Daily Archives: December 20, 2025

Marcus Brotherton (FN): German Fighter Pilot Spared Enemy Bomber in WWII — and it Proves Empathy Critics Dead Wrong

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What a great story for the Advent Season! For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Empathy is under attack lately. 

The all-important ability to see the world through another person’s eyes is now being recast as something corrosive.  

The argument goes like this: if you’re empathetic, you’re being manipulated into accepting all manner of ideas, behaviors or policies that you would otherwise reject. Empathy, in this view, is a Trojan horse for weakness. 

But that’s a dangerous distortion. 

True empathy is not agreement. And it’s definitely not surrender.  

It’s the refusal to reduce another person to a caricature. It recognizes that the people we disagree with have reasons for their choices. And people are intrinsically valuable, even if we’re on opposite sides.  

Far from weakening conviction, empathy actually strengthens it by grounding our beliefs in humanity, not hatred. 

A story from World War II illustrates this. It reminds us that even in our darkest moments, empathy must triumph. 

On Dec. 20, 1943, in the frenzied skies above war-torn Europe, two bitter enemies met in what remains one of World War II’s most remarkable encounters. 

An American B-17 bomber, piloted by 21-year-old West Virginian Charles Brown, was shredded by enemy fire. Bullets had torn through the fuselage. Several crew members were bleeding out. The plane was barely holding together, yet still in the air.  

Flying nearby was the enemy: Franz Stigler, 28, a veteran German fighter ace. His job was simple: blow the Americans out of the sky.  

Stigler had every incentive to pull the trigger.

Read the whole great story.

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Advent Antiphons—December 20, 2025

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From The Book of Common Worship’s Times and Seasons (p.58).

These antiphons, or refrains, all beginning ‘O …’, were sung before and after the Magnificat at Vespers, according to the Roman use, on the seven days preceding Christmas Eve (17–23 December). They are addressed to God, calling for him to come as teacher and deliverer, with a tapestry of scriptural titles and pictures that describe his saving work in Christ. In the medieval rite of Salisbury Cathedral that was widely followed in England before the Reformation, the antiphons began on 16 December and there was an additional antiphon (‘O Virgin of virgins’) on 23 December; this is reflected in the Calendar of The Book of Common Prayer, where 16 December is designated O Sapientia (O Wisdom). The Common Worship Calendar has adopted the more widely used form. It is not known when and by whom the antiphons were composed, but they were already in use by the eighth century. 

20 December – O Clavis David

O Key of David and scepter of the House of Israel; you open and no one can shut; you shut and no one can open: Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house, those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

—cf Isaiah 22.22; 42.7

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