Today I spent some time reflecting on and analyzing the rhetoric of Elie Wiesel’s April 1999 speech The Perils of Indifference, and I couldn’t help but think of one of the major themes of Pope Francis’s pontificate thus far – the call to treat all human beings with dignity and eschew selfishness to take care of those most in need. On March 28, 2015, he tweeted, “As disciples of Christ, how can we not be concerned for the good of the weakest?”
And yet, it is easy to become distracted and sure that caring and concern are the jobs of people with more time, money, or other resources than we do.
Following the refugee crisis besetting Europe and having been recently moved by that tragic picture of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy whose body washed up on the shores of Turkey, it would truly be a difficult thing to listen to or read Wiesel’s address to the Clinton White House and the American people in general, the words of a boy who lived through the horrors of the Holocaust, and feel indifferent to the plight of refugees the world over.
Duel to the Death 