Cardinal Felipe Arizmendi, Bishop Emeritus of San Cristóbal de Las Casas and responsible for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Mexican Episcopal Conference (CEM), offers Exaudi readers his weekly article.

FACTS

When the Gospel, in the Beatitudes, speaks of the poor, many prefer Matthew’s version, which says “poor in spirit”; they dislike Luke’s version, which simply speaks of the poor. Therefore, when they hear us speak of the preferential option for the poor, they become annoyed, distrust us, and say that we subscribe to a liberation theology that is not in accordance with the Social Doctrine of the Church. They argue that there are rich people who are also poor because they suffer for various reasons, and that is why they dedicate themselves to them and neglect, in their pastoral work, explicit attention to the materially poor. What do the Latin American bishops tell us in their documents from Puebla, Santo Domingo, Aparecida, and, more recently, Pope Leo XIV?

The Puebla Document (1979) states:  “The situation of widespread extreme poverty takes on very concrete faces in real life, in which we should recognize the suffering features of Christ, the Lord, who questions and challenges us: the faces of children, struck by poverty even before birth, hindered by irreparable mental and physical disabilities; the vagrant and often exploited children of our cities, a product of poverty and moral disorganization within families; the faces of young people, disoriented by their inability to find their place in society; frustrated, especially in rural and marginalized urban areas, by a lack of training and employment opportunities; the faces of indigenous people and frequently of Afro-Americans, who, living marginalized and in inhuman conditions, can be considered the poorest of the poor; the faces of peasants, who as a social group live relegated throughout almost our continent, sometimes deprived of land, in situations of internal and external dependence, subjected to marketing systems that exploit them; faces of workers who are often poorly paid and have difficulty organizing and defending their rights; faces of the underemployed and unemployed, laid off due to the harsh demands of economic crises and often development models that subject workers and their families to cold economic calculations;  faces of the marginalized and overcrowded urban poor, with the double impact of the lack of material goods, compared to the ostentatious wealth of other social sectors; faces of the elderly, increasingly numerous every day, frequently marginalized from the society of progress that dispenses with people who do not produce”  (31-39).

The Santo Domingo Document (1992) elaborates on this point:  “Discovering the face of the Lord in the suffering faces of the poor challenges all Christians to a profound personal and ecclesial conversion. In faith, we encounter faces disfigured by hunger, a consequence of inflation, foreign debt, and social injustices; faces disillusioned by politicians who promise but do not deliver; faces humiliated because of their own culture, which is not respected and is even despised; faces terrified by daily and indiscriminate violence; the anguished faces of abandoned children who walk our streets and sleep under our bridges; the suffering faces of humiliated and marginalized women; the weary faces of migrants who find no dignified welcome; the faces aged by time and labor of those who lack the bare necessities to survive with dignity. Merciful love also means turning to those who are spiritually deprived, moral, social and cultural.”

In the Aparecida Document (2007), we say:  “Globalization brings forth, in our peoples, new faces of poverty. With special attention and in continuity with previous General Conferences, we fix our gaze on the faces of the newly excluded: migrants, victims of violence, displaced persons and refugees, victims of human trafficking and kidnapping, the disappeared, those suffering from HIV and endemic diseases, drug addicts, the elderly, children who are victims of prostitution, pornography and violence or of child labor, abused women, victims of exclusion and trafficking for sexual exploitation, persons with different abilities, large groups of unemployed, those excluded by technological illiteracy, people living on the streets of large cities, indigenous and Afro-American people, landless peasants and miners”  (402).

LIGHTNING

In his recent exhortation  Dilexi te (I loved you), Pope Leo XIV states:

“The condition of the poor represents a cry that, throughout the history of humanity, constantly challenges our lives, our societies, our political and economic systems, and especially the Church. In the wounded faces of the poor, we find imprinted the suffering of the innocent and, therefore, the very suffering of Christ. At the same time, we should perhaps speak more accurately of the many faces of the poor and of poverty, because it is a varied phenomenon; indeed, there are many forms of poverty: that of those who lack the means of material sustenance, the poverty of those who are socially marginalized and lack the means to give voice to their dignity and their abilities, moral and spiritual poverty, cultural poverty, that of those who find themselves in a condition of personal or social weakness or fragility, the poverty of those who have no rights, no space, no freedom”  (9).

“In this sense, it can be said that the commitment to the poor and to removing the social and structural causes of poverty, even though important in recent decades, remains insufficient. This is also because we live in a society that often privileges certain criteria for the orientation of existence and politics marked by numerous inequalities and, therefore, to the old forms of poverty that we have become aware of and that we try to counteract, new ones are added, sometimes more subtle and dangerous”  (10).

ACTIONS

Let us examine our attitude toward the poor, and also toward the rich who are poor and suffer, but above all toward those who lack everything, in body and spirit. If we love them and do all we can to do them good, Jesus Christ will consider it as done to Himself.