The poor of the family of God

The Jerusalem Experiment, it was afterwards called. Benedict reminds us that the first seven people chosen to assist the apostles by the distribution of goods had to be “men filled with the Holy Spirit.” They therefore fulfilled not only a material task, but a spiritual one as important to that Early Christian community as was the Ministry of the Word and the Sacraments.

Benedict in his Encyclical God is Love had seen the union with Christ in the Eucharist as inseparable from the union with those Christ loves and will love in the future. This is now matched — and strengthened — by the spiritual nature of those who minister the Sacrament of the Eucharist and those who minister to the poor. This is not by chance.

Listen O Israel

Benedict goes back to the ‘Schema: that prayer said every day by Jews and kept near to the doorway and worn. “Listen O Israel, the Lord your God is One God. You will love the Lord with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your strength.” It is from this Schema that Benedict gets his great Yes to God. It cannot be only emotions. The great Yes to God commits all that we are: “intellect, will and emotions.” You will recall that Benedict speaking of the so called “freedom of the body” today stated that the Great Yes to the body could not be confined to the body. Freedom must include not only the body but all of us, ie, also intellect and reason.

A plethora of pieties

In speaking of the great Yes to God, Benedict again warns of pieties. These he knows can create a personal and emotional link with God but, like the Eros which does not proceed to the Agape, often remains at the level of emotions and tend to exclude love of neighbour. If I underline this it is because of the enormous place that pieties take in Trini Catholicism.

Some now claim that reports of visions of Our Lady and of messages from her are compulsory belief for Catholics and form part of revelation and of dogma. This is not the teaching of the Church. Curiously these devotions to Our Lady rarely include the Pieta: Our Lady at the foot of the Cross. They rarely include the horrors of the Crucifixion. Even devotion to the Eucharist is often to the Presence, but not to the Crucifixion without which the Presence makes little sense. Nor does the Faith. God’s love is not in the goodies, the Benny Hinn healings, the feeling nice. God’s love, Benedict continually reminds us, is in the pouring out of all upon a cross. Because he has poured out all, the Great Yes demands our all.

Love your neighbour

But Jews had another commandment: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” Jesus abolishes the distinction between the two commandments. Both become one. Benedict quotes the parable of the rich man and the poor man. The rich man is condemned eternally for no other sin but being blind to the poor man at his gate.

He quotes Matthew 25 on Judgment. Those who feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, welcome the stranger, see after the ill, visit the prisoner, do it to the Lord himself. Jesus, he remarks, so totally identifies with those in need that he becomes one with them. It follows from that ministry to the poor is as necessary a part of the Church as is the ministry of the Sacraments. The two are part of one and the same loving.

Love dries up

If I love God and ignore those in need, my love of God will eventually dry up. If I think that I can love my neighbour without the love of God, I am wrong. I can only love those who I do not appreciate (Benedict uses a stronger term than like) or not even know if I can see in them that divine spark and see them as God sees them as persons needing my love. This individual love is not however all that is needed. Benedict points out that the nomination of deacons in the Early Church is the organisation of the distribution of goods. The ministry to the poor cannot be left to my goodwill.

Organisation

He gives the example of Egypt where from the 4th century until the 6th century, each monastery established what was called a Deaconry for the distribution to the poor. Eventually every diocese in Egypt had a Deaconry. Deaconries were mentioned in Naples and in Rome during the 7th and 8th centuries. Rome is already mentioned as organising its work for the poor in the Acts of the Apostles.

Benedict tells the story of Laurence, the deacon in charge of the distribution at Rome and who was martyred in 258. The Pope and many of Laurence’s colleagues had been arrested. He himself was called by Rome’s civil authorities and given a certain time to collect the funds and jewels of the Church and to bring them to the authorities. Laurence collected the funds and distributed all among the poor. Then bringing the poor to the authorities he said, “These are the jewels of the Church.”

Later on in his Encyclical Benedict charges each Bishop to be directly in charge of all Catholic charities in his diocese. These must no longer be dispersed and spontaneous. They must have the same status under the Bishop as do the arrangements for sacraments or preaching.

A dignified life

This is not by chance. Benedict underlines that while the Church must maintain the universality of the demands of love, she has a specific duty of love within the Church as the family of God. He quotes Paul to the Galatians: “Work for the good of all especially in the family of believers.” No Catholic, Benedict demands, should be without the means to live a “dignified life.” I do not need to underline the importance of this to the Trini Church. One of its major weaknesses has been relegating the Catholic poor to the general category of poor in the organisation of its charity.

If we take the present debate on education it becomes a debate on schools which belong to the Catholic Church. From that it easily becomes a debate on Catholic elite schools at secondary level. But most of our poor Catholics — and they are in the majority in the Church — are not at these schools. They are at the disastrous government junior secs and, worse, may be at those shift schools. Furthermore we argue that the education of the poor is the affair of government. We therefore have little conscience over St Joseph’s Convent boasting that it hopes to have every classroom air-conditioned while many of the Catholic primary schools, on which the social mobility of the poor crucially depends, are in a disastrous condition. Our argument so far has been that teaching those likely to be of importance in the society will give us contacts in the future.

Well Benedict’s directive dramatically changes that. It is the poor who are “the jewels of the Church.”

Divided society

The relegation of poor Catholics to the general category of “poor” has other disastrous effects. Perhaps the principal one is the sharpening of the division between rich and poor parishes as the society itself is increasingly divided between the very, very wealthy and the despairing poor. Gated communities shut the wealthy living areas off from the poor, sometimes like the poor Lazarus in the Bible, at their door-step.

Those poor Catholics will not attend a church increasingly seen as a church of the rich: they are afraid to be stared at. The wealthy do not know the public transport of mini-bus and often dangerous taxi. They will go to private hospitals and if it is needed abroad for medical treatment. They do not have to be concerned with what happens in public hospitals.

Their children will go to private Catholic primary schools that the Catholic poor cannot afford. No one worries about if the crazed homeless is a Catholic. What we wish from the government and St Vincent de Paul is that they are taken up and out of our sight.

Rich parishes attract — and can solicit — major funding. Parishes in poor areas are poor. There is no way that a parish in Morvant or Blanchisseuse could attract the money CLICO gave to St Finbar’s.

How the poor live

Poor parishes serve those Catholics who cannot afford rent. They squat, sometimes five or six to a room, unable to afford division by sex with all that implies for rape and incest.

Their children may go to school with only sugar water for breakfast and their elderly infirm stay in bed in pampers for the day. And yet the Trini Catholic Church has in its midst some of the wealthiest and the most pious in the country.

Well there it is from Benedict, from St Paul and from the Early Church.

Our poor are not just the poor who we blithely blame for their own poverty. They are the poor of the family of God and as such must be given the means for a dignified life.

And on the State and charity to come.