Blogs For Victory

But not the sort of fight against poverty, perhaps, that we think of here in America:

Presiding over the celebration of Mass for the Solemnity of Mary Mother of God, Pope Benedict XVI re-emphasized the need to fight poverty to build a society of peace. Violence, hatred and mistrust, which he called “forms of poverty,” must be brought to an end, especially in the Holy Land, he exhorted.

The Holy Father began his homily by commemorating the Incarnation, “a light which will not go out and which offers the faithful and men of good will the possibility to construct a civilization of love and of peace.”

“The Second Vatican Council said, in this regard, that ‘by His incarnation the Son of God has united Himself in some fashion with every man,’” the Pope noted.

With his birth in Bethlehem, Benedict XVI said, Jesus reveals to humanity that God chose poverty for himself in his coming among them. “The scene that the shepherds saw first and that confirmed the announcement made to them by the angel is that of the stable where Mary and Jesus looked for refuge and of the manger in which the Virgin laid the Infant wrapped in swaddling clothes.”

Turning to today’s celebration of the 42nd World Day of Peace, the Pope explained that its theme– Combating poverty. Building peace– contains two elements: “the poverty chosen and proposed by Jesus and of combating poverty to make the world more just.”

The second consideration is that “there is poverty that God does not want: a poverty that impedes individuals and families from living according to their dignity; a poverty which offends justice and equality and which threatens peaceful coexistence,” the Pontiff said. In addition, he pointed to forms of spiritual poverty: “marginalization and moral and spiritual misery.”

“To combat unjust poverty it is necessary to rediscover sobriety and solidarity, those evangelical and at the same time, universal values,” Pope Benedict asserted.

We wrap ourselves up so much in income levels and judge peoples’ wealth or poverty by the amount of things they have. Now, to be sure, there is actual, physical poverty which we must, as far as possible, end. Those who lack their daily bread, and a roof over their heads, and clothes on their back – they must be succored by a world which does not pause to count the monetary cost of such aid. But while such physical aid has its vital place in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t attack the real poverty of our modern world, which is spiritual.

Most of the people in the world today are poor. Most of the people who have ever lived were born in to poverty and never rose out of it. And yet with poverty being the normal condition of Man, it has only been in the past century or so that we’ve gone down into the depth of human degradation.

In the last century, at least 100 million people were murdered for political reasons. We abort millions of our children every year. Pornography has become mainstream and the objectivication of our fellow human beings – mostly women, but a large number of men, as well – is considered a right so important that we daren’t place even mild restrictions on it. We think people have a right to lie on our streets in their own filth. We’re teaching our children to massacre their school mates. People set off bombs to kill the innocent. These are the actions of people who are spiritually impoverished – people who may, especially in America and the larger West, live in the greatest of ease and surrounded by wealth kings of the past couldn’t dream of, but who are so morally bankrupt that they can’t bestir themselves to even so much as see evil, let alone do anything about it.

We’re given the simple solutions – just give the Palestinians some land. Just provide sex education. Just withdraw from Iraq. Just ban racial profiling at airport security. Just control guns. Just increase foreign aid. Just go through the UN. Just to this. Just to that. Just do the other thing. But almost nowhere in this world is there the leader who doesn’t merely give lip service to the concept of hope, but who seeks to make it manifest. In other words, the leaders who understand that the problems of the day are fundamentally spiritual are few and far between. You could give the Palestinians all the land you want – give them Alaska and throw in half of Canada for good measure, and it won’t change the fact that the people who strap bombs on themselves don’t really need land, they need a moral revival. Provide all the birth control and sex education you want, and it won’t cure the person who has been degraded to the point where they say, “yeah, give me some money and I’ll allow a stranger to f**k me on camera”. Triple the budget for Head Start and develope the most comprehensive anti-violence education in school and it won’t do anything to sway a kid who is learning, step by step, that its cool to take guns to school and massacre the student body. We’re bleeding to death and we keep trying to put a band aid on the societal lacerations.

Sobriety and solidarity are, indeed, the keys to a revived human society and the restoration of an advanced civilization. Sobriety – not just not getting drunk and stoned, but a set of mental attitudes which refuses excess and which places self indulgence on a much lower plain than self sacrifice. Solidarity – an understanding that we really are our brother’s keeper and that even those who are doing the most wicked deeds must not be allowed to make hatred and despair grow in our hearts. Naturally, as a Christian, I believe I know where one can get this – tap in, that is, to the wellsprings of sobriety and solidarity. But not all my brothers and sisters are Christian. But, still, it remains something we must do – Christian or not – in order to survive as humans rather than die off as a failed experiment, or regress entirely into savagery.