“A preferential option for the poor.” Dr. Paul Farmer took Gustavo Gutierrez’s writing on A Theology of Liberation and included it in a nonprofit mission statement. Farmer died yesterday in Rwanda at the age of 62. He was the co-founder of the global nonprofit Partners in Health working to improve health care in Haiti, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and other countries. He leaves an incredible legacy and a thriving organization that has made a real difference in countless lives.

It is hard to describe the emotions when someone you have never met dies and you feel strangely connected. That happened to me yesterday. There are some obvious reasons why I felt that connection. Both Paul Farmer and I were born in North Adams seventy days apart 62 years ago. We were both raised Catholic.

And the writings of Gutierrez shaped our careers. For me, it was a religion class at Fairfield University that introduced me to A Theology of Liberation just ten years after it was published. It was really the first time that my faith truly spoke to me. This is why I am a Catholic. This is my faith.

Gutierrez writes, “Christians have not done enough in this area of conversion to the neighbor, to social justice, to history. They have not perceived clearly enough yet that to know God is to do justice. They have yet to tread the path that will lead them to seek effectively the peace of the Lord in the heart of social struggle.”

Farmer acted on his faith. See. Judge. Act. Farmer talks about how this theological construct is similar to what physicians are supposed to do when they see a patient. His actions perfectly capture the power of example. “Don’t tell us you can’t treat AIDS in rural Haiti, we’re doing it,” says Farmer on the podcast Jesuitical last year. “One of the ways we move forward as Partners in Health is by sometimes being quiet and just doing the work. And being able to point to something and say look, ‘don’t say its impossible, don’t say its not feasible, not prudent and please don’t say it is not sustainable because none of us is sustainable.”

Despite all the despair and desperation Farmer observed over his career, he remained an optimist about global health and even about what the pandemic might do to attitudes in the United States. “People will have to sort out a narrative to explain our failures [during the pandemic]. And I’m hoping people will come to the conclusion that we aren’t doing things right. We need better safety nets. We need more investment in public health…I’m probably guilty of pathological optimism but I have conviction that we are going to make real progress.”

We will have to do it without him but not without his organization, Partners in Health. We will all have to do the work of acting to transform the social structures that contribute to suffering and injustice in the world by seeing, judging and acting as individuals and as part of a collective movement.