Who Is My Neighbor? Who Is My Enemy?

Who Is My Neighbor? Who Is My Enemy?

I wonder how many times Joseph Cardijn sat with this question. How many sleepless nights did he spend wrestling with it? How many times did he challenge his followers to sit with it as well?

Your Neighbor: The Worker Nobody Sees

For Cardijn, the answer was clear but radical: your neighbor is the worker—especially the one society pretends doesn’t exist. The one being ground down by systems that treat humans like disposable parts.

He saw something most of us miss: every worker carries infinite worth simply because they’re made in God’s image. Think about that for a moment. Most migrants today are simply looking for work, searching for the dignity that comes with earning an honest living. Yet how often do we reduce them to statistics, problems to be solved, threats to be managed?

Cardijn refused to do that. He insisted the working class wasn’t a “problem” at all—they were people with dignity and agency. And here’s the uncomfortable truth: we’ve been dealing with worker exploitation for centuries. So why haven’t we figured this out yet? What’s the mental block that stops us from truly understanding what dignity and agency mean?

Your neighbor, Cardijn would say, isn’t just the person next door. It’s whoever needs solidarity right now, wherever they are.

His most famous line captures it all: “A young worker is worth more than all the gold in the world.” Not might be worth. Not could be worth. Is worth. Right now. Just as they are.

Your Enemy: The System, Not the Person

Now, about enemies—this is where Cardijn gets interesting.

He was fierce in his opposition to systems that crushed workers: exploitative capitalism, brutal labor conditions, and the reduction of human beings to economic units. He had no patience for indifference—whether it came from factory owners or church leaders who turned a blind eye to suffering.

But here’s what makes his approach different: he didn’t demonize individuals. Instead, he worked to transform hearts and dismantle unjust structures. Through the Young Christian Workers (YCW) and other movements, he taught people the “See-Judge-Act” method—a way of looking at reality, measuring it against Gospel values, and then taking action accordingly.

His genius was empowering workers to become agents of their own liberation. Not just fighting against oppressors, but building toward something better. Isn’t that exactly what Jesus called us to do?

The Threat We’re Facing Now

Here’s where this gets urgent.

We’re watching various forms of Christian Nationalism rise around the world, and they’re crushing everything Cardijn stood for. These movements promote racism, oppress the working class and the poor, and especially target immigrants—the very people Cardijn saw as neighbors.

Christian Nationalism is the opposite of the Sermon on the Mount. It contradicts the two commandments Jesus said were most important—the commandments that drove Cardijn’s entire movement.

What This Means for Us

So here’s where we land: loving both neighbor and enemy isn’t just a nice idea. It’s at the core of what it means to be God’s people—going all the way back to Torah and renewed by Jesus.

In the Old Testament, these commands were about how the covenant community should live in the land. Jesus took it further: he was establishing a new covenant community, one that rejected the world’s obsession with wealth, power, and prestige. One that refused the feudal systems that gave us racism, colonialism, and oppression.

The early Christians showed through their actions—not just their words—that they believed in a coming judgment and a civilization shaped by the Kingdom of Heaven. And here’s the thing: Jesus wasn’t talking about some distant future in the Sermon on the Mount. He was describing the Kingdom here and now, made possible through the incarnation.

Rethinking Christian Civilization

What does the future of “Christian civilization” look like? I’ll tell you what it’s not: Christian Nationalism or the institutional structures we’ve known for six hundred years.

Are we living through a period that’s forcing us to renegotiate the relationship between the Church and an emerging global order? Are we experiencing the birth pangs of something new—an eschatological transition to the Kingdom of Heaven here and now? If you want to glimpse this possibility, read Thomas Merton and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

You Are the Church

Fr. Louis J. Putz, CSC, used to say something that still hits me: “You are the Church.” He often began his homilies with that opening statement.

You and I—we can’t stay silent. But we also can’t just react. We need to use the See-Judge-Act method carefully and thoughtfully as we respond to this changing world.

Jesus taught us that context matters. Historical context. Cultural context. Economic context. It’s through understanding the reality around us that we grasp what his teachings actually mean for our lives today.

So I’ll ask you what Cardijn would ask: Who is your neighbor? Who is your enemy?

And more importantly: What are you going to do about it?