Cardinal Ryś: The Good Samaritan offers the Church a model for today’s world

By Vatican News

Reflecting on the question, “In what kind of world are we called to proclaim the Gospel?”, Cardinal Grzegorz Ryś invited fellow cardinals to look to the Parable of the Good Samaritan as a guide for understanding both today’s world and the Church’s mission within it.

Speaking during the Extraordinary Consistory in the Vatican, the Archbishop of Łódź in Poland drew inspiration from St Luke’s account of the Good Samaritan, recalling how St Paul VI, at the close of the Second Vatican Council, described the parable as the Church’s “model” and “norm” for engaging with the modern world.

Rather than speaking about the world in abstract terms, Cardinal Ryś said the Gospel invites Christians to contemplate the individual person. “Meditating on man, we do not escape from the meditation on the world,” he said, noting that every person both shapes the world and remains “the primary and fundamental way for the Church.”

He reflected first on the figure of the man attacked by robbers, describing him as an image of humanity today. Like the wounded traveller, he said, many people are victims of violence, stripped not only of material possessions but also of their dignity. Others bear hidden psychological and spiritual wounds, while countless people experience profound loneliness and indifference, despite living in an age of unprecedented communication.

The Cardinal also pointed to the traveller’s journey away from Jerusalem as a symbol of societies increasingly detached from God. Modern secularisation, he suggested, and the misuse of religion for ideological purposes both contribute to a loss of authentic human dignity.

Yet the parable also offers hope in the figure of the Samaritan.

Although considered an outsider and even an enemy, the Samaritan becomes the true teacher, Cardinal Ryś said, challenging the Church to set aside prejudice and learn from acts of compassion wherever they are found.

The Samaritan’s mercy, closeness and generosity reveal that charity is not the exclusive preserve of Christians but a place where the Church and the world can meet in genuine dialogue. Rather than responding with jealousy, he said, Christians should recognise and join the many works of mercy already present in society.

Concluding his reflection, Cardinal Ryś said the two figures in the Gospel represent two faces of today’s world: “a half-dead fellow and an alien teaching us where true life is.”

In both, he said, God continues to call the Church to proclaim the Gospel.