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"To my fellow believers in Jesus Christ I would call our attention to those first generations of Christians in the city of Rome, who were so often scapegoated by the powerful pagan Roman government.
But when a plague would strike the city and the well-to-do fled to the hills for safety until the plague subsided, it was the Christians who stayed behind to care for the sick, at great risk to their own health and very lives. And not just the Christian sick: all the sick, regardless of religion, of how they lived their lives, or even what they thought of the Christians themselves.
The historian Eusebius noted about the Christians of his time:
'All day long some of them tended to the dying and to their burial, countless numbers with no one to care for them. Others gathered together from all parts of the city a multitude of those withered from famine and distributed bread to them all.'Likewise, the Emperor Julian complained to one of his pagan priests,
'[They] support not only their poor, but ours as well.'It is this kind of love and compassion in the service of truth, especially the truth of the human person, that has marked the lives of the holy ones of our own faith tradition and others as well: hospitals, orphanages, schools, outreach to the poor and destitute – giving without concern for getting anything in return, seeing in each human being, especially in the poor and destitute, a priceless child beloved by God, whom God calls to turn away from sin and toward Him, so that they might be saved."
- Archbishop Cordileone of San Francisco - address to the March for Marriage (6/19/2014)
Full Text available here:
http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Blog/3201/abp_cordileones_speech_at_the_march_for_marriage_full_text.aspx
