Gad Saad's Suicidal Empathy Warning

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]You know, there's a new book everyone's talking about called Suicidal Empathy.

[00:00:05]Gad Saad is not writing as a Catholic theologian. He is making a secular cultural argument. But the phrase is useful [music] because it names something Christians ought to recognize immediately.

[00:00:19]Compassion can become dangerous when [music] it is cut loose from truth.

[00:00:24]That does not mean compassion is bad.

[00:00:26]Christians should be the last people in the world to mock mercy.

[00:00:31]Mercy is at the heart of the gospel.

[00:00:34]It is why we go to confession.

[00:00:36]It is why the cross stands at the center of history.

[00:00:40]It is why any of us can have hope.

[00:00:43]But that is exactly why Christians have to tell the difference between real mercy and the counterfeit.

[00:00:51]One of the strangest things about modern life is that some of our cruelest ideas now come dressed up as compassion.

[00:00:59]If something calls itself kindness, inclusion, accompaniment, or mercy, we tend to lower our guard.

[00:01:07]We assume the motive is good, so the idea must be good.

[00:01:12]But Christians are not allowed to confuse tenderness with truthlessness.

[00:01:18]That is where Saad's warning becomes interesting.

[00:01:21]Suicidal empathy sounds exaggerated until you notice how often our culture uses compassion to excuse things that harm the very people compassion claims to protect.

[00:01:33]A child's confusion treated as identity.

[00:01:37]Addiction managed without conversion.

[00:01:40]Assisted suicide called dignity.

[00:01:43]Families told that love means silence.

[00:01:47]And even the church tempted to stop naming what destroys people.

[00:01:53]The problem is not that modern people feel too much for suffering.

[00:01:57]The problem is that we often refuse to ask what love actually requires.

[00:02:03]Christ himself was moved with compassion.

[00:02:06]He wept at the tomb of Lazarus.

[00:02:09]The Gospels are not embarrassed by the tenderness of Jesus.

[00:02:14]But Christ's compassion never lies.

[00:02:17]It never flatters sin.

[00:02:19]It never calls death mercy because life has become difficult.

[00:02:25]Counterfeit mercy begins with a real wound.

[00:02:28]Someone is suffering.

[00:02:30]Someone is afraid.

[00:02:32]Someone feels rejected, ashamed, weak, trapped, or alone.

[00:02:38]And because the wound is real, we feel a real desire to comfort them.

[00:02:44]So far, that is human.

[00:02:46]That is Christian.

[00:02:48]Then comes the temptation.

[00:02:50]We start to think that love means removing whatever makes the wounded person uncomfortable.

[00:02:56]Even if that means removing a commandment, a consequence, a duty, or a truth about the body, the soul, sin, or repentance.

[00:03:08]Once truth becomes the enemy of comfort, mercy has already been replaced by sentimentality.

[00:03:15]Thomas Aquinas gives us a better way to think about this.

[00:03:19]In the Summa, when he asks about the mercy of God, he says that mercy does not destroy justice.

[00:03:27]In a sense, mercy is the fullness of justice.

[00:03:32]That matters because a lot of modern compassion is built on the opposite assumption.

[00:03:37]It treats justice as the hard thing and mercy as the soft thing.

[00:03:42]Justice tells the truth.

[00:03:45]Mercy looks away.

[00:03:47]But that is not the Catholic view.

[00:03:50]In God, mercy and justice are not rivals.

[00:03:54]God is perfectly just and perfectly merciful because God is perfectly truthful and perfectly loving.

[00:04:02]His mercy does not save us by denying what sin is.

[00:04:07]His mercy saves us by entering the full reality of sin and overcoming it.

[00:04:13]That is why the cross is not sentimental.

[00:04:16]If God wanted mercy without justice, there would be no cross.

[00:04:22]If sin were only a misunderstanding, Christ would have given us a clarification.

[00:04:27]Instead, he took on flesh.

[00:04:30]He entered the place where sin, death, guilt, cruelty, cowardice, and injustice had done their worst.

[00:04:39]And he conquered them by love. Pope St. John Paul II understood this deeply.

[00:04:45]In his great teaching on the mercy of God, he returned again and again to the parable of the prodigal son.

[00:04:54]The father does not humiliate the son.

[00:04:57]He does not make him crawl.

[00:04:59]He runs to meet him.

[00:05:02]He restores him.

[00:05:04]He puts a robe on him and a ring on his finger.

[00:05:08]But the son still has to come home.

[00:05:12]The father's mercy does not rename the pigsty as freedom.

[00:05:17]It does not send money so the son can remain degraded in a far country.

[00:05:23]It does not say, "I affirm your journey." while the son is starving among the swine.

[00:05:30]The mercy is real because the return is real.

[00:05:35]That is the part our age wants to skip.

[00:05:39]We want the robe without the confession.

[00:05:42]We want the feast without the return.

[00:05:47]When Christ meets the woman caught in adultery, he protects her from a mob.

[00:05:53]He refuses to let sinners use the law as a weapon against another sinner.

[00:05:59]That is mercy.

[00:06:01]Then he says, "Go, and from now on, sin no more."

[00:06:08]That is also mercy.

[00:06:11]A culture that remembers the first half and forgets the second does not become more Christian.

[00:06:19]It becomes more dangerous because it learns to use the words of Jesus against the medicine of Jesus.

[00:06:27]This is why false mercy always ends up hurting the weak.

[00:06:32]The unborn child cannot plead his case.

[00:06:36]The elderly woman who thinks she is a burden may not have the strength to resist a culture that calls her death compassionate.

[00:06:44]>> [music] >> The confused child does not have the maturity to know what adults are supposed to know.

[00:06:51]>> [music] >> The addict cannot be loved by pretending addiction is freedom.

[00:06:57]The people who pay for counterfeit mercy are usually the people least able to speak.

[00:07:05]And this is why prudence matters so much.

[00:07:09]Prudence is not cowardice.

[00:07:12]It is not a baptized word for being careful.

[00:07:16]Prudence is the virtue that sees reality and chooses the true good.

[00:07:23]Without prudence, compassion becomes blind.

[00:07:27]A parent knows this.

[00:07:29]A doctor knows this.

[00:07:32]A confessor knows this.

[00:07:35]Anyone who has had to love another person seriously knows this.

[00:07:41]Sometimes love comforts.

[00:07:44]Sometimes love corrects.

[00:07:47]Sometimes love waits.

[00:07:51]Sometimes love says no.

[00:07:55]That last sentence may be one of the most merciful things a Christian can say.

[00:08:01]I will walk with you, but I will not lie to you.

[00:08:07]Mercy is not permission to remain wounded.

[00:08:11]Mercy is the love of God reaching into our misery to raise us out of it.

[00:08:18]Suicidal empathy is finally a spiritual problem because a society can feel pity and still lose charity.

[00:08:28]It can multiply therapeutic language and still forget sin, sacrifice, repentance, and the cross.

[00:08:37]Christian mercy is different because Christian mercy is ordered to salvation.

[00:08:44]It asks what will help this person become whole before God.

[00:08:49]It asks what truth has to be spoken.

[00:08:52]What wound has to be bound up.

[00:08:56]What sin has to be confessed.

[00:08:59]What injustice has to be repaired.

[00:09:02]What burden has to be carried.

[00:09:05]And what good has to be pursued.

[00:09:09]It is tender, but it is not soft-headed.

[00:09:13]It is patient, but it is not passive.

[00:09:18]It is gentle, but it is not false.

[00:09:22]So, the answer to suicidal empathy is not less mercy.

[00:09:28]It is mercy returned to its source.

[00:09:32]The source of mercy is not a mood.

[00:09:35]It is not a political program.

[00:09:38]It is not the feeling we get when we imagine ourselves as kind people.

[00:09:44]The source of mercy is the sacred heart of Jesus Christ.

[00:09:49]Pierced for sinners and still telling sinners the truth.

[00:09:55]So yes, Christians should defend compassion.

[00:10:00]We should be the people most ready to bind wounds, feed the hungry, visit the sick, forgive enemies, welcome the repentant, and protect the weak.

[00:10:13]But we cannot call something mercy if it helps a person stay lost.

[00:10:20]False mercy bypasses justice.

[00:10:23]Christian mercy passes through it.

[00:10:27]And that is why mercy, when it is joined to truth, does not become suicidal.

[00:10:34]It becomes the road home.