Empathy sounds like an uncontroversial virtue. We should care about how other people feel. We should avoid needless cruelty. We should treat people with compassion.

But what happens when empathy stops being one virtue among many and becomes the standard by which every moral question is judged? Bishop Robert Barron argues that this is where compassion can become confused with love — because genuine love is not simply feeling another person’s feelings. It is willing the good of the other.

That distinction gives this sermon its force. Barron uses examples from education, parenting, criminal responsibility and contemporary cultural debates to argue that doing what is loving will sometimes mean saying something uncomfortable, enforcing a boundary or refusing to affirm what is false.

Barron begins with Canadian social psychologist Gad Saad’s book Suicidal Empathy. He describes Saad’s central concern as the elevation of empathy from a worthwhile virtue to something approaching a supreme moral principle.

Barron’s argument is not that empathy is inherently bad. Quite the opposite: he explicitly calls it a “perfectly decent thing”. The problem begins when the desire not to hurt someone’s feelings overrides other moral considerations — particularly truth, reality and justice.

That is an important distinction. A Christian ethic cannot simply ask, Will this make someone feel better? It also has to ask, Is this true? Is it just? Is it actually good?

The sermon becomes most persuasive when Barron moves from cultural criticism to ordinary examples.

A professor gives a student a C because the work is poor. The grade may hurt. It may damage the student’s immediate self-esteem. But, Barron argues, the professor may nevertheless be acting out of love by telling the truth and giving the student an opportunity to improve.

Likewise, Barron describes a priest counselling someone who has confessed a serious crime to turn himself in. The advice may make the person’s circumstances considerably worse. Yet, in Barron’s framework, it can still be an act of love because the priest is willing the person’s genuine good rather than simply protecting his feelings.

Parents understand this intuitively. A good parent does not define success as ensuring that a child is never disappointed, frustrated or corrected. Children need boundaries precisely because love is concerned with who they are becoming, not merely with how they feel in a particular moment. Barron makes this point bluntly: sometimes loving someone requires hurting their feelings.

Barron then connects the argument to St Paul’s teaching in Romans. Paul says that love fulfils the law, but immediately connects that love with concrete moral commands: do not commit adultery, murder, steal or covet.

Barron’s point is significant. Biblical love is not morally empty sentiment. It assumes that some things really are good and some things really are evil. Love therefore cannot simply mean accommodating whatever another person currently believes or feels.

This is where his distinction between empathy and love becomes particularly useful.

Empathy asks us to enter into another person’s feelings. Love asks us to will their good.

Those things can overlap. But they are not identical.

Barron then makes a much broader claim about contemporary “wokeism”. He argues that strands of critical theory have rejected objective moral and epistemic truth, leaving empathy to fill the resulting vacuum. His formulation is that if there is no shared objective standard of truth or goodness, the remaining principle becomes something like: tolerate one another and avoid hurting one another’s feelings.

That is the point in the sermon that deserves the most scrutiny.

Barron presents a particular interpretation of the intellectual origins and development of contemporary woke thought. Readers should not treat those historical and philosophical claims as settled merely because they appear in the sermon; they would require independent verification and engagement with the relevant primary sources before being presented as established fact.

But his underlying moral question stands independently of that larger cultural diagnosis.

What happens to a society when avoiding offence becomes more important than pursuing truth?

Barron’s final challenge is not simply to criticise contemporary culture. It is directed at Christians themselves.

He suggests that Christianity’s retreat from public life has left a vacuum that other ideas have filled. Whether one accepts the full historical diagnosis or not, his practical conclusion is clear: Christians should not retreat from difficult cultural questions simply because speaking about truth, morality or human flourishing may cause offence.

That does not justify being rude, harsh or needlessly provocative. Barron’s argument is more demanding than that.

It requires Christians to recover the biblical meaning of love.

Love is not sentimentality. It is not simply affirmation. And it is not measured by whether everyone feels comfortable after the conversation.

Sometimes love comforts. Sometimes love forgives. Sometimes love listens.

And sometimes love tells the truth.

That is the challenge at the heart of Barron’s sermon: if we genuinely seek the good of another person, are we prepared to do what is good rather than merely what feels kind?

The sermon is strongest as a moral and theological reflection on the difference between empathy and love. Its broader claims about wokeism, critical theory and the decline of Christianity are more sweeping and would benefit from deeper evidence and engagement with competing interpretations.

That distinction matters. A compelling moral argument does not automatically establish every historical or sociological claim attached to it.

Nevertheless, Barron’s central question is worth taking seriously — particularly for Christians raising children, teaching students, leading churches or participating in public life.

If love means willing the good of another, then Christians cannot outsource morality to the avoidance of discomfort.