Word to the Wise
Sunday, September 10, 2006 - 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time
[Isaiah 35:4-7A; James 2:1-5; Mark 7:31-37]If a man with gold rings and fine clothes comes into your assembly, and a poor person in shabby clothes also comes in, and you pay attention to the one wearing the fine clothes and say, "Sit here, please," while you say to the poor one, "Stand there," or "Sit at my feet," have you not made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil designs?
There are nearly a billion Christians on this planet, and the scripture from James is in every Bible. But the spectre of poverty continues to make the lives of the majority of the people on this planet one of great deprivation. The phenomenon of "globalization" of economic forces does not seem to be helping the matter. Exploitation of human and natural resources for the economic gain of a minority is an ancient challenge to Christian belief. The apparent inability of Christian resources to get at the roots of this problem with effectiveness remains something of a mystery. The great Brazilian Archbishop Helder-Camara once said, "When I feed the hungry, I am called a saint. When I ask why they are hungry, I am called a communist." Christianity suffers from Marx's blunt accusation that it counsels people to look for "pie in the sky by and by" while tolerating terrible injustice on earth. The "awakening" of the Catholic Church to this has been slow. The first of the great "social" encyclicals, RERUM NOVARUM by Leo XIII, dates from the 1890's! My experience of popular consciousness of the Church's teaching on the great social problems is that these documents are unknown to most Catholics!!!!! The well-known conservative Catholic writer and columnist, William F. Buckley, publicly denounced Pope John XXIII's encyclical, MATER ET MAGISTRA. But most Catholics have probably never even read it! The Synod of Bishops in 1971 declared that action on behalf of social justice is a constitutive part of preaching the gospel. We cannot claim to be following Jesus' teachings if all we do is feed the hungry and not ask why they cannot get food on their own. The causes will run deeper than many people will find comfortable. But, as one wag once put it, the role of preaching is not simply to comfort the afflicted but also to afflict the comfortable! AMEN
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