Between the comfortable restaurant, where bishops eat until they are stuffed, and the robbed perfumery of the victim of the unaccompanied foreign minors, there are increasingly more meters.
A friend tells me that yesterday they robbed his mother’s perfumery. The aggressors, unaccompanied foreign minors. It’s not a statistic. It’s not an argument. It’s a specific woman, a small business, the fright, the fear that doesn’t fade when she lowers the shutter.
And meanwhile, from ecclesiastical podiums, it is repeated that talking about borders, limits, or social consequences is «denial of the Gospel,» a lack of mercy, almost a sacrilege.
This is where the discourse crashes against reality.
Because the robbed mother is also a neighbor. She is also worthy. She is also vulnerable. She also has the right to security. And her fear is not ideology: it is experience.
Mercy cannot be selective. It cannot look only in one direction. It cannot be infinitely moved by the newcomer and show itself cold—or worse, morally accusatory—toward those who suffer the consequences of poorly thought-out policies.
And an uncomfortable question arises. I wish those who preach so lightly about non-existent borders and unconditional welcomes had to personally face the disorder that their words legitimize. Not so that they suffer violence—no one wishes that—but so that the debate would stop being abstract. It’s not the same to write about «the poor» from a comfortable restaurant, with a leisurely after-dinner and guaranteed security, as it is to close a store with a racing heart after a robbery.
The distance between the pulpit and reality is starting to be obscene.
When a bishop claims that questioning certain migration policies is spitting on Christ, he should remember that the small merchant is also Christ. That the frightened elderly woman is also Christ. That the family that sees their neighborhood degrade is also Christ.
The Gospel is not a slogan to bless specific political decisions. Charity does not eliminate prudence. And the common good is not a suspicious category.
What many faithful perceive is an ideologized compassion: a compassion that demands silence, that disqualifies concrete experience, and that turns any question into sin. That does not strengthen faith. It erodes it.
The robbed mother does not need sermons about fire and water. She needs someone to tell her that her security matters. That her fear matters. That her dignity is not inferior to anyone’s.
And remembering it is not a lack of mercy. It is justice.