MISSIONER NEWSLETTER – Spring 2025

Sarah Bueter, El Salvador

The Unión de Enfermos Misioneros (“Union of Sick Missioners”), who visit the sick in the public hospital, prepare the church for Mass. While the name of their group implies they are sick, they are not, but rather identify with the sick as the foundation for their compassion.

EL SALVADOR—The Salvadoran church ladies are dressed in starched powder-blue vests. Weaving among hospital staff like fish swimming upstream, they flit with calculated efficiency through cheap, blue curtains that separate patients’ hospital beds. They jot down “wants confession, bed #26” on a piece of paper.

This is the ministry of Unión de Enfermos Misioneros, who visit the sick in the public hospital. They’re the kind of churchy ladies with immaculately bleach-white blouses, hair slicked back into tight buns, and the Psalms tucked under their arms.

It is February, and I volunteer with them as my own nascent ministry struggles to make something of itself.

The ladies visit the patients who lie gaunt and disheveled in beds, wedging themselves between the bedside and the cramped corridor with its scaling paint. They bring the Eucharist to Catholic patients. They read the Gospel. They can rattle off extemporary prayers with a lacerating eloquence.

Salvadorans are overwhelmingly Christian (unabashedly so), and I’ve found hospital patients eager to talk about God’s intervention in their lives. At times, I find it unnerving, the ease in which patients see undergoing hardship and some sacrifice as appropriate to their Christian faith; their ease in accepting health tribulations amid a maddeningly flimsy health system conversely only frustrates me.

The public hospitals carry a bad reputation. This year, the government cut the health and education budget in favor of military spending and tourist development. The underfunded hospitals don’t have medicine, space, or sufficient wages. Last week, I visited the bathroom at the hospital, only to find that even the bathrooms aren’t equipped with soap.

Draped in powder-blue vests, the women of Unión de Enfermos Misioneros weave through the hospital corridors, bringing prayers, presence, and the Eucharist to those in need.

We’re sick, too

The group’s name is odd: the Union of Sick Missioners. It implies the following: they are sick missionaries attend to sick patients.

“We’re ill, too,” one of them tells me. It’s not that they experience health issues, too. It’s that they identify with the person in the bed. We’re sick, too. This sick patient is also us. They recognize that we all carry brokenness, and we all seek healing and wholeness.

The women’s identification with the sick is the foundation for their compassion.

Choosing compassion

Compassion is differentiated from, say, pity as understood by Aristotle, who watching Greek tragedy, saw pity as a distinctly human and collectivizing emotional response from the audience at the “sight of some evil … which befalls one who does not deserve it, and which we might expect to befall ourselves” (Rhetoric, 1385b). To Aristotle, pity was an instinctual response, not an action.

Later, Thomas Aquinas would offer that pity was not considered virtue because virtue involves choice, i.e. will. Compassion, or mercy, however, was a virtue, according to Aquinas, because it implies a choice to extend mercy to someone.

Compassion (“to suffer with”) derives from the Latin roots com (“with”) and pati (“suffer”), and implies actively joining in another’s suffering, not merely spectating. It requires putting one’s self in the shoes of another and responding.

When Jesus shows compassion in the gospels, the text sometimes uses the Greek word splagchnizomai. For example, when Jesus sees such a woman mourning her dead son, “his heart went out to her” (Luke 7:13). Splagchnizomai stems from the Greek spagchna (“organ” or “entrails”), and the translation renders as “filled with love and compassion” or “to be moved in one’s bowels.”

“And Jesus went forth, and saw a great multitude, and was moved with splagchnizomai toward them, and he healed their sick.” (Mt 14:14) Jesus experiences not just an emotional response of pity, but a bodily, affective response. He felt it in his bowels.

The women put themselves in the shoes of their patient, or the shoes of the patient’s mother, are moved with splagchnizomai toward them, and respond.

When I map their response onto my life, I wonder in whose shoes I need to walk around for a while.

When is my attitude toward those who I deem ideologically different, duped, antagonistic, or criminal result in, at best a pity steeped in cool self-righteousness, bereft of compassion that could result in positive action?

When do I neglect the hard work of extending empathy, preferring a self-congratulatory resentment toward my “enemies”?

Properly understood, compassion is not an impediment to judgment or justice. Compassion is “in full accord with reason when we show compassion in ways that keep justice unimpaired,” Augustine offers (City of God, Book IX.5). The Dalai Lama writes that it is “accompanied by wisdom” (Dalai Lama, Kindness, Clarity, Insight, p. 69). It’s neither naïveté nor passive acceptance of the grim state of things.

Compassion was recently featured in Pope Francis’ February letter to us in the United States:

“The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

The Samaritan man chooses to love as “neighbor” the person who decidedly is not considered a neighbor. He teaches us that love is not “a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.” Who is my neighbor? The person before me in need, without exception.

At the hospital, when the women leave the bedside, I hang back, lingering and listening to patients. One talks among phlegmy coughs. One offers a rubbery handshake. One cries.

Most want to talk about spiritual and emotional hurts, not physical hurts: rifts in a relationship, whether a daughter visits, how a diagnosis affects a spouse. I listen, never offer trite phrases, which become tiny, almost ridiculous and petty, before the magnitude of grief. This is a ministry of presence, sitting with someone else’s pain and not walking away from it.

“Go and do likewise,” (Luke 10:37) concludes Jesus at the end of the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Leaving the public hospital, one walks out blinking at the blinding brightness of the sun. The enormity of suffering becomes hidden once again beneath the garble of city buses and the whine of sirens.

Step out into the soporific heat, and stretch out the compassion muscle again. Go and do likewise.

Please support my mission in El Salvador with a donation through the link below.

I also invite you to walk with me as a “COMPANION IN MISSION.” Companions in Mission are friends and generous donors who give financial gifts on a regular (usually monthly) basis. For more information, visit Become a Companion in Mission. Thank you so much for your generosity!