Ragamuffins are simple, direct and honest. Their speech is unaffected. They are slow to claim, "God told me..." As they make their way through the world, they bear wordless, prophetic witness.

Whenever religion shows contempt or disregards the rights of persons, even under the noblest pretexts, it draws us away from reality and God.

We cannot claim to have the mind of Christ and remain insensitive to the oppression of our brothers and sisters. We cannot stay oblivious to the world's struggle for redemption, freedom, and peace. We know that the good done to the poor—the least of our brothers and sisters (Matthew 25:40)—is done to Jesus himself. We know that we must commit ourselves to concrete action on behalf of liberation. There are things to be done.

His (Christ's) appearance in our midst has made it undeniably clear that changing the human heart and changing human society are not separate tasks, but are as interconnected as the two beams of the cross.

If God is compassionate, then certainly those who love God should be compassionate as well.

In the face of the oppressed I recognize my own face, and in the hands of the oppressor I recognize my own hands. Their flesh is my flesh, their blood is my blood, their pain is my pain, their smile is my smile.

Be compassionate just as your Father is compassionate.

Compassion must become the core and even the nature of authority. When the Christian leader is a man of God for the future generation, he can be so only insofar as he is able to make the compassion of God with man—which is visible in Jesus Christ—credible in his own world.

The gospel that proclaims the intrinsic worth, sacred value, and essential dignity of human beings encourages our work for equal rights, good housing, good medical care, and good education, and our fight for justice and peace in the world.

As Father, the only authority he claims for himself is the authority of compassion.

It seems indeed that the Church today is one of the few institutions in the world willing to defend human rights regardless of who the oppressor is.

For a Christian is only a Christian when he unceasingly asks critical questions of the society in which he lives and continuously stresses the necessity for conversion, not only of the individual but also of the world.