Pope Francis’ New Encyclical, Fratelli Tutti    

In Jewish traditions . . . we encounter the command not to do to others what you would not want them to do to you . . .  In the first century before Christ, Rabbi Hillel states: “This is the entire Torah. Everything else is commentary.”  The desire to imitate God’s own way of acting gradually replaces the tendency to think only of those nearest us: “The compassion of human beings is for their neighbour, but the compassion of the Lord is for all living beings.”

In the New Testament, Rabbi Hillel’s precept is expressed in positive terms: “In everything, do to others as you would have them do to you; this is the law and the prophets.”  This command is universal in scope, embracing everyone on the basis of our shared humanity, since the heavenly Father “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good.”

In the oldest texts of the Bible, we find a reason why our hearts should expand to embrace the foreigner. It derives from the enduring memory of the Jewish people that they themselves had once lived as foreigners in Egypt:

The call to fraternal love echoes throughout the New Testament:

“For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’”

Yet this call to love could be misunderstood.  Saint Paul, recognizing the temptation of the earliest Christian communities to form closed and isolated groups, urged his disciples to abound in love “for one another and for all.”