Thanks for the encouragement, all you good neighbors.
Allen, you mention another reasonable interpretation of the Good Samaritan story. (As I recall, Martin Luther King, Jr., said something similar in his "I Have Been to the Mountaintop" speech.)
For the purposes of my poem, though, I prefer to think that the priest and Levite were simply avoiding the ritual impurity of touching a corpse, in case the victim died while they were tending him. (Numbers 19:11, Leviticus 21:1-4, 11). The following commentary rings true to me:
Quote:
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It is essential to the point of the story that the traveller was left half-dead. The priest and the Levite could not tell without touching him whether he was dead or alive; and it weighed more with them that he might be dead and defiling to the touch of those whose business was with holy things than that he might be alive and in need of care." George Bradford Caird, The Gospel of St. Luke, Black, 1968, p. 148
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I see the priest and Levite as caring much more about maintaining their own status than they cared about potentially saving a vulnerable person's life. In contrast, the Samaritan just saw someone who needed help that he was in a position to give, so he gave it, regardless of any other considerations.
Saving themselves from the excommunication threatened by documents like the 1962
Crimen sollicitationis instruction (and earlier, similar rules) weighed more with many non-rapists in the Church than saving kids from rapists did. The Vatican's policy of
omertà depended on the obedience of cowards willing to sacrifice children on the altar of their own perceived spiritual well-being, or perhaps on the altar of their own career advancement. Help only came from "Samaritans" like
St. Mary MacKillop, who were willing to accept the price of excommunication for their insubordination when they refused to keep silent, or from people outside the Church who didn't care about threats of excommunication.
Since the bit about the priest and Levite risking ritual impurity if they helped the victim isn't widely known, I'll probably provide an endnote to that effect if I ever publish a book. But for the
New Verse News, I felt that I had too many epigraphs already.
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