TWO Sundays ago, a priest extolled material poverty (yes, he said material) as a place where one finds spiritual freedom. I would like to rebut this and similar such Lenten reflections that glorify poverty as a blessing and opportunity to share in Christ’s redemptive suffering and death.
This sort of pious transcendentalism or unrealism veils people’s minds and blurs the reality of poverty’s sociological causes. It sedates victims into sublimely holding back any feeling of righteous moral indignation at their marginal social status thus helping to perpetuate it.
Poverty in fact enslaves the spirit by wrapping a person up in the all-consuming daily grind to keep body and soul together. What leads to freedom is voluntary poverty or the spirit of detachment from such worldly cares as material wealth and power. Christ refers to this when he says “blessed are the poor in spirit for they shall see God.”
But that is only half of the equation. Detachment, which essentially includes the renunciation of greed, qualifies us to see God only if it frees us to love and serve others in the manner Christ teaches us...with all our hearts and as we love ourselves.
Unwanted or socially imposed poverty, the kind homeless and jobless parents of street children are suffering, is a scourge not a blessing. It is an indictment of society’s failure to meet the material needs of all its members. It specifically indicts its Catholic members of expressing their faith solely by observance of prescribed religious laws and rituals and not by works of mercy that St. Paul says are the sole proof that Christ lives in them.
We read In Scriptures that Christ came so we “may have life and have it more abundantly.” The absence of abundance of material life among millions of Filipinos begs the question, if Christians are supposed to love one another why is there so much poverty and suffering among so many in this supposedly Christian country?
A growing number of Catholics is beginning to see poverty as more immoral and more unChristian than bikini contests, artificial contraceptives, divorce, etc. Bishops and clergy had better realize that poverty is society’s collective mortal sin and the biggest moral challenge of a Church that they claim to lead on the narrow road of the Christ who suffered and died so we may “have life and have it more abundantly.”
The recently announced cooperation of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines with government in the war against poverty is hopefully the onset of realization and of atonement. In any case, a new Church of the poor cannot rise one Easter Sunday in the future without atoning for society’s collective sin this Good Friday and for many more Good Fridays to come.