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.