Fr. Mark Patrick Hederman: We have to be careful not to create a wrong impression on a day like today. Some interpretations of the Gospel might suggest that Poverty is good and wealth is bad. Nothing could be further from the truth. Riches are not evil and being poor is not a blessing. Poverty is one of the greatest blemishes on our common duty to create a liveable home for all 8.2 billion people on this planet at this time. There is nothing whatever to recommend poverty in itself as a way of life. Poverty in itself is actually a disgrace. It has become one of the most urgent challenges of our time. Today, almost 700 million people, that is 8.5 percent of the global population,live in extreme poverty. This should not be the case. The United Nations Summit in New York in 2015 vowed to end extreme poverty altogether by the year 2030, that is five years from now. There is certainly enough wealth being generated to make this happen. But it is not going to happen. Why not? Because of the age old struggle between basic needs and excessive consumption. Global hunger isn’t about a lack of food. Right now, the world produces enough food to nourish every human being alive. But the sad fact is that one-fifth of all the food produced is lost or wasted. We throw away, according to statistical analysis, at least a billion meals every day.
People who are poor have every right to expect more from the rest of us. Extreme poverty is not a blessing, it is an entirely remediable blemish.
What Jesus Christ has said about poverty is this: ‘Blessed are the poor in Spirit.’ This is quite a different reality. There is nothing wrong or evil about being rich. It is how you use those riches that makes them good or bad. ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” [Mark 10:25]. Why is this so? Because of the cancer of greed. Greed, as the root of all evil, is what we all suffer from in one way or another. Every one of us knows the symptoms: We can never have enough, we always want more.
Two days before Christmas, on the 23rd December, 1849, one of the greatest writers of all time, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who was in his late twenties, stood against a wall in Saint Petersburg in Russia. It was early morning and he was awaiting execution by firing squad. He had been condemned to death for subversive activity. He was counting the buttons on one of the soldier’s uniforms as that soldier raised his rifle. Suddenly a horse gallops into the yard; the rider is carrying a last minute reprieve from the Czar. The young man falls to his knees and vows to live every moment of the rest of his life with the same fullness and intensity of those final seconds before he was shot. That was the beginning of what later became known as ‘Existentialism.’Living every moment of your life as though it might be your last. When you get up in the morning and put your two feet out on the floor, are you aware that every move you make, every breath you take, is a gift from elsewhere. It’s not your doing. You are nothing, and you can do nothing on your own. Everything you are, and everything you have, come from elsewhere. You are a nobody, a pauper, a beggar. Those two feet that touch the ground are the only two you’ve got. No matter how much you yearn for the most fashionable shoes on the market, you can only put one shoe on each foot at a time. That’s the way we are, the way we were built, and we just have to get on with it. Being ‘poor in spirit’ is knowing the facts of life, recognizing our existential poverty and accepting this as a foregone conclusion, a done deal. Greed is refusal to accept such poverty. Mahatma Ghandi spoke for all of us when he said: ‘the world has enough resources for everyone’s need but not enough for everyone’s greed.’ If current trends continue, 8.9 per cent of the world’s population will still live in extreme poverty by the time we reach 2030. Imelda Marcos, when forced to flee The Philippines with her husband in 1986, left behind her, in the presidential palace, 2,700 pairs of shoes.