The Church is with the poor

62. The Biblical precept must not be distorted nor disguised. It runs counter to the spirit of the worldand to our natural sensitivity. Our nature and our culture are repelled by poverty.

People living in poverty and wealthy alike sometimes refer to the poverty of the Gospel in cynical terms. Christians are then accused of wishing to perpetuate poverty. But to scorn poverty in this way would be the work of the devil. The mark of Satan (Cf. Mt. 4) is refusing to do the will of God by quoting his own Words.

One of the addresses delivered by Pope John Paul II can help us to avoid this conclusion, which is a trap that would enable us to justify our selfishness. During his visit to the Lixão de São Pedro shantytown in Brazil on 19 October 1991, the Holy Father reflected on the first Beatitude of the Gospel of St. Matthew. He explained the link between poverty and trust in God, between happiness and total surrender to the Creator. He then continued "But there also exists another poverty, which is quite different from the poverty that Christ declared to be blessed, and which affects a multitude of our brethren, hampering their integral development as persons. Faced with this kind of poverty, which is the lack and deprivation of the material things they need, the Church speaks out ... This is why the Church knows that all social changes must necessarily come about through a conversion of hearts, and she prays for this. That is the first and the main mission of the Church(⁹⁰)."

As we have already said, the call of God handed on through the Church is evidently an appeal to share, to active and practical charity, addressed not only to Christians but to everyone. As in the past, and more than ever today, the Church is present to all those who are performing humanitarian work to serve other human beings, working for their needs and their most basic rights.

The Church's contribution to the development of each human being and whole peoples is not restricted to combating poverty and under-development. There also exists a form of poverty caused by the conviction that the pursuit of technical and economic progress is enough to make each person more worthy to be called a human being. But soul-less development cannot suffice for the human being, and an excess of wealth and affluence is as harmful to the person as an excess of poverty. It is in the "development model" created by the northern hemisphere and spreading throughout the southern hemisphere, that the sense of religion and the human values stand the risk of being overwhelmed by a mentality of consumption, sought-after for its own sake.