From “readers” distilled.
QUAERITUR:
You haven’t commented on Pope Leo’s new document? How come?
The problem is that, by the spiritual abuse and constant drubbing we have had, over the last years, with the looming threat of some other looney off the cuff remarks or bizarre footnote even more bizarrely defended, many people have a kind of PTSD or the effects of moral abuse.
I remember back when we heard that a new papal document was about to come out and we would rub our hands together in anticipation. We’d get it and work through it looking for all the good stuff.
Then, more recently, we hear there is a papal document and many say, “no, not another”. Then you spend a week with the sort of dread you have on a Sunday Mass in a suburban parish wondering how cringeworthy the sign of peace will be…but it takes a “week”. You ring your hands and look to the exits. Then, when they get the document, their first impulse is to look for the bad stuff. And they find it.
That’s NOT their fault.
We need now years of healing. The damage of moral abuse does not go away easily.
That said…
This is not Leo’s intentional document, that is, programmatic for his pontificate as Redemptor Hominis was for John Paul II.
The document. It isn’t all that interesting. Take care of the poor. Okay! Greed is bad. Okay! Heaven is more important than earthly wealth. Okay!
There are a lot of contingents to be sorted and people will have different solutions.
It seems to be a continuation in some vectors of what we had before which was profoundly uninteresting because of its lack of balance. For example, it isn’t just to speak of what everyone is supposed to do for a massive illegal influx of people across a sovereign nation’s border, without also addressing the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of children probably to trafficking of the worst sort, or the massive disturbance the newcomers make within a nation’s borders thereafter.
Gotta let’em all in is just shallow. Does that also include single men of military age from China?
The walls around the Vatican remain very much standing.
However, I will also say that although there are many statements we can’t merely accept without reservation, this document is great for the depth and breadth of its scriptural, PATRISTIC (a main interest of mine), and historical treatment of poverty in the teachings and apostolic works of the Church throughout two millennia.
As for the usual suspects talking and writing about it making videos, etc., who pop up like midnight mushrooms now, I suggest that they at least get the NAME of the document right. Its Dilexi te… not Delixit te (to the guy who decided not to respond to my multiple emails back when).
Just sayin’, friend.
Let’s take a look at a paragraph and see what can be extrapolated from it.
13. Looking beyond the data — which is sometimes “interpreted” to convince us that the situation of the poor is not so serious — the overall reality is quite evident: “Some economic rules have proved effective for growth, but not for integral human development. Wealth has increased, but together with inequality, with the result that ‘new forms of poverty are emerging.’ The claim that the modern world has reduced poverty is made by measuring poverty with criteria from the past that do not correspond to present-day realities. In other times, for example, lack of access to electric energy was not considered a sign of poverty, nor was it a source of hardship. Poverty must always be understood and gauged in the context of the actual opportunities available in each concrete historical period.” [10] Looking beyond specific situations and contexts, however, a 1984 document of the European Community declared that “‘the poor’ shall be taken to mean persons, families and groups of persons whose resources (material, cultural and social) are so limited as to exclude them from the minimum acceptable way of life in the Member States in which they live.” [11] Yet if we acknowledge that all human beings have the same dignity, independent of their place of birth, the immense differences existing between countries and regions must not be ignored.
I can’t shake the idea that this means that if you don’t have a mobile phone and internet, you are “poor”.
On the the hand, I remember times when you were thought to be “poor” when you couldn’t get work.
Having stuff or not is not a measure of poverty. We mustn’t discount the spiritual poverty which Mother Theresa underscored and we must forget John Paul II on the dignity of work.
Now, it seems to be access to stull. Mostly free stuff. And there is no such thing as “free stuff” because ultimately someone had to pay to produce it.
Remember “Obama phones”? I remember videos of people in Detroit lined up for free phones. Asked where they came from, laughter, “I don’t know… his stash!”.
It is a corporal work of mercy to give aid to the poor. This is an imperative from Christ.
However, I am not sure that this globalistic labeling of “poor” is what we are to be on watch for in our daily lives.
I’m reminded of Screwtape who told his student Wormwood to get his “patient” interested in “the poor”. “The poor” … out there, the concept. Not the poor guy right in front of you.
Keep it abstract.
A take away is that this document from Leo could prompt people to do deeper dive into the more profound social teaching documents which popes gave us some, say, 15 years ago and more.
In sum, this document… okay. I look for something better, and more concrete, that says something new, down the line. Still, repetitia iuvant.
Rome brightened with the rising sun at 17:17.
