At this morning's General Audience in St. Peter's Square, Leo XIV, resuming the cycle of catechesis that runs throughout the Jubilee Year, “Jesus Christ Our Hope”, focused his meditation on the parable of the Good Samaritan from the Gospel of Luke. After summarizing his catechesis in the different languages, the Pope addressed special expressions of greeting to the faithful present, who came from all over the world. “The lack of hope, at times, is due to the fact that we fixate on a certain rigid and closed way of seeing things, and the parables help us to look at them from another point of view,” said Leo XIV, emphasizing that ”before being a religious matter, compassion is a matter of humanity! Before being believers, we are called to be human,” ‘those who think that their own journey must take priority are not willing to stop for another,’ ”this Samaritan stops simply because he is a man in front of another man who needs help. Compassion is expressed through concrete gestures. The evangelist Luke lingers on the actions of the Samaritan, whom we call 'good', but who in the text is simply a person: the Samaritan gets close, because if you want to help someone you cannot think of keeping your distance, you have to get involved, get dirty, perhaps defile yourself; he bandages his wounds after cleaning them with oil and wine; he loads him on his mount, that is, he takes charge, because you really help if you are willing to feel the burden of the other person's pain; he takes him to a hotel where he spends some money, 'two denarii,' more or less two days' work; and he pledges to come back and possibly pay again, because the other person is not a package to be delivered, but someone to care for. Dear brothers and sisters, when will we too be able to stop our journey and have compassion? When will we realize that that wounded man along the road represents each one of us. And then the memory of all the times Jesus stopped to care for us will make us more capable of compassion. Let us pray, then, that we may grow in humanity so that our relationships will be truer and richer in compassion. Let us ask the Heart of Christ for the grace to have more and more of the same feelings as him”.