Without Sacrifice, There Is No Love

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COZ163: Every year the Australian Catholic bishops issue a social justice statement, and in 2026 they wrote two. The second, Living the Gospel in Times of Social Division, opens with a line from St Maximilian Kolbe: “Love lives through sacrifice and is nourished by giving. Without sacrifice, there is no love.” Lindsay Sant reads the statement aloud and works through it with Caroline Knight and Lino Saubolle.

The picture is uncomfortable. Archbishop Timothy Costelloe writes of abusive language and violence becoming normal, a disturbing rise in antisemitism marked by the Bondi Beach attack of December 2025, and migrants abused in public as housing pressure looks for someone to blame. The statement’s answer is not tolerance but something costlier: Kolbe, who died at Auschwitz in another prisoner’s place, as the model for treating others as neighbours rather than threats.

From there the bishops lean on imago Dei and the Trinity, Pope Francis’s culture of encounter, and Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks on society as “a conversation scored for many voices.” The panel makes it concrete. Caroline describes school-holiday conversations that started over orchids and pugs. Lindsay tells of an Uber ride with a Sikh driver and of the neighbour he had been waiting months to greet. Justice, the statement says, means treating people as companions, not objects of pity.

Social media gets its own section. Algorithms feed us what keeps us scrolling and often steer us toward conflict, and Pope Leo warns that a faith discovered online stays “disembodied” unless it is lived with others. Caroline’s advice is simpler: get off it and talk to people.

The statement closes with practical steps: practise encounter, exercise restraint in what we say, welcome migrants and refugees, commit to reconciliation with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, name racism even in ourselves, and learn conversations in the Spirit. Lino sums it up as salt and light.

Then the science segment turns cute. A Bolivian man found what he took for a stray kitten in the Yungas cloud forest and raised it for a year before realising it was wild. That cat, Tigrino, is now the type specimen of Leopardus tilcayo, the Tilcayo tiger cat, described in Current Biology after a study of 38 genomes, including DNA from old museum specimens, showed the tiger cat is really five species. Caroline explains why that matters for conservation in one small stretch of Bolivian forest.

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