When speaking about truly loving other people (especially those as Christ commands), Mother Teresa once said that Jesus brings us to the poor, the poor don't necessarily bring us to Jesus.
This is an important distinction. To authentically love another person we must love them through Divine love. Loving others only on a human level often amounts to nothing more than social work. Anybody can do that. Christians are called in love to save souls through the grace of God in Christ, not just serve others with material goods.
How then does one love with "God's love'?
In speaking of moral transformation in light of the Eucharist Pope John Paul II stated that the moral life “has the value of a ‘spiritual worship’ (Rom 12:1; cf. Phil 3:3), flowing from and nourished by that inexhaustible source of holiness and glorification of God which is found in the sacraments, especially in the Eucharist: by sharing in the sacrifice of the Cross, the Christian partakes of Christ’s self-giving love and is equipped and committed to live this same charity in all his thoughts and deeds.” In a word, “‘worship’ itself, Eucharistic communion, includes the reality both of being loved and of loving others in turn. A Eucharist which does not pass over into the concrete practice of love is intrinsically fragmented.” (Sacramentum Caritatis, 82, quoting John Paul II’s Veritatis Splendor, 107, and Pope Benedict XVI’s Deus Caritas Est, 14).
In noting that by the sacraments—especially the Eucharist—the believer “is equipped and committed to live this same charity in all his thoughts and deed,” we are reminded that the grace of God seeks to partner with and elevate our activities in ways that are impossible for the human person. Furthermore, we must admit that our desires to live charitably will remain only desires without the sacramental grace that has really, truly, and decisively been flowing into human history since Pentecost.
What Christians must offer the world is both this authentic love—graced and made possible by our participation in the sacraments—and the admission of sin that teaches us why we need sacramental grace in the first place. Human failings exist because of our fallen nature and no amount of self-help, government aid, or state mandates will adequately, if at all, heal and elevate broken human hearts—which is vital when seeking to bolster the social order.
Catholics actively engaged in matters of social welfare and charity—as we should all be—must never forget that the source of our successes is the very summit to which we are called: true communion with Christ and his Church. (Indeed, Catholics whose primary vocation is social justice should meditate especially on the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary, which speak of divine transformations in material world.) We invite terrible forms of failure when we engage in matters of social justice without first accepting that it is God, not us, that initiates, encourages, sustains, and completes our good works.
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