Journal of Catholic Social Thought

This article expands on Pope Francis’s vision of a community of fraternity. This community is one in which people support each other, identify with each other’s vulnerability, bear one another’s burdens, and embrace collective salvation. Although Francis takes steps forward in considering violence against women, a proper order to which a community of fraternity must turn requires that one draw much more from local narratives of injustice against women. This task can guide the Church’s orthopraxis on women’s suffering, which should consider how psychological or sociopolitical factors doubly wound women, especially in contexts of war and conflict. The effects of these wounds should inform the idea of imputability and responsibility for action regarding absolute moral laws. The article includes narratives affirming Francis’s call for mercy to be put first in accompanying wounded women, who become the locus theologicus on the suffering Christ.

The recent social encyclical Fratelli tutti provides the Chinese Catholic Church with renewed hope in a time of sweeping impasses. This article is inspired by Pope Francis’s passionate summons for the centrality of love, a culture of encounter, and a new social and political order. It presents an utterance of a laywoman rising from the Chinese Church, aspiring to dialogue with the encyclical. By weaving Francis’s vision together with the wisdom of Carmelite saints and my personal knowledge of the Chinese Church, I call upon the Chinese Church to deepen its roots in the soil of love and to journey through the dark night. I urge the Chinese Church to re-encounter atheism and to become a beacon of peace in Chinese society. I conclude the article with an appeal for authentic solidarity from the world Church and all concerned parties of the Chinese Church.