"Christ in the Sinner" Addendum

I've been reading a book by Charles Scribner III, Home by Another Route: A Journal of Art, Music, and Faith (Paulist Press, 2016). It's a journal from the Epiphany of 2005 to the Epiphany of 2006, with seasonal entries with details of Masses attended, presentations made, and various trips, including a visit to Elizabeth Schwarzkopf in Austria six months before her death on August 3, 2006.

In the Eastertide of 2005, Scribner is an alternate on a murder trial and he remarks on a witness to the death of the victim, a heroin dealer, who had been "dealing and was shot in the head outside a schoolyard."

He describes the testimony of a Hispanic woman who described her encounter with the victim when she came out of the school and

saw the staggering victim calling for help, she rushed over to him; he collapsed on top of her; she called for 911, then cradled his bleeding head in her lap until the medics arrived. (p. 67)

Scribner--an art historian in addition to being a publisher--imagines "a Caravaggio Pieta* as it might have been painted in the lower east side of our island across the Atlantic, four centuries later." As he summarizes the effect of her testimony, he notes that the witness "relived her simple act of charity to a dying man."

Objectively, the victim was a sinner (he was dealing heroin), but she didn't know that, she just knew he needed her. She even went to the hospital and stayed with his family and attended the funeral! As Scribner sums it up:

She knew nothing of the victim's background or street business; he was simply a wounded soul in dire need of compassion; she gave it in abundance. (p. 68)

I read this passage in Adoration before Mass on Friday and thought how it echoed in a way Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson's meditation on "Christ in the Sinner": We have to do, on the level of our own capacities, something of what Christ did in His Omnipotent love -- identify ourselves with the sinner, penetrate through his lovelessness and his darkness down to the love and light of Christ Who has not yet wholly left him to himself. We have, in a word, to make the best of him and not the worst (as our Lord does for ourselves every time He forgives us our sins), to forgive his trespasses as we hope that God will forgive our own. To recognize Christ in the sinner is not only to Christ's service, but to the sinner's as well.

*Caravaggio did not paint a Pieta that we know of.