On Compassion

This article http://www.incharacter.org/article.php?article=107 is an interesting discussion on the development of the modern viewpoint of compassion with significant space given to the role of compassion in the Christian and specifically Catholic faith. The gist of the article is that the concept of compassion as a virtue is a fairly modern construct which they trace to a handful of French thinkers of the 19th century. Regarding Christianity and Catholicism, the authors note that current stereotypes aside, the faith has been focussed on helping the poor, sick, etc., not out of a sense of compassion but out of a sense of responsibility. The tendency to tout an emotion - compassion - as a virtue, is a modernist concept and one of the core distinguishing characteristics of modern liberalism.
There is another aspect of compassion that I want to address. In reality we are confusing compassion with a virtue. I would argue that we confuse the emotion compassion with the virtue of agape, or filial love. We do this in the same way that we confuse the emotion of passion with the virtue of marital love.
Love is not an emotion. This is a core teaching in most Catholic-oriented programs for engaged or married couples (c.f. Engaged Encounter and Marriage Encounter). Love is a decision. Emotions come and go - we may not feel the emotion to our spouse on any particular day, but we make the decision to love that person nonetheless. If we did not, the marriage would not last, and it certainly would not be an example of Christ's love.
Passion is the emotion we often confuse with love, which is a virtue. Likewise compassion is an emotion we often confuse with filial love, or agape, which is a virtue and which is the love Jesus meant when he commanded us to love our neighbor.
The problem with confusing compassion as a virtue is that, being an emotion, compassion is irrational. The objects of our compassion are not chosen fairly or rationally, but based on emotion and circumstance, and the actions we take as a result are typically designed to satisfy our compassionate feelings rather than based on a careful examination of the best interests of the person to whome we feel compassion. We give a couple of dollars to a transient who we know will spend it on alcohol. We give to the charity with the saddest stories of hungry children or abandoned pets without ever really looking at what that money will be spent on. How many of us know that many of the major breast cancer charities funnel money to abortion providers?
Compassion, like passion, is an emotion that can lead us to do either good or evil, but our modern liberal society has raised this feeling to a virtue. We cannot allow this corrupt redefinition of virtue to stain our Church or our families. We will feel however it is we feel at any given moment, but we must always act, as Christ commanded, with love of neighbor regardless of those feelings.