Choosing Compassion
February 23, 2026
When you walk into the Philip E. Batt Education Building at the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights, you are not simply entering a building. You are stepping into an ongoing conversation about human rights. More than 30 works of art line the walls and fill the alcoves, each inviting reflection on what it means to live in community with others. One of the most striking pieces is Compassion, painted by Mary Frances Donelinger. The painting is a visual meditation on interdependence — a reminder that no life stands alone and that communities endure through mutual care.
At its center are words from a Catholic nun who inspired Bill Wassmuth, the Center’s namesake. Sister Joan D. Chittister reminds us:
Compassion is not sympathy. Compassion is mercy. It is a commitment to take responsibility for the sufferings of others. Compassion makes no distinction between friends and enemies, neighbors and outsiders, compatriots and foreigners. Compassion is the gate to human community.
That image of compassion as a gate feels especially poignant now. A gate is not a symbolic decoration; it determines who is welcomed, protected, or turned away. In moments of social tension, the question is not whether we admire compassion, but if we use it to drive our collective decisions and keep the gate open.
When compassion guides decision-making, it opens pathways to stronger care systems and a deeper recognition that our well-being is intertwined. Yet we are living in a moment when compassion itself is increasingly contested. Rather than focusing on the urgent challenges facing Idaho families — access to healthcare, economic stability, safety, and opportunity — some proposals emerging from the Statehouse risk narrowing who is considered worthy of care, who is allowed through the gate.
A bill introduced last week, for example, would criminalize certain forms of assistance to people who are undocumented. For faith communities, food pantries, domestic violence shelters, and after-school programs, this could create an impossible moral position: serve neighbors in crisis or face legal consequences. Behind policy language are real people seeking safety, stability, and dignity whose lives are directly impacted by our collective compassion.
Beyond policy specifics lies a deeper question about the kind of community we are building. Laws and public rhetoric do more than regulate behavior; they signal whose suffering matters and whose humanity is recognized. When compassion is framed as weakness or dismissed as naive, exclusion can begin to seem normal. This is often how human rights violations begin. Gradual shifts in language and priorities make it easier to look away from the suffering of others.
And still, compassion remains one of humanity’s most enduring values. Last week’s rare overlap of Lent and Ramadan offers a reminder of our shared moral inheritance. Though rooted in different faith traditions, both observances invite reflection, restraint, and generosity. They encourage people to notice suffering — their own and others’ — and respond with intention. The calendars may not often align, but the message is consistent: communities grow stronger when compassion is practiced.
Ultimately, compassion is a daily decision to widen the circle of care, especially when doing so feels inconvenient, uncomfortable, or unpopular. It asks us to resist the temptation to divide the world into those who deserve dignity and those who do not. As civil rights leader Reverend Jesse Jackson encouraged us, “Never look down on anybody unless you are helping them up.” His words name compassion for what it truly is: a practice of meeting vulnerability with care, a way of keeping the gate to community open even when it is difficult.
Every act of care — expressed through public policy, advocacy, or everyday kindness — becomes a hand on that gate. Each time we choose compassion, we push it open a little wider, creating space for dignity and belonging. When fear urges us to close it, we can be strong and hold it open for one another. Healthy communities are not built by deciding who must stand outside, but by choosing to let compassion guide who we become together.