‘Caring and sharing.” Believe it or not, that was the gist of a press day in the nation’s capital this past week. And they weren’t just words to vote by and to make you feel good. A group of Catholics, most of whom probably vote Republican — in some cases primarily if not exclusively because of abortion — gathered in Washington, D.C., to support a new health-care sharing ministry, Christ Medicus Foundation CURO.

Under the Affordable Care Act, health-care sharing ministries that were already in existence before the law was passed were grandfathered in — allowed to continue to operate without being subject to the individual mandate or the abortion-drug, contraception, and sterilization mandate issued by the Department of Health and Human Services after the passage of the law. CURO is the first Catholic health-care sharing ministry in the United States. It is able to exist because of a partnership with the veteran Samaritan Ministries International.

This partnership represents an ecumenical “God-honoring, Christ-centered, sharing health-care” effort, as Samaritan’s Anthony Hopp puts it, to combat not just the affronts to freedom of conscience and human dignity that the president’s health-care legislation embodies, but the whole trajectory of our culture in America. Pope Francis often talks about a throwaway society where indifference to the suffering of others has become routine. These health-care sharing ministries are a counter-cultural effort to rebuild, to remind people that we should look our brother and sister in the face and help them in their needs. It is a practical and prayerful effort, and in many senses a new way of life.

At the time of the CMF CURO launch, I just happened to have the neighboring state of Virginia on my mind — the state which, its advertising proclaims, is “for lovers.” Cosmopolitan, the women’s glossy, has been branching out into political commentary. But, unlike CMF CURO, the results are less than inspiring, as in a recent editorial about a congressional race.

Barbara Comstock is a Republican running for Congress in Virginia. She’s exactly the kind of woman you’d want in politics. She loves her family and her country, knows how Washington works, and takes the responsibilities of government seriously. Were her politics a little different, she’d be the cover gal for women in politics for any magazine.

But Cosmo came out for her opponent, John Foust, repeating tired, misleading rhetoric mired in the tired dogma of the sexual revolution and a rigid stance on abortion rights that is out of step with Americans today. Cosmo urges readers to vote for Comstock’s opponent because he passes the abortion litmus test that is all too often the only thing required to earn the Left’s seal of approval. And that’s a shame.

But the over-the-top nature of this type of commentary may just offer an opportunity to see people and their visions whole. Another candidate in Virginia, Ed Gillespie, who is running for Senate, has made it a point to talk about the “dignity of work” in his stump speech, focusing on his economic plan to help people find self-worth and value in helping to transform the world through labor. During a convocation talk at Liberty University, he elaborated by quoting both St. John Paul II and Timothy Keller, the popular pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York.

We are “Created in God’s image, we were given the mandate to transform the earth. By their work, people share in God’s creating activity,” Gillespie quoted from JPII’s 1981 letter on labor. Later, in his northern-Virginia office, reflecting on this idea of the dignity of being able to provide a service, Gillespie is especially excited by Keller’s description of God, in Genesis, taking “delight” in his work. In his Liberty speech, Gillespie, who like me is a graduate of the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., cited Keller, sharing this insight with the students: “. . . in Genesis we see God as a gardener, and in the New Testament we see him as a carpenter. No task is too small a vessel to hold the immense dignity of work given by God. Simple physical labor is God’s work no less than the formulation of theological truth.” Gillespie hopes his “five-point plan for economic growth” will work toward affording more Americans the opportunity to know “the dignity of work.”

Pope Francis frequently points to the problem of unemployment among young people, and, when he does, he is inviting us into a holistic understanding of human dignity. He also talks about seeing the unborn child and the elderly as Christ Himself. This is why even non-religious Americans might welcome a development like CMF CURO teaming up with Samaritan. A culture where doctors and patients have a relationship, where cost sharing is rooted in a belief in common brotherhood, where people feel the need to serve because they believe all men and women were created in the image and likeness of God — that is the kind of culture where charity is fostered and nourished. It’s a culture where it becomes implausible that you would completely ignore the pain of another, as we so routinely do.

Rallying around human dignity in policy and practice — and, yes, even in politics — is the way out of a culture of indifference and inhumanity. In and around D.C., a few do personify this sort of grace.

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute, editor-at-large of National Review Online, and founding director of Catholic Voices USA. She is on the board of the Catholic Information Center and spoke at the CMF CURO launch there Thursday evening.