# Solidarity Is Not Neutrality ## Claim A love that reaches both the harmed and the person who harmed them is not the same as a stance that declines to distinguish between them, and collapsing the two turns compassion into a safeguarding failure. <!-- atomicity: 1 idea ✓ --> ## Scope & conditions - Holds wherever a universal-compassion claim is applied inside a situation of active or unresolved harm — pastoral care, community moderation, restorative justice, workplace conflict. - The two positions use nearly identical language, which is what makes the collapse easy and hard to name. "God loves everyone" and "your injury is not a distinction worth making" can be spoken in the same sentence. - The failure is directional. Refusing moral asymmetry does not distribute grace evenly; it functions as an instruction to the injured party to stop objecting, because they are the only one asking for the distinction. - Breaks in genuinely symmetric conflict where no party holds power over another, and in settings after repair, where insisting on the asymmetry indefinitely becomes its own harm. ## Evidence Richard Rohr's CAC meditation extends divine solidarity past the comfortable boundary: God is on the side of suffering "including the wounded and dying troops on both sides in every kind of war, and both the victims and the oppressors of this world." He concedes immediately that "this pleases very few people," which is honest — but the meditation never engages the tradition that answers it. Gutiérrez's preferential option for the poor, and womanist critiques of redemptive suffering such as Delores Williams's *Sisters in the Wilderness*, exist precisely because "God loves everyone" kept arriving in practice as "so stop making a fuss." The devotional register is what lets the claim travel unexamined. Asserted gently and hedged courteously, it is unlikely to be checked by the reader most at risk from it. ## Links - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Meaning About Suffering Belongs to the Sufferer]] — extends: that note establishes who may author an account of suffering; this one establishes that an account which erases the asymmetry is one the sufferer would rarely author about themselves. - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Charismatic Damage Control Runs on DARVO That Recasts Victims as Biased Outsiders]] — contrasts on intent, converges on effect: DARVO deliberately inverts victim and offender, while this collapse merely declines to separate them. The mechanisms are different and should not be conflated, but the person harmed experiences a similar silencing. - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Non-Disparagement Clauses Silence Victims Like an NDA]] — parallels: another instrument that produces silence without ever stating that silence is the goal. - [[3. Resources/MOCs/Faith & Theology MOC]] — applies-in: any atonement or solidarity theology has to answer what remains of judgment and repair once God stands with everyone. - [[3. Resources/MOCs/Spiritual Formation and Discipleship MOC]] — applies-in: formation material used pastorally needs an explicit safeguarding frame, not an assumed one. ## Tests / falsifiers - Ask whether Rohr addresses the preferential option elsewhere in his corpus. If he engages it directly, the gap is this meditation's compilation rather than his position, and the claim should narrow to how devotional excerpting strips qualification. - Look for a case where refusing to distinguish victim and offender measurably helped the injured party. Restorative justice practice may supply one, which would sharpen the scope conditions considerably. - Watch how the both-sides line gets quoted in the wild. If it is repeated mainly in contexts of active harm, the concern is empirical rather than theoretical. ## Maintenance - Last tended: 2026-08-31