The Year of the Poor

THE Church, through our bishops, has declared 2015 the

Year of the Poor. It’s part of grand 9-year plan of new evangelization

in preparation of the celebration of the fifth centenary of the

Christianization of the Philippines in 2021.

            We should do all we can to promote this ecclesial thrust

for the year to come, keeping in mind the over-all idea of the plan so

that we can develop the proper spirit, attitude and skills needed to

undertake the many activities involved.

            For this Year of the Poor, we just have to make one

crucial clarification though. While it’s very understandable that the

immediate concern is what to do with those living in some form of

human misery, we should never forget that there is such thing as bad

poverty as well as good poverty.

            We should not just jump into the Year of the Poor doing

all sorts of works of charity and mercy without making this

distinction, because bad poverty can only be solved, or at least, to

be realistic, relieved to a great extent if the good poverty is

developed and lived well.

            In short, if there is no good poverty, we cannot expect to

do much about bad poverty. We would just be indulging in showy but

useless sloganeering and other mechanical and soulless programs

composed of modules, talks and p.r. campaigns, complete with photo

ops.

            At worst, we would just be going through the motions

without the substance. High-class hypocrisy, in other words, a kind of

new pharisaicalism—good and attractive more in words than in action,

more interested in looking good than in delivering. Sad to say, this

is an image that has been hounding the Church for long, and we need to

correct that drastically.

            Bad poverty is the one that dehumanizes us, that

diminishes our dignity and reduces us to mere objects or animals, that

disables us to do our functions as persons and as children of God.

            As a way of describing them journalistically, our bishops

refer to them as “the unwashed, the oppressed, the scorned, the

powerless, the miserable and the outcast.” But I’m sure there are

still other forms of bad poverty that are so subtle as to escape these

categorizations.

            We need to be more aware and wary of these trickier forms

of bad poverty that can manage to appear “rich” according to our

purely human standards and estimations. Sad to say, this kind of bad

poverty is spreading rapidly, and is affecting our millionaires and

billionaires and the powerful of this world.

            Such awareness would lead us to tackle the challenge of

tackling bad poverty more realistically and seriously, and would help

us to avoid falling into simplism that would divide the rich and the

poor according to mere economic or social measures.

            Good poverty, on the other hand, is the one exemplified by

Christ himself who, as St. Paul said, emptied himself all the way to

offering his very own life on the cross. He is the model to follow,

the template to reproduce in our life, the paradigm to go through.

            This is the good poverty referred to in one of the

beatitudes, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom

of God.” It’s the poverty that means one has a true and abiding hunger

for God, a hunger that involves total detachment from the things of

the world insofar as these things become a hindrance to live genuine

charity or love for God and for others.

            It does not mean that we should reject the things of this

world. Good poverty is not averse to having things, since as human

beings, we are always in need of material things. We just have to see

to it that everything is used for God’s glory and for the common good,

a continuing struggle for us given our weakened human condition.

            When we have this good poverty in place in our heart, then

it would be easy to truly love others, to sympathize and empathize

with them, to the point of sharing what we have with them and even

giving all that we have, in imitation of Christ, who gave his very own

life for us.

            Obviously, in this we have to start to small things,

making use of those daily ordinary events that ask of us to be

detached from things so we could love Christ more and serve others

better. If we persist in this, we can be ready for the bigger

challenges of good poverty.

            Let’s hope the Year of the Poor brings our life of good

poverty to a higher level.