become involved in a gang when he was sixteen after leaving school
early. His parents had neglected him, he came home to an empty house a lot of the
time. Gradually Mark stopped taking care of himself and developed bad habits.
When he spoke of his mother, he broke into tears. He said he’d not seen her in
years and that when he texted her to say ‘Happy birthday’, there was no reply. Over
the course of the hour we spent together, I began to realise that I was just like him.
There was no difference in our individual craving for love, care and acceptance from
others. There was nothing different about our shared desire to be successful and to
‘get on in life’. There was no difference in our values and our beliefs. Unfortunately,
the sad reality was that by even mentioning our respective addresses, we would be
separated, grouped and seen completely differently by society.
I was angry that things had been allowed to get so bad for this group of
people who were so appealing and charming with us. What had happened? A lot of
them had no choice but to live on the streets as home was not a safe place to be for
various reasons. Living on the streets led to other problems like drug abuse, crime
and violence. And when this happened, they were told they were bad people. But
they didn’t deserve to go through life like this. They didn’t want to be abused, or
have to rob or steal in order to survive.

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 “Within that week, I became a socialist. No longer could the wealthy be
allowed to thrive with people like this in our midst. We had to tax them more heavily
and give it to the poor, invest in their education and try and make a fairer Ireland.”

But what he said next shocked me:

“I argued with all my teachers over the next few weeks incessantly about the
injustice of it all. Finally one of them said: ‘Someday you’ll realise that’s never going
to happen. You’ll calm down in a while.”

This young man was very honest. He concluded:

“I didn’t like hearing that at all. But I suppose that teacher was right. Over the
next couple of years, I did become more conservative and more protective of my
‘kind’. The radical change of which I dreamed was beaten out of me in a way by that
‘kind’.”

First Step: Experience

This young man’s story illustrates the steps which are necessary to produce
young people who are compassionate. The first step is to offer them the opportunity
to meet with, and befriend, those who are poor and marginalised. We can show
them videos in class, bring in speakers to the classroom but without an intensive
encounter with poor people, there will be little lasting benefit. The more intense the
experience, the greater the benefit.

This was my own experience, going to live and work in the Inner City of
Dublin. In the 1970s, people there lived in the most appalling slum housing, 80%
were unemployed and children were leaving school at the age of 12, at the latest.
My involvement with young homeless people began when I came across a young
boy, aged 9, sleeping rough. What horrified me was not just the conditions that
people lived in, but the fact that I had been living in Dublin for many years and I had
been totally unaware that people lived in such conditions, just a few minutes’ walk
from the city centre. The experience of those few years totally changed my life, my
values and my attitudes.

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 We live in our own worlds, often unaware of the worlds that others around us
live in. An immersion experience is a pre-condition for developing an awareness of
those other worlds and developing students who are committed to justice.

Pope Francis, at a meeting with 120 Superiors General of men’s religious

orders at the Vatican in November, reiterated Pedro Arrupe’s conviction that real
contact with the poor is essential .

“I often refer to a letter of Father Pedro Arrupe, who had been General of the
Society of Jesus. It was a letter directed to the Centros de Investigación y Acción
Social (CIAS). In this letter Father Arrupe spoke of poverty and said that some time
of real contact with the poor is necessary.”

“This is really very important to me,” he went on to say, “the need to become
acquainted with reality by experience, to spend time walking on the periphery in
order really to become acquainted with the reality and life – experiences of people. If
this does not happen we then run the risk of being abstract ideologists or
fundamentalists, which is not healthy.”

The first question then for most of our educational institutions is how we can
provide our students with an insertion experience where they can encounter and
befriend people who are poor and marginalised. Such an experience cannot be just
one experience amongst many others which we offer to our students: it has to be
the experience to which we attach the most importance and significance. Without a
willingness on the part of a student to commit themselves to such an experience, we
should question whether they should be accepted by our educational institutions.

The second step: Reflection

However, experience on its own is a necessary but not sufficient condition for
creating students who are compassionate. That experience must be reflected upon,

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within the school context. A structured reflection, supported by the school, is critical.
Otherwise, their experience may be like water poured on sand and the subsequent
action which they undertake may be token or temporary.

It is easy for the school to send students out on an exposure experience. The
structured reflection is, in my experience, a problem that some of our schools fail to
offer or only offer inadequately. Reflection on their experiences of poverty and
exclusion must involve reflection on the national and international structures which
create and maintain poverty, inequality and exclusion. This involves reflecting on,
and challenging, those very structures which may maintain some of our students and
their families in their quality of life and status in society. This may pose huge
conflicts within the student and between the student and their family, if their family do
not also share a commitment to challenging structures.
“It is difficult to get a person to understand something when their salary
depends on their not understanding it.1”

Unless the principal, teachers and staff in the school all share the same
perspective, then what happened to this student above will almost certainly repeat
itself. The teachers in that school were unable to support him in reflecting on his
experience because they had a totally different mindset; indeed they poured cold
water on it.

To enable such reflection within the student and amongst the student
population, in a way that allows them to cope with the tensions involved, requires
teachers who have themselves already reflected upon the structures. No doubt the
teachers in this student’s school were people of compassion. But compassion is not
enough. To enable and encourage the students to reflect on their experiences, the
staff in the school must share the same passion for justice and for the poor. Hence
to create students who have a passion for justice and for the poor, we have to
develop teachers who have the same passion.
And therefore they, too, must have had, or be willing to have, an intense
experience of the poor and an openness to reflecting on that experience. What
applies to our students also applies to our teachers. It is not sufficient that our
teachers be competent in their field of expertise, nor that they be good teachers. To

1
Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked

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enable our pupils to become “men and women for others”, we have to invest a lot of
time and effort in making our teachers “men and women for others.”

The Third Step; Action

If we produce pupils who have an experience of being with the poor, and if
they have been facilitated by the school in reflecting on that experience, then they
must take action. To be effective, action must come, not from a sense of charity, or
compassion, but from a sense of justice or solidarity. They must go beyond
compassion to solidarity.

From Compassion to Solidarity

There are several limitations to compassion:

The first is that we tend to give from our excess: it is our surplus resources,
our surplus time, our surplus energy that we devote to those in need. We contribute
generously to good causes at home and abroad and we may volunteer to work with
those in need, giving a proportion of our time to helping them.

The second limitation is that we decide to whom we will show compassion.

We decide on the charities or the poor whom we will support, judging them to be
more or less deserving. Our compassion may stir us to donate generously to
services for a child in need of healing from sexual abuse, but we may paradoxically,
at the same time, support prison for an adolescent whose behaviour is anti-social (as
a consequence of childhood sexual abuse!). Those to whom we show compassion
may be chosen quite arbitrarily (such as meeting a homeless person who is begging
on the street) or may be chosen for us by the media (such as the tsunami victims in
Asia). We reach out in compassion because their suffering has touched our hearts.
Our compassion is, then, a feeling of distress at the pain and suffering of another
human being and a desire to do something to alleviate it, usually something concrete
and immediate.
But compassion towards the poor, while it can and will alleviate some of the
suffering of those who are poor and marginalised, may not challenge the structures
that create and maintain poverty in our societies and in our world.

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 Solidarity, on the other hand, is a radical expression of compassion.
Solidarity is rooted not in my distress at the pain of others, but in the objective reality
of their distress. Solidarity is rooted not in transient feelings of distress at the pain of
others, but in a lifelong commitment to alleviating the pain of others. Solidarity
derives not from our sense of charity and generosity but from our sense of justice,
from an acknowledgement that we are all united in our common humanity and the
pain of others is our responsibility.

Solidarity, then, goes beyond compassion in two ways.

First, we no longer decide to whom we will reach out. Solidarity is a reaching
out to all in our world who are victims, who are poor and who are marginalized,
whether we like them or not, whether we feel threatened by them or not, whether we
judge them to be deserving or not. It is the suffering of others that calls us to
solidarity, not the choices we make.

Secondly, our response to the suffering of others is chosen not by us, but by
those who suffer. Solidarity is a radical commitment to do whatever is required to
alleviate their suffering, at whatever cost to ourselves. Thus our compassion for
those who are homeless may bring us to donate generously to an appeal for funding,
which will do a lot of good and alleviate a lot of suffering, but we may at the same
time oppose the construction of a hostel for homeless people as being inappropriate
for our neighbourhood. Our solidarity with those who are homeless, however, may
compel us to support such a project, if it is in the interests of homeless people,
despite the cost (real or imagined) to ourselves, or to our property values. Solidarity
compels us to support policies in favour of the poor which may be detrimental to our
own interests.

Solidarity is a commitment to the common good in contrast to any sectoral

good, even my own.

The Church and Solidarity

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 John Paul II, troubled by the poverty and injustice in our world, and, no doubt,
reflecting on his own experience in Poland, gave a new impetus to the biblical
message of solidarity.

“Solidarity .... is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the

common good; that is to say to the good of all and of each individual, because we
are all really responsible for all.2”

He became convinced that solidarity of the poor and with the poor is the path
to justice and peace:

“The solidarity which we propose is the path to peace and at the same
time to development”3.

He sees such solidarity as a test of the Church’s commitment:

“The Church is firmly committed to this cause (the cause of solidarity of the
poor and with the poor) for she considers it her mission, her service, a proof of her
fidelity to Christ, so that she can truly be ‘the Church of the poor’4”.

Pope Francis too echoes this theme:

“A lack of solidarity towards his or her needs (the poor) will directly
effect our relationship with God.5”

“Solidarity must be lived as the decision to restore to the poor what

belongs to them.6”

Indeed, it may not be too much to say that a commitment to solidarity with the
poor is a defining characteristic of the follower of Jesus and therefore a central
component of evangelization.

2
Solicitudo Rei Socialis, No 48
3
Solicitudo Rei Socialis, No 39
4
On Human work, No 8
5
The Joy of the Gospel No. 187
6
The Joy of the Gospel No. 189

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 The school then must promote and encourage its pupils to go beyond
compassion to solidarity, to be agents of change, expressing their solidarity with the
poor through action to change the structures which maintain them in poverty and
marginalisation.

Their solidarity with the poor cannot be a commitment that will only be
expressed in action at a later stage of their career, after they have left the
educational centre. To postpone it is to kill it.

Nor can it be expressed, outside school hours, as an “add-on” to the main

business of the day, their education. A commitment to solidarity should be
integrated into the very structure of the school itself. The school itself must be a
centre of solidarity.

If the school is committed to ensuring that its pupils will express their solidarity
with the poor, then this may change the very nature of the school itself and its
function within the educational structure of the society of which it is a part. The
school itself must support their commitment to action, or at least not contradict it.
The school itself must be a witness to the compassion and solidarity of Christ and
the Church. It must be, or become, a school of solidarity itself. We cannot just tell
people to be compassionate – the very structures within which we educate them
must also reflect the compassion and solidarity which we preach. We cannot divorce
their educational experience from the actions which they undertake in response to
their experience and reflection.

Ideally, then, and while recognising that educational structures are

enormously varied in different societies, our schools should be centres of social
integration, that is, all classes of society should be equally represented in our
schools.

How can we take privileged children, put them together in a classroom, give
them a privileged education and expect them to develop a solidarity with the poor?
Theoretically, this cannot work and in my experience, it does not work in practice,
although, of course, there are individual exceptions which can be used to justify what
we do.

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 Jesuits have an enormous experience and expertise in the educational arena.
We also have a non-negotiable commitment to the promotion of justice and all our
ministries must reflect this commitment.

Today, we talk a lot about “evidence-based outcomes.” We subject policies

to an evaluation based on the outcomes of those policies. We must critically, and
with an open mind, evaluate all our educational centres to see which centres, and
why, are truly producing students who are committed to solidarity with the poor and
to changing the structures which maintain poverty in our world. We need to learn
from such evaluations and have the courage to change.

In summary then, we must offer our students opportunities to experience the

worlds of the poor, to reflect in a systematic way on that experience, and to take
action to make the world a better place. This may, and sometimes should, lead to a
reflection on the nature and role of the educational centre itself.

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