Last summer I found myself in Krakow, Poland. I have long felt a kinship with St. Faustina Kowalska and her devotion to the apostolate of the Divine Mercy, and I was excited to make a pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of Divine Mercy. I loved the image of Christ that Faustina received and shared with the world, and it remains one of my favorites, alongside the Sacred Heart. It illustrates the fervent desire that God has to convey mercy and compassion to a suffering humankind, in ways great and small.
Having left the small church where St. Faustina once prayed at the foot of the hill below the main basilica, I was looking around the chapel gardens. It was a bright, warm day, and bees buzzed around the rose bushes and Marian shrines. Two women approached me, surely noticing the rosary in my hand and bucket hat on my head. They must have thought I was an easy mark: a tourist and a Catholic who would no doubt be swayed by a sense of Christian compassion (or maybe guilt) to help them.
One had a leathery face sun-worn by years of a hard life. She looked like she could be my grandmother’s age, but in reality she was probably younger than my mother. The other was younger and appeared pregnant. They tried first speaking to me in Polish to no avail, then switched to fragmented English to tell me they were hungry and needed food. I told them, truthfully, that I had no cash. They then gestured to a nearby convenience store that accepted credit cards, asking, “Could you please buy us a sandwich, just a sandwich?”
I groaned. I felt discomfort. I thought: What can I say? I am at a pilgrimage site. I just prayed for mercy and I prayed that God would make me more merciful.
Begrudgingly, naïvely, I went with them. In the small convenience store, my two new companions shifted into high gear. They got two baskets and each one started walking around the store. I followed them around like a little sheep, wringing my hands.
Each woman would point at something and then make a plea: Can I get this soap? I have children; they really need it. I’d nod, embarrassed. I was beet-red, sweating with discomfort. The younger woman grabbed some jugs of milk, some yogurt, looked at me with big pleading eyes and said, “I have six children.” I nodded. She put them in the basket.
The older woman came to packages of bread, wrapped pastries, bags of chips, scooping up a generous armful. “I really have nothing, please, for my family?” she pleaded. She placed them in her bag, then pulled out her worn, leather purse, making a show of opening all the pockets and shaking it out, showing that there was nothing inside. Eventually, they both stopped asking and simply picked up their pace, rushing about the store, grabbing handfuls of canned food, candy, junk food, laundry detergent.
I just kept telling myself the women looked poor, they were poor, it was the right thing to do. I had enough that I could share. Though if I am honest, I went along with it as much out of discomfort as generosity.
Finally, we arrived at the checkout. The salesclerk stared at me, clearly flustered and possessing little patience for our group. The total was nearly $300. My new friends looked at me imploringly. My face was flushed, I was tense, my heart raced. I swiped my credit card—then instantly noticed my phone buzz with a fraud warning marking the transaction as suspicious. As if I didn’t know already. I sighed.
We three emerged into the sunlight. It was a beautiful day. The older woman said, “You are a saint. Thank you, thank you,” hugging me tightly, pinching my face and kissing me on both cheeks. The younger woman said, “God bless you, my children will eat today.” Before I could even respond, they had already rushed off, plastic grocery bags in hand, heading up the street, away from the basilica.
I felt dazed and started walking slowly back toward the train station to the city, my pilgrimage complete. I was stressed and tired. I thought back to all the other times I had been taken advantage of. Back in school, when the popular kids would agree to work with me on a project because they knew I’d do all the work and they would get a good grade. When a friend of mine would always “forget” his wallet when we met for lunch, and I’d pay for him, knowing I would never get that money back. When I was in Columbus, Ohio, and an older unhoused man followed me around, asking for money for cigarettes. I gave it to him, again more motivated by awkwardness than true altruism, and knowing God calls us to generosity even if it may be misused. I gave him the cash and then heard him call someone else an offensive gay slur, not knowing that I was gay. I also thought of when I was a tourist in Jerusalem and an old city shopkeeper said he could not pay for his children’s school tuition, and I felt so uncomfortable that I just overpaid for my purchase so I could get out of there quickly.
I was, in these moments, not giving with an open heart. And I’ve often been plagued with a sense that being too quick to share or too trusting of others’ good intentions has been a weakness, rather than a sign of my good character. Those feelings of getting taken for a ride, of being too weak, too much of a pushover, still trouble me and my ego. In spite of all I thought I believed, after encounters like the one in Krakow, I felt less like a good Catholic than a helpless victim.
But then I thought about where I had been during that encounter: the Divine Mercy basilica, the place where Pope St. John Paul II made a pilgrimage in 2002 and prayed to Jesus that “all the peoples of the earth may experience your mercy.” I thought about how much I’d loved praying the musical chaplet accompanied by guitar during adoration with my college campus ministry. I thought about Faustina’s likely struggles with mental health—as we understand it today—and certain “soul torments.” I related those to my own struggles with mental health and feeling far from God. Above all, I thought: What does it mean when Jesus says, “I am mercy”? And what does it mean to pray, “Jesus, I trust in you”?
In Christ’s example of mercy, I saw something different from passivity or a naïveté that led to being pushed down in a Darwin-esque “survival of the fittest.” It is true we say that Christ was a victim. The victim. Yet, we are also taught that Jesus is all-powerful God incarnate. He entered “willingly into his passion,” we pray at Mass. Christ suffered, but he wasn’t “taken for a ride”; he wasn’t scammed. He accepted what was done to him. He willingly gave his entire self, freely—though notably, not until after he wrestled with it in the garden.
After he entered willingly into his victimhood, Christ was scapegoated, humiliated and tortured; he was killed slowly and painfully. But we do not always realize that these sufferings are associated with being a victim because of Jesus, rather than Jesus being called a victim because he suffered these things.
This word victim can be understood in multiple ways, none necessarily precluding the truth of the others. In our contemporary sense of the word, Jesus Christ was a victim because he was an innocent sufferer of pain and death. But Jesus was also a victim of a political system of collective oppression by the Roman authorities ruling over Judea, who had been violently repressing their Jewish subjects. For Christology, the study of how we understand who Jesus is, the most salient meaning of victim is from Latin, from which, through Christian usage, the word entered English and eventually acquired its other uses: It was the term for a living sacrifice, such as an ox or other animal killed on an altar in a temple. This word came to be used in reference to Jesus through the theological understanding of his death in relation to the Jewish Passover sacrifice of a lamb. Uniquely in Jesus’ case, he is a victim who offers himself willingly in atonement for sins.
Jesus may be a victim, but that is not the whole story. Not only on the Cross, but also through the Incarnation, he gives himself to all humankind for the salvation of all the world, but he also asks us to give of ourselves in ways great and small. In the same Mass where we remember and re-enact Christ’s sacrifice, we pray, “make of us an eternal offering,” asking God to unite us to Jesus’ merciful self-offering even in our imperfections and human failures.
In our modern parlance, victims have little agency, whether victims of war, of sickness, of car crashes or of sexual abuse. To be clear, I am not comparing my experience in Poland to the real violence, exploitation and suffering endured by undeserving victims. The women whom I met, who took advantage of my agreement to buy them each a single sandwich, also have ethical failures, even as they are at the same time victims of generations of racism and poverty. Like us all, they had both agency and were bound by circumstances beyond their control.
But Christ teaches his disciples that it is not our place to judge those asking for help if we are able to give. We are not the ones who decide if they are deserving, just as Jesus did not offer himself for us because we deserve it. And I have to remind myself of this all the time, when I feel my fists, my wallet and my heart all tighten up. When I feel a protective fear to shield myself from being taken advantage of. But thank God, this time I was generous; I was moved by that tiny ray of mercy, even if in my human weakness it was begrudging at first.
When I wanted to give them something, I thought it would be small, but they took a lot. I could have left the store, refused to pay, but I decided to go ahead and do it, because I know that I myself have sinned and fallen short time and time again. I have lied, I have cheated, I have manipulated, I have been unkind. And yet, I am also capable of doing good, showing compassion, forgiving the undeserving and embodying at least a portion of that infinite and unfathomable Ocean of God’s Mercy. We all are. And so this time I willingly allowed myself to be a victim. Not a victim who gets pushed around, but rather a victim who made a small sacrifice out of myself to serve others and give generously when I could, to be simply an instrument of mercy as Christ asks us to do when we are able.
This article appears in November 2026.
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