Reflections on the first reading today
Today (February 5, fifth Sunday in Ordinary time) the first reading was from the prophet Isaiah:
Sharing your bread with the hungry, sheltering the oppressed and the homeless; Clothing the naked when you see them, and not turning your back on your own. Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your wound shall quickly be healed; Your vindication shall go before you, and the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer, you shall cry for help, and he will say: Here I am! If you bestow your bread on the hungry and satisfy the afflicted; Then light shall rise for you in the darkness, and the gloom shall become for you like midday; (Isaiah 58:7-10)
This and similar passages in the Old Testament are very powerful ones, reminding us of our responsibility to the poor. But while I was on vacation I started reading Mollat’s The Poor in the Middle Ages, and one point he stresses in his analysis is how frequently the Church in the Middle Ages had risen in the defense of the poor, both individually and as a class, but how infrequently it challenged or even questioned the social order which created the poor, or at least raised significant obstacles to their becoming “not poor”. (Maybe this changes later on in the book: I’ve only read the first four chapters.)
Now the passage above, and ones like it lend themselves naturally to a personalist interpretation, since they are cast in terms of what you (the reader) are to do in response to God’s call. And, in a rural, agricultural civilization in which most people never travel more than a few days’ walk from their village, a personalist approach makes sense. Society is essentially horizontal in nature (though with class inequalities already appearing) and the poor are your neighbor and known to you by name?
But is a personalist reading sufficient given the present size and complexity of our economy? First, the poor are very often no longer are neighbors in the sense of proximity in terms of geographic or social space. When I teach my first year seminar on this topic, I am repeatedly struck by the fact that many of my middle class students have never had any significant contact with someone who is poor. They are an undifferentiated other, living somewhere else. They remain, however, our neighbors in the specific Christian sense.
Second, the problem is vast. Current charitable contributions by both individuals and corporations are approximately 310 billion per year. This covers the whole gamut of giving, including gifts to support universities, museums, etc. and not just “charitable” gifts in the narrow sense. Based on 2004 data, only about 5-10% went directly to human services. This is not easy to measure, since gifts to “religious organizations” (the largest category) must yield at one remove substantial amounts that aid the poor in some way. In the same way, some portion of the gifts given to higher education must provide scholarships to help students. So for purposes of discussion, let me estimate the total amount of direct and indirect “charitable” giving to the poor at 1/3 of this amount, or 100 billion dollars. Total government spending (federal, local and state) on “welfare” (income-tested benefits, not including social security and medicare) is in excess of 500 billion dollars a year. (The most recent figures I could find were for 2000, when the total was 436 billion.)
Third, is charitable giving (either directly by individual/corporate gifts to charity or indirectly via taxation and government programs) an adequate solution, or do we need to challenge the social structures that are part of the problem? Asking this question often puts people on the defensive, and perhaps it should, since it implies that the structures which make them able to give generously to the poor are really part of the problem. In this context I am very fond of an acerbic quote attributed to Dom Holder Camara of Brazil: “When I give bread to the poor, they call me a saint; when I ask why there are so many poor, they call me a communist.”
These are mostly questions to which I do not have clear answers. I am partial to the personalist solution: as someone in the Catholic Worker movement put it, at the Last Judgment Jesus is going to say, “When I was hungry you gave me to eat,” not “when I was hungry you helped me apply for foodstamps.” But I am realist enough to know (or cynical enough to suspect) that charitable contributions are not going to more than double overnight (even given massive tax cuts or subsidies in the form of tax credits) to cover the portion of welfare funded by government spending. Therefore, for a significant amount of time (barring a massive change of heart by most of the American population) government is going to have to be part of the solution. But I also realize that any government solution is going to institutionalize many of the same structures that are at the heart of the problem. Thus I am in a conundrum from which I do not see a clear exit. Thoughts on the matter?
Comments are closed.
Yes we need to challenge the social structures that are part of the problem, and I think our Church calls us to do so. I am only familiar with the United states but in this country, attempting to find the root of any problem is frowned upon. We tend to let the problem blossom and then slap a band-aid upon it.
This is penny wise and pound foolish, but the people who complain the most about federal expenditures seem to be the most fervently against spending enough to allow a thorough examination of what caused the problem.
If a man has a good job, and had a healthy support system elevating him ( Family, Church, Government) from the day he was born, he contributes and is not a burden to society. If he does not have that support he may wind up in prison, contributes nothing but damage to society, and he costs taxpayers roughly 40,000 dollars a year to house him in prison. This makes no sense.
I do not have the answer to how we shape the political environment to the point where reason can return to the discussion. I say this with only the greatest sense of both sadness and shame.
I don’t know whether it’s the best solution (the whole solution is Christ’s return, of course) but in my house our solution is to give above tithe.
Wonsider 10% the Christian minimum for anyone not actively requiring assistance NOW. As we do not actively require assistance right now, we start at tithe to church and church ministries. Anything additional is directly to the poor (through Christian rather than secular avenues whenever possible). Starting from 1% over tithe, we have a guideline for how much above tithe we give: a percent or two for a year when the budget is quite tight, and increasing percentages for years when we are very blessed in the financial department.
We basically worked out a spreadsheet ahead of time which had us at 1% extra if we were near poverty line and 50% extra if we had the kind of income that makes you really wealthy: seven figures or whatever.
Then we said, “Okay, God: You do what is your will; we don’t know exactly what income you’ll bless us with over the coming years, but whatever it is, we’ll be faithful to proportionally, with tithe-plus-one as the floor.”
I don’t know if that’s the best approach. I just know it’s a start and that it takes our obligation to be generous to others pretty seriously. If God grants us additional wisdom on the topic, we’ll adjust appropriately.
Anyhow, assuming there isn’t anything radically theologically wrong with all of that, perhaps it’s a pretty good system? If everyone did likewise, perhaps we could make a significant dent in the problems of the poor?
And it doesn’t require that we wait until someone invents a better economic or political reality. It starts with what we do, voluntarily. That, I think, isn’t a bad thing.
In case anyone was wondering, “Wonsider” = “We decided to consider” and “we’ll be faithful to proportionally” = “we’ll be faithful to give proportionally.” I must have been very distracted while typing that. Sorry.
Also, the emphasis on “ahead of time” was supposed to have been followed by an observation that the time for deciding what you’re going to do about emotionally-agitating moral quandary X is before it’s facing you, not when you’re in the middle of it. Just as teenagers ought not to wait until they’re in the back seat before deciding whether they’ll abstain from sex before marriage, Christian couples shouldn’t wait until their income unexpectedly gets big to determine whether they’ll be faithful with implementing “from he to whom much has been given, much is expected” in their tithes and offerings. Hence the emphasis on working out the spreadsheet “ahead of time.”
The reality is that we have not done what R.C. suggests. Why? Is there something structurally wrong in the Church? If there is, does this affect how we members approach persistent social crises? Does the problem begin with the style of leadership? The third reading for Sunday may give us a clue, “… your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father.”
Is this happening in this highly technical world where the light of the Church could be seen immediately with good deeds being accomplished? What kind of light is the Church projecting?
I think if we answer these questions then we will know what to do.
First, does it bother anyone that newest information we could find for our welfare budget was from 2000?
Second, who in America are we defining as poor? I know of the poor that have cable, cars, new TV’s, cell phones, and still get food stamps…don’t get me wrong but that is poor like the starvation we see in developing countries.
Last point – when I read the quote, “When I give bread to the poor, they call me a saint; when I ask why there are so many poor, they call me a communist.” All I could think was that this is class warfare tactics.
Steve,
there probably is more recent data available; but I was concerned with reliability, and I did not trust any of the sources I found with data from later than 2000. (I am not saying they were wrong; but I try to be careful with where I get my data.)
There are multiple definitions of “poor” in America; the most widely used is the Federal poverty line, which is in 2010, an annual income of about $22,000 for a family of four. When you consider that rent alone for a two bedroom apartment in most urban areas is probably more than $6,000 a year, you can see that this is a pretty fragile base of support. Is it “the same” as the desperately poor in, say, India? No, but I find such comparisons invidious because they seem to suggest that they are not “really” poor.
Finally, what do you mean by “class warfare tactics”? Are you accusing Dom Holder of class warfare, or his opponents?