The latter part of the homily
tells the basic message of Pope Francis. It is exactly the message of the
second Vatican Council found in Gaudium et Spes #22 which announces that Jesus
Christ is the prototype of the human person (“Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the
Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme
calling clear”), which then becomes the meaning of Christian anthropology
in Gaudium et Spes #24 (“man, the only
earthly being God has made for itself, finds himself by the sincere gift of
himself”). John Paul II famously took up this truth in giving an account of
the first chapters of Genesis as “The Theology of the Body.” Benedict had
elaborated this truth theologically in 1968 in his “Introduction to
Christianity” prior to his pontificate which basically becomes a magisterial
elaboration of it, and now Francis lives it out dramatically in his person
before the cameras and media of the
world. He gives conceptual and semantic account of it in his address on the
Vigil of Pentecost, Saturday May 18, 2013. In the latter part of the address,
he says:
“Times of crisis, like the one we are living
through (…) is not merely an economic crisis. It is not a crisis of culture. It
is a human crisis: it is the human person that is in crisis! Man himself is in danger of
being destroyed! But man is the image of God! This is why it is a profound
crisis!
(…)
There
is another important point: encountering the poor. If we step outside ourselves
we find poverty. Today — it sickens the heart to say so — the discovery of a
tramp who has died of the cold is not news. Today what counts as news is,
maybe, a scandal. A scandal: ah, that is news! Today, the thought that a great
many children do not have food to eat is not news. This is serious, this is
serious! We cannot put up with this! Yet that is how things are. We cannot
become starched Christians, those over-educated Christians who speak of
theological matters as they calmly sip their tea. No! We must become courageous
Christians and go in search of the people who are the very flesh of Christ,
those who are the flesh of Christ!
When
I go to hear confessions – I still can’t, because to go out to hear
confessions... from here it’s impossible to go out, but that’s another problem
— when I used to go to hear confessions in my previous diocese, people would
come to me and I would always ask them: “Do
you give alms?” — “Yes, Father!”
“Very good.” And I would ask them two further questions: “Tell me, when you give alms, do you look
the person in the eye?” “Oh I don’t know, I haven’t really thought about it”.
The second question: “And when you give
alms, do you touch the hand of the person you are giving them to or do you toss
the coin at him or her?” This is
the problem: the flesh of Christ, touching the flesh of Christ, taking upon
ourselves this suffering for the poor. Poverty for us Christians is not a
sociological, philosophical or cultural category, no. It is theological. I
might say this is the first category, because our God, the Son of God, abased
himself, he made himself poor to walk along the road with us.
This is our poverty: the poverty of the flesh of
Christ, the poverty that brought the Son of God to us through his Incarnation.
A poor Church for the poor begins by reaching out to the flesh of Christ. If we
reach out to the flesh of Christ, we begin to understand something, to
understand what this poverty, the Lord’s poverty, actually is; and this is far
from easy.
However
there is one problem that can afflict Christians: the spirit of the world, the
worldly spirit, spiritual worldliness. This leads to self-sufficiency, to
living by the spirit of the world rather than by the spirit of Jesus. You asked
the question: how should we live in order to address this crisis that affects
public ethics, the model of development and politics? Since this is a crisis of
man, a crisis that destroys man, it is a crisis that strips man of ethics. In
public life, in politics, if there is no ethics, an ethics of reference,
everything is possible and everything can be done. We see, moreover, whenever
we read the newspapers, that the lack of ethics in public life does great harm
to the whole of humanity.
I
would like to tell you a story. I have
already told it twice this week, but I will tell it a third time to you. It is
taken from a biblical midrash by a 12th-century rabbi. He tells the
tale of the building of the Tower of Babel and he says that, in order to build
the Tower of Babel, bricks had to be made. What does this mean? Going out and
mixing the mud, fetching straw, doing everything... then the kiln. And when the
brick was made it had to be hoisted, for the construction of the Tower of
Babel. Every brick was a treasure because of all the work required to make it.
Whenever a brick fell, it was a national tragedy and the guilty workman was
punished; a brick was so precious that if it fell there was a great drama. Yet
if a workman fell, nothing happened, that was something else. This happens
today: if the investments in the banks fall slightly... a tragedy... what can
be done? But if people die of hunger, if they have nothing to eat, if they have
poor health, it does not matter! This is our crisis today! And the witness of a
poor Church for the poor goes against this mentality.
The
fourth question: “in the face of such situations, I think my confession of
faith, my witness, is timid and awkward. I would like to do more, but what? And
how can I help these brethren of ours, how can I alleviate their suffering
since I can do nothing or only very little to change their political and social
context?”.
To
proclaim the Gospel two virtues are essential: courage and patience [acceptance
of suffering]. They [Christians who are suffering] are in the Church of
“patience”. They suffer and there are more martyrs today than there were in the
early centuries of the Church. More martyrs! Our own brothers and sisters. They
are suffering! They carry their faith even to martyrdom. However martyrdom is
never a defeat; martyrdom is the highest degree of the witness we must give. We
are on the way to martyrdom, as small martyrs: giving up this, doing that...
but we are on the way. And they, poor things, they give their lives, but they
do so — as we heard in the situation in Pakistan — for love of Jesus,
witnessing to Jesus.
Christians
must always have this attitude of meekness, humility, the same attitude that
they have, trusting in Jesus and entrusting themselves to Jesus. It should be
made clear that very often these conflicts do not have a religious origin;
there are frequently other social and political causes, and unfortunately
religious affiliation is used like fuel to add to the fire. A Christian must
always know how to respond to evil with good, even though it is often
difficult.
We
try to make these brothers and sisters of ours aware of how deeply united —
deeply united! — we are with their situation, how conscious we are that they
are Christians who have entered into “patience”. When Jesus goes to his
Passion, he enters into “patience”. They have done the same: we should tell
them so, but we should also tell the Lord.
I put a question to you: do you pray for these
brothers and sisters? Do you pray for them? In your daily prayers? I am not
going to ask those who do to raise their hands: no. I am not going to ask that
now. But think about it carefully. In our daily prayers let us say to Jesus:
“Lord, look at this brother, look at this sister who is suffering so much,
suffering atrociously!” They experience the limit, the very limit between life
and death. And there are consequences for us: this experience must spur us to
promote religious freedom for everyone, everyone! Every man and every woman
must be free in his or her profession of religion, whatever it may be. Why?
Because that man and that woman are children of God.”
And reconsidering economic poverty as a theological category where
the very flesh that Christ has taken on
is the flesh of the increasingly disadvantaged economically, let me offer the
remarks of Paul Krugman of the New York Times
Op Ed of today (1/21/2014):
The
Undeserving Rich
JAN.
19, 2014
The reality of rising American inequality is stark. Since the
late 1970s real wages for the bottom half of the work force have stagnated
or fallen, while the incomes of
the top 1 percent have nearly quadrupled(and the incomes of the top 0.1 percent have
risen even more). While we can and should have a serious debate about what to
do about this situation, the simple fact — American capitalism as currently
constituted is undermining the foundations of middle-class society — shouldn’t
be up for argument.
But it is, of course. Partly this reflects Upton Sinclair’s
famous dictum: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his
salary depends on his not understanding it. But it also, I think, reflects
distaste for the implications of the numbers, which seem almost like an open
invitation to class warfare — or, if you prefer, a demonstration that class
warfare is already underway, with the plutocrats on offense.
The result has been a determined campaign of statistical
obfuscation. At its cruder end this campaign comes close to outright
falsification; at its more sophisticated end it involves using fancy footwork
to propagate what I think of as the myth of the deserving rich.
For an example of de facto falsification, one need look no
further than a recent column by Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal, which first
accused President Obama (wrongly) of making a factual error, then proceeded to
assert that rising inequality was no big deal, because everyone has been making
big gains. Why, incomes for the bottom fifth of the U.S. population have risen
186 percent since 1979!
If this sounds wrong to you, it should: that’s a nominal number,
not corrected for inflation. You can find the inflation-corrected number in the
same Census Bureau table; it shows incomes for the bottom fifth actually
falling. Oh, and for the record, at the time of writing this elementary error
had not been corrected on The Journal’s website.
O.K., that’s what crude obfuscation looks like. What about the
fancier version?
I’ve noted before that conservatives seem fixated on the notion
that poverty is basically the result of
character problems among the poor.
This may once have had a grain of truth to it, but for the past three decades
and more the main obstacle facing the poor has been the lack of jobs paying
decent wages. But the myth of the undeserving poor persists, and so does a
counterpart myth, that of the deserving rich.
The story goes like this: America’s affluent are affluent
because they made the right lifestyle choices. They got themselves good
educations, they got and stayed married, and so on. Basically, affluence is a
reward for adhering to the Victorian virtues.
What’s wrong with this story? Even on its own terms, it
postulates opportunities that don’t exist. For example, how are children of the
poor, or even the working class, supposed to get a good education in an era of
declining support for and sharply rising tuition at public universities? Even
social indicators like family stability are, to an important extent, economic
phenomena: nothing takes a toll on family values like lack of employment
opportunities.
But the main thing about this myth is that it misidentifies the
winners from growing inequality. White-collar professionals, even if married to
each other, are only doing O.K. The big winners are a much smaller group. The
Occupy movement popularized the concept of the “1 percent,” which is a good
shorthand for the rising elite, but if anything includes too many people: most of
the gains of the top 1 percent have in fact gone to an even tinier elite, the
top 0.1 percent.
And who are these lucky few? Mainly they’re executives of some kind,
especially, although not only, in finance. You can argue about whether these
people deserve to be paid so well, but one thing is clear: They didn’t get
where they are simply by being prudent, clean and sober.
So how can the myth of the deserving rich be sustained? Mainly
through a strategy of distortion by dilution. You almost never see apologists
for inequality willing to talk about the 1 percent, let alone the really big
winners. Instead, they talk about the top 20 percent, or at best the top 5 percent.
These may sound like innocent choices, but they’re not, because they involve
lumping in married lawyers with the wolves of Wall Street. The DiCaprio movie
of that name, by the way, is wildly, who cheer on the title character — another
clue to the realities of our new Gilded Age.
Again, I know that these realities make some people, not all of
them hired guns for the plutocracy, uncomfortable, and they’d prefer to paint a
different picture. But even if the facts have a well-known populist bias, they’re
still the facts — and they must be faced.
Recall #202, #203, and 204 of
“Evangelii Gaudium:”
202. The need to resolve the structural causes
of poverty cannot be delayed, not only for the pragmatic reason of its urgency
for the good order of society, but because society needs to be cured of a
sickness which is weakening and frustrating it, and which can only lead to new
crises. Welfare projects, which meet certain urgent needs, should be considered
merely temporary responses. As long as the problems of the poor are not
radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation
and by attacking the structural causes of inequality,[173]no
solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any
problems. Inequality is the root of social ills.
203. The dignity of each human person and the
pursuit of the common good are concerns which ought to shape all economic
policies. At times, however, they seem to be a mere addendum imported from
without in order to fill out a political discourse lacking in perspectives or
plans for true and integral development. How many words prove irksome to this
system! It is irksome when the question of ethics is raised, when global
solidarity is invoked, when the distribution of goods is mentioned, when
reference in made to protecting labour and defending the dignity of the
powerless, when allusion is made to a God who demands a commitment to justice.
At other times these issues are exploited by a rhetoric which cheapens them.
Casual indifference in the face of such questions empties our lives and our
words of all meaning. Business is a vocation, and a noble vocation, provided
that those engaged in it see themselves challenged by a greater meaning in
life; this will enable them truly to serve the common good by striving to
increase the goods of this world and to make them more accessible to all.
204. We can no longer trust in the unseen forces
and the invisible hand of the market. Growth in justice requires more than
economic growth, while presupposing such growth: it requires decisions,
programmes, mechanisms and processes specifically geared to a better
distribution of income, the creation of sources of employment and an integral
promotion of the poor which goes beyond a simple welfare mentality. I am far
from proposing an irresponsible populism, but the economy can no longer turn to
remedies that are a new poison, such as attempting to increase profits by reducing
the work force and thereby adding to the ranks of the excluded.
But, you
still ask: What is the solution? That before God, each one turn work into a
personal gift of self! The problem is theological before it is economic.
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