Becoming Good Samaritans, Online

The digital revolution has dismantled the gatekeepers of old, democratizing influence while leaving a credibility vacuum in its wake. Trust is no longer conferred institutionally but individually, and follower count is often conflated with authority. In this ever-shifting landscape, the Church faces an urgent challenge: how can we communicate our reason for hope when traditional measures of trust fail? The way forward first takes us back to Holy Scripture. Drawing inspiration from Pope Francis’ exhortation to embody the Good Samaritan online, this essay proposes a relational framework for digital evangelization designed to restore credibility in a disbelieving world by regrounding online encounters in cruciform witness. 

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The Good Samaritan is an ideal model for our incarnational recovery of digital evangelization because he is an icon of Christ’s love poured out for a broken world. His story reveals both whom and how to serve. The passage begins when a lawyer presses Jesus on the boundaries of the second great commandment. But God’s love knows no bounds, and neither should ours. Jesus responds with the famous parable at the center of today’s reflection. Turning the reductive assumptions on their head, He offers a Christian definition of neighbor that is unsettlingly inclusive. In contrast to the selfish temptation of the religious and intellectual elites — those who sought to minimize the number of neighbors and those who ignored the stranger in the ditch — we must expand the category to include all whom we may encounter on the digital continent.

 

Moving from whom to how, the Good Samaritan’s story teaches us that love of neighbor extends beyond sentiment to concrete, oftentimes costly, action. It means caring for people wherever we meet them, wherever they lie. To love the “stranger on the road,” as Pope Francis has described them, is not only to look for those in need online, but to strive to see them as Christ sees us — and then respond accordingly. That is how we escape the snare of avoidance in our digital interactions. The internet tempts us to engage only on our own terms, luring us into echo chambers that reinforce what we already hold true. To echo Pope Francis instead, our prayer is that the light we offer others, “not be the result of cosmetics or special effects, but rather of our being loving and merciful ‘neighbors’ to those wounded and left on the side of the road.”[1] It is easier than ever to remain in communities that are curated and comfortable. Christian love, however, cannot be self-centered, and comfort isn’t guaranteed. 

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Our mission demands that we retrain ourselves to see the forgotten and the overlooked as fellow humans, hidden though they are in the ditches that line our digital roads. We should tend to their wounds as if they were our own. Will we, like the Good Samaritan, become “little Christs,” embodying our reason for hope to the strangers we meet? Or will we follow the example of those who are too busy, too sterile, too suspicious, too self-absorbed? While the missionary’s road may look different today, make no mistake: digital ditches abound, and they’re full of suffering. It’s easy to avoid turning into the robbers that prey upon the Good Samaritan. It’s much harder to avoid becoming the priest or the Levite. 

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Serving as Good Samaritans online starts by remembering that so-called “users” are first and foremost people worthy of love. The language itself is telling: “internetspeak” tends toward the inhuman. “Users,” with their ambiguous avatars and fictitious usernames, are easy to ridicule, to neglect, to leave in the ditch. Humans made in the image of God? Much less so. Regardless of profile appearance, party affiliation, or preferred hashtags, the Church’s category of neighbor contains whomever you’re engaging with online. Focusing on our shared humanity paves the way for an incarnational strategy. For our work “is not simply a matter of generating content, but of creating an encounter of hearts,” as Pope Leo XIV reminded the Catholic influencers and digital missionaries gathered for the July 2025 Jubilee for Digital Missionaries and Catholic Influencers. “This will entail seeking out those who suffer, those who need to know the Lord, so that they may heal their wounds, get back on their feet and find meaning in their lives.” Their wounds may be hidden by digital makeup, but their need for healing is just as real as the stranger’s.

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Recognizing Christ in the other does not stop with intellectual assent. God’s law commands us to love in action, which in turn compels us to give up something of ourselves. An outsider in a hostile land, the Good Samaritan forsakes his position of relative comfort because he recognizes the other’s dignity. He lets himself be interrupted and inconvenienced. He chooses to spread hope through healing, even at great personal cost. Perhaps most impressively, the Samaritan returns to ensure the stranger has recovered. He remains in relationship with the man, adopting a profound spirit of accompaniment. He carries the other’s cross all the way to Calvary.

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The Samaritan’s example is timeless because it mirrors the accompaniment of Christ, whose own gift of self sustains the very hope we aim to spread. His goal is not to achieve credibility per se, but that is also why he’s so effective: true credibility cannot be gained by seeking personal comfort or external validation, two of the internet’s chief virtues, but by demonstrating radical gifts of self. Just as the early Christians bore witness through physical martyrdom, today’s missionaries need to embrace a new form of digital martyrdom. This call is answered by intentionally sacrificing the self — whether it be measured in terms of monetization or reach or other personal gain — to incarnate Christ’s message in the digital continent. Like the Samaritan, we must be willing to diminish so that others may grow and heal. 

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This harmony of old and new requires us to view the digital continent through neither a utopian nor dystopian lens, reframing the entire conversation in incarnational and relational terms. Properly understood, digital evangelization rejects transactional engagement, treating online interactions as opportunities for personal accompaniment. Just as the Good Samaritan poured out oil and wine to heal the wounded, the way to evangelize effectively is to shape our exchanges into “a balm which relieves pain and a fine wine which gladdens hearts,” as Pope Francis described it in his 2014 World Communications Day message.[2] Regardless of where we meet, people are not primarily an audience to be reached, but humans to be loved. By thus reshaping our content in the form of the Cross, we become the “agents of communion, capable of breaking down the logic of division and polarization, of individualism and egocentrism” that Pope Leo  encouraged digital missionaries and influencers at the 2025 Jubilee–and all of us–to be. 

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Throughout history, the Church has navigated technology-fueled revolutions by keeping her eyes fixed on Christ, the origin and end of all communication. Our content should not merely contain Christ’s message; Christ’s message has to shape our content. As Marshall McLuhan explained in a conversation to his wife, the Incarnation is the supreme example of communication because “Christ came to demonstrate God’s love for man and to call all men to Him through himself as Mediator, as Medium. And in so doing he became the proclamation of his Church, the message of God to man. God’s medium became God’s message.”[3] To be sure, the evangelistic environment has changed, and with it the media we use, but the incarnational foundation of our message remains the same: the Word made flesh. That is why we must not only proclaim but embody Christ’s message of hope. Moving beyond abstract connectivity, the modern world desperately needs “networks of relationships, of love, … where we can mend what has been broken, heal from loneliness, not focus on the number of followers”[4] as Pope Leo implored once again in his 2025 Jubilee message. Understood in this light, today’s missionaries are true bridges to Christ, offering digital invitations to “experience the greatness of infinite Love in every encounter.” 

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The subversive task of building a digital culture defined by martyrdom — as foreshadowed by the Good Samaritan and modeled by the early Church — is also how we bridge the credibility divide. Martyrdom fueled Christianity’s spread because martyrdom is the perfect testament to faith. It is the ultimate gift of self: hope in Christ embodied. Our current plight beckons us to return to these familiar roots. Becoming digital Good Samaritans means grounding content in the Incarnation and orienting it toward communion, so that “every story of shared goodness will be a knot in a single, immense network: the network of networks, the network of God,”[5] as Pope Leo describes it once again in the 2025 Jubilee. Digital martyrdom is not an example of performative suffering, but cruciform witness. It is the intentional sacrifice of influence and reach in service of compassion. It asks Catholics to prioritize integrity over virality, impact over engagement, and communion over celebrity culture. Once more from Pope Leo’s Jubilee message, it requires us to “look for the ‘suffering flesh of Christ’ in every brother and sister [we] encounter online.”[6]

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The digital continent might be our mission field, but it is not our home. Like the Samaritan, we find ourselves in a state of journeying. That is why the Church needs digital missionaries who not only build but become bridges between this world and the next. Those who take up their cross and carry it into the digital continent. Those who see the other lying in a ditch first and foremost as a human being in need of Christ’s love. Those who refuse to rest until the forsaken have been healed. Becoming digital Good Samaritans is not only how we restore credibility in our disenchanted, disbelieving world — it is how we communicate our reason for hope online.