At the same time, we must recognize that to feel empathy for him and others like him is not enough. “Compassion,” Susan Sontag famously declared, “is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.” The same can be said of empathy—we can imagine Aurelio’s pain, we can feel something that perhaps approaches it, and we can even, as Pope Francis suggests, grieve for him, weep for him—but in the end our feelings and our tears are useless unless they compel us to act in a way that might someday improve his situation. The hard truth is that the policies and structures that
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