Culture

Compassion comes from the Latin com- ('with') and pati ('to suffer') — literally, 'to suffer with' another. It is more than feeling sorry for someone from a distance; it moves the heart to enter another's pain and then to act. Its opposite vices are indifference (not caring) and hardness of heart. Scripture's great picture of compassion is the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:33), who 'had compassion' and crossed the road to help a stranger his society despised — and Jesus says, 'Go and do likewise.' Compassion is the engine behind the corporal works of mercy: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, visiting the sick and imprisoned, and burying the dead. St. Vincent de Paul (this week's saint) turned compassion into organized, lasting service. As Passiontide approaches and we contemplate Christ's own suffering, compassion takes on its deepest meaning: God himself 'suffered with' us by becoming man and going to the Cross. To be compassionate is to share, in a small way, in the heart of Christ.

Just five days after Lee's surrender, on April 14, 1865, President Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre by John Wilkes Booth. The nation lost its leader at the very moment it most needed to heal. The great task that followed was Reconstruction: how to rebuild the South and bring nearly four million freed people fully into American life.

Three amendments to the Constitution carried the war's promise into law. The 13th Amendment (1865) abolished slavery everywhere in the United States. The 14th Amendment (1868) made all persons born in the country citizens and guaranteed them 'equal protection of the laws.' The 15th Amendment (1870) declared that the right to vote could not be denied because of race. For a brief, hopeful time these promises were real: freedpeople voted, built churches and schools, reunited families sold apart under slavery, and elected Black men to Congress and to state offices.

But the hope did not last. Many white Southerners resisted fiercely, and groups like the Ku Klux Klan used terror and violence to drive Black citizens from the polls. When the contested election of 1876 led federal troops to withdraw from the South in 1877, Reconstruction ended. Southern states then passed 'Jim Crow' laws enforcing segregation and stripping away the vote. The amendments remained in the Constitution — and would be the legal foundation of the civil rights movement a century later — but their promise was betrayed for generations.

Key facts: - April 14, 1865 — Lincoln assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. - 13th Amendment (1865) — abolished slavery. - 14th Amendment (1868) — citizenship and 'equal protection.' - 15th Amendment (1870) — voting cannot be denied by race. - Freedpeople voted, built schools and churches, and held office. - 1877 — federal troops withdrawn; Reconstruction ends. - Jim Crow laws then imposed segregation and disenfranchisement.

If the Renaissance was calm, balanced, and idealized, the Baroque (roughly 1600-1750) was its dramatic opposite: dynamic, emotional, theatrical, and intensely realistic. It was, above all, the art of the Catholic Reformation in full confidence — designed to overwhelm the viewer with beauty and feeling, to make the truths of faith vivid and irresistible. Two giants defined it. Caravaggio (1571-1610) revolutionized painting with tenebrism - violent contrasts of deep shadow and piercing light - and with shocking realism: he painted saints and apostles as real, weathered, barefoot people, dragging the sacred into the gritty present. In The Calling of Saint Matthew, a beam of light slices across a dim tavern as Christ points at the tax collector Matthew, who points at himself in disbelief - 'Me?' - the very instant of grace and conversion. Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) did for sculpture and architecture what Caravaggio did for painting. His marble Ecstasy of Saint Teresa seems to breathe, capturing the mystic (our Week 22 saint) pierced by divine love. And his vast colonnade embracing St. Peter's Square in Rome reaches out like 'the arms of the Church' welcoming the world. The Baroque made faith dramatic, sensory, and human - exactly the renewal Trent had called for.

Write two or three sentences: 'How does Baroque art try to MOVE the viewer, and how does that serve the goals of the Catholic Reformation?' Then check your compassion resolution from this morning.