SSVP Scotland National Meeting
Saturday 17 October
Do not forget the Poor

When Peter met Paul their key criterion of authenticity was not to forget the poor. This principle given by Peter to Paul, that Paul’s communities should not succumb to the self-centred lifestyle of the pagans- remains just as relevant today when a new self-centred paganism is growing. The Catholic Church may not always be able to live up to the beauty of the Gospel in every respect but there is one sign we should never lack: the option for those who are least, those whom society discards.

Do not forget the poor. Not only was this the demand that the first Pope made to the apostle to the Gentiles at the birth of the Church, it was also the plea made by the Brazilian, Cardinal Hummes who was sat beside Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio in the last conclave as the count for Bergolio went over the seventy-seven votes needed to make him pope. Hummes hugged him, kissed him and said, ‘Don’t forget the poor.'

In Paisley we have embarked on a diocesan synod and its themes are about embedding lay leadership at the heart of our Church. With an army of well-formed and equipped lay leaders everywhere throughout the Church and society we can truly be a Church of New Evangelisation.

Of course when we think of evangelisation we tend to think of only one thing. We imagine street preachers knocking on neighbour’s doors to talk about Jesus. And if that is all we imagine it to be, we are wrong because it is far too narrow and simplistic in itself. Yes, as Pope Francis says, ‘There is no evangelisation without the specific proclamation of Jesus as Lord’. But he also goes on to say that this does not simply mean going round the doors with Bibles in our hands. Catholic evangelisation is much wider than that.

In his encyclical, Evangelii Gaudium, Francis challenges us Catholics that we evangelise above all when we care for the poor as Jesus did and that whenever the Church gets outside its four walls and forms community and fraternity with the marginalised, then we are really evangelising.

Evangelisation is about the explicit proclamation of Jesus as Lord but that therefore means it has to have a societal dimension because Jesus’ own feeding and healing of thousands was aimed at social impact. Our Catholic faith commits us to society and above all to the margins of society. Truly anyone who reads the Gospel with fresh eyes soon sees how it is nothing if it is not an insistent demand of society to open its structures and cultures and include the poor who cry out to us day and night. So the Church, if it is to be true to the proclamation of Jesus and His ways, will always have a special heart and voice for the poor, a voice on which the poor can count.

The Gospel is Social and Communal

Pope Francis is right to remind us that Catholic charities are not NGOs and all of us who are members of the likes of SSVP are not aid workers but disciples of Christ; ours in not a career but a vocation. We do not simply give aid but become other Christs, with His eyes and hands and voice and heart. We do insistently challenge every injustice that discriminates against the poor but we are not afraid to talk of charity because charity, caritas, means loving kindness and, even more than justice, we all need to experience human kindness, love, compassion and mercy, both divine and human. So, although we share many external similarities with aid work, our hearts will always be unashamedly the sacred heart of Jesus, bending down to wash the feet of his beloved poor. Catholics ascribe not to any philosophy or ideology but follow a Person, Jesus Christ.

And two things we know about Jesus are, firstly, that He Himself was poor and, secondly, that He was personally close to the poor and excluded. God’s heart has such a special place for the poor that, in Jesus of Nazareth, the Triune God Himself became poor. Though God could have made His Son rich He chose poverty for Him so that the poor would see in Jesus not just a man who worked for the poor but a man who was really one of their own. Our Saviour was born in a manger in the midst of animals that belonged to the poor. When he was presented in the Temple it was with two turtle doves, the offering made by those who could not afford a lamb.

The Lord Jesus began the proclamation of the Gospel with the words, ‘ The Spirit of the Lord has anointed me to bring to bring good news to the poor’. In these words he directed the heart of the Gospel to teaching his disciples how to live in communion with the needy and how to lovingly engage with them. Jesus’ very first proclamation of the Gospel already had clear moral implications for his followers that gathered around the demands of charity towards the poor.

So crowds of the dispossessed followed Him in consequence of this very anointing to preach the good news to them. He showed the poor 'His first mercy'. His self-identification with the poor and His obvious distress at finding so much poverty in His own society, His compassion for the needy who always took first place in His attention and His determination to restore them to full inclusion in the polity, all of these are the basis of our concern for society's most neglected members.

In Jesus the world found a God who came down not to save specially chosen individuals from a rotten society but to save true society from rotten individualism. He came not to free us from social ties but to make those very same social relations among humanity just and holy. His Gospel connected evangelisation with basic humanity, the proclamation of God’s Kingdom with the authentic development of human society on earth. So you simply cannot accept his message of eternal salvation without hearing and responding to His urgent commitment to brotherly love in our present world.

From the life and mission of Jesus onwards, the entire history of our Church has been marked, uninterruptedly, by the presence of the poor in our bosom. This is why, again today, in our own times, we need to rediscover the radical joy of being a Church not just for the poor but one that is poor with the poor.

These are nice words surely. But when we just take them for granted without really sacrificing our collective lives to making real inroads into poverty locally and globally then our Gospel winds up in big trouble. It becomes a Gospel itself dangerously and harmfully excluded from its own home and soul. It is a dangerous state of affairs for the Church when we pay no more than lip service to poverty because such lip-service anaesthetises us from the real lifeblood of our Catholic faith. The Gospel loses its amazement and we lose our excitement for it and our fire to be avengers of the poor! We stop realising that Jesus is really there, present and alive in the poor who are before our eyes and that serving them we serve Him.
Jesus said the measure we give out is the measure we get back and it is only insofar as we give to the poor that we begin to thrive as a Church. The opposite is also true. Our Church in Scotland is in decline. There, I have said it! But do we need look any further for the cause of this than that we forgot to go out to find the poor, living in darkness and doom and preferred to stay in churches, warm and bright? Lack of solidarity with the poor inevitably impacts on our relationship with God. As St James, again, put it, 'How can God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods, sees a brother in need and yet refuses help?'

So let us banish the false Gospel in our midst that says all that matters is our own personal, or private, relationships with God. Let us never fall into the insidious trap of saying, after carrying out a few gestures towards the poor, ‘Well now I’ve done my bit’. The Gospel is not meant to ease our conscience but will never rest till 'all men and the whole man' are safe and in a place of well-being. The Church’s battle of anxiety and hope must go on without ceasing till the whole of the Kingdom has reached all of the poor. Indeed every single Christian and every local Church are called to be God’s soldiers in a liberation army whose battle cry is inclusion and preference for the poor.

The struggle, of course, goes on at a number of levels. Firstly it involves small daily acts of solidarity with the poor, personally, but better in associations like SSVP, in meeting the urgent needs we encounter, in the poor man who turns up at our door there and then. These ongoing, concrete moments of compassion and acts of charity are the well-spring and only sure foundation of our work at other levels in favour of the poor.

But secondly it means working towards the integral development of the poor. We have to attend to the urgent needs they present us with at the time but then we have to think of how to get them onto a path of continual and progressive well-being. That means ongoing material, human, social and spiritual pastoral care. Often, in fact, the worst discrimination the poor suffer is that lack of spiritual care. The great majority of them have a special openness to the faith. They need God and we must not fail to offer them His friendship, His blessing, His word, the celebration of the Sacraments and a journey of growth and maturity in their faith. Our preferential option for the poor must not forget the special religious care of their souls.

And thirdly, it means working to eliminate the structural causes of poverty. Rightly, as a Church, we are concerned to preserve the purity and truth of our doctrines, handed down from Jesus. No complaint about that from me! But how can we, at the same time, be passive, or indulgent of complicit about intolerable structures of injustice around the same world. Surely this is part of the doctrine of our Church too. It can never be enough that our beliefs are pure unless our action to redeem the world is also filled with Christ’s heart. As St James put it, ‘ S how me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds’. A ‘walk on by’ Church that minds its own business without having a lively, active concern for the poor coursing through our veins, a Church that has forgotten how to personally and effectively help the poor to live with dignity, is a Church that will soon fall apart, no matter how pure its doctrines, no matter how much it talks about the social issues of the time or criticises the government of the day.

The Gospel is so clear and direct, so simple and eloquent on all of this that no interpretation can change it. Our doctrines must never have the effect of obscuring or weakening the force of our radical option for the poor but, quite the reverse, must urge us to accept this perennial challenge with courage and zeal, to take up anew humble and generous service, and justice and mercy towards the poor. Why should we complicate a Gospel teaching that is, in essence, so simple? No-one is allowed to say his vocation is exempted from personal closeness to the poor because his particular vocation demands his attention somewhere else. No-one is allowed to regard himself as exempted from concern for the poor and for social justice. Certainly no two situations are the same and each person or local Church has to reflect upon their own circumstances. But one great issue of our times is fundamental to all of us without exception and that is our inclusion in what we think of and do for the poor.

The Economy

‘When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a Communist’. The Church of Jesus must itself be poor and it must serve Christ in the poor before any other service. But, as Dom Helder Camara insisted, then it must be a Church that holds civic power to task and that asks hard questions of politicians, economists and electorates as to why the poor are poor in the first place. Catholic social teaching, while never party political, is adamant and insistent in its call for an economy that recognises that the goods of the earth belong to all people, even if this requite an economics of redistribution of wealth to bring it about. The mere fact some people are born in places with fewer resources and less development, at home or abroad, does not mean they are supposed to live with less dignity. Those of us fortunate enough to be born with more than enough should renounce some of our rights in order to put ourselves at the service of others who have less than they need and share the earth’s goods more generously.

And the same Catholic Social Teaching calls for systems that put concern for the vulnerable above preference for the privileged and powerful. The Gospel is not a manifesto of advantages for the individual but a proclamation that seeks to safeguard the common good of all, collectively. Jesus taught that the end of a politics of individualism is personal and societal decay while the fruits of pursuing the common good are justice and peace for all. In the face of many high-brow and esoteric economic ideologies about markets and capital and the like, our social teaching holds our economists’ and politicians’ feet to the fire about the actual, concrete reality of people’s lives, here and now. Instead of sowing ideological seeds of conflict that talk of strivers and shirkers, we insist that governments foster unity around decent and honest work and just pay. Instead of taking a partial view of the effect of economic policies in the West and concluding that market economies are working very well, thank you very much, we take the total view of their global impact, especially on the much more populous and poorer southern hemisphere and find a fuller and, let us be honest, much less self-congratulatory picture of market mechanisms.

Today’s Catholic Social Teaching says that, in the end, the endemic and structural blight of poverty will be resolved only by a radical rejection of the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation. Otherwise no solution will be found to the other of the world’s problems because we believe that inequality is at the root of all our social ills and global unrest.

A transformed economics will shape policy not firstly by markets and speculation so much as by the thought of the dignity of every person and the protection of our common good and heritage for all. Such considerations are, of course, irksome to present day market economists who get vexed and impatient whenever question about ethics are raised, or whenever the idea of global solidarity is invoked, or whenever the distribution of goods is mentioned, or whenever reference is made to protecting labour and defending the powerless, or whenever allusion is made to God Who demands a commitment to economic justice. But we have to be courageous and insistent on these realities and take the cultural battle to the status quo. The world will never grow in justice simply on the back of the mechanism of free markets alone.

We have to pray for more politicians capable of appreciating their lofty vocation to public life which remains one of the highest forms of charity because it works towards the common good of all. We need more Catholics to enter civic life genuinely disturbed by the state of society and the lives of the poor or to become economists who usher in a new mind-set that tears down the high wall of separation between a market for the privileged and the common good of all in society

The new poor and excluded
We cannot end without mentioning those new forms of poverty and exclusion which have risen in recent generations. We must draw near to these new forms of poverty and marginalisation, even where it makes us unpopular and brings us no tangible benefit. We mean the homeless, the addicts, the elderly who are increasingly isolated and abandoned, the refugees and migrants. Christian countries should have generous openness to refugees and migrants without being worried about losing their national identity. In fact they will find that the inclusion of these poor ones will create, in time and with care, a newer and richer national identity. Then there are the new slaves of our contemporary world, the victims of trafficking. The Lord challenges us as He challenged Cain: ‘where is your brother?’, and we cannot look the other way.

Last but by no means least among the new poor, excluded and vulnerable in our world, the Church cares with particular love and attention for unborn children, the most defenceless and innocent among us. The defence of unborn life is closely linked to the defence of each and every other human right. Human beings are ends in themselves and never a means of resolving other problems. You do not need faith to see the unborn child is a human being. You just need a pair of eyes. It is not progressive politics to solve social problems by killing babies. On the other hand we have to ask ourselves if we have really done enough to accompany poor women in hard situations where abortion seems a quick solution to profound anguish. More work needs to be done.

Pope Francis, in Laudato Sii, has drawn the world’s attention to the fact that Creation as a whole is also weak and defenceless before economics of indiscriminate exploitation. We are stewards of other creatures as well as beneficiaries of Creation and Creation itself stands at our door begging for some tender care and attention.

Conclusion
The Holy Spirit moves us to compassion for the excluded. He inspires in us an attentiveness which opens us up to see them as one with ourselves. This loving attentiveness is the beginning of true concern for their personal identity and dignity and it inspires us to seek their immediate, concrete good.

The Spirt allows His Bride, the Church, to see the poor and excluded as beautiful beyond their immediate appearance. He brings us to love them by name and to treasure each one of them with great value and this is what makes our option for the poor different from all other ideologies. Only our Church’s sincere closeness ensures the poor man a lasting home in our Catholic community and sets him on a path of liberation. With our preferential option for the poor really rediscovered and lived, our proclamation of the Gospel will once more be understood and embraced by the world.