Without land tenure systems that work, economies risk missing the foundation for sustainable growth, threatening the livelihoods of the poor and vulnerable the most. It is simply not possible to end poverty and boost shared prosperity without making serious progress on land and property rights.""The poor you will always have with you" (Matthew 26:11)
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. [emphasis added] 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]
~Pope Leo XIV, Dilexi Te
TLDR: The Church must continuously redefine the meaning of the word "poverty" so as to make sure someone, somewhere, is always in poverty.
This is fundamentally absurd, but it is also fundamentally unavoidable. Life expectancy in the 1st century AD Middle East was generally low, averaging between 20 and 35 years at birth. 90% of the population died before they turned 55 or 60. Today, life expectancy in the same region is 77 to 80.
By first century standards, no one in the world today is poor. There is no more smallpox, rinderpest or polio. Leprosy is essentially unknown. Malnutrition and famine have been wiped out.
If we judged physical poverty according to the standards of the world Jesus lived and preached in, Jesus would be wrong. The poor, by his definition, are gone. We don't have any of them with us and haven't for centuries. Obviously, that's not a conclusion that can be permitted.
27. For this reason, works of mercy are recommended as a sign of the authenticity of worship,
Sure. But what are these works of mercy? "Literally half of the work of the Church is either already irrelevant or on the verge of being rendered irrelevant." Similarly, the Church has actively worked to destroy the very families She claims to desire:
71. Many female congregations were protagonists of this pedagogical revolution. Founded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Ursulines, the Sisters of the Company of Mary Our Lady, the Maestre Pie and many others, stepped into the spaces where the state was absent. They created schools in small villages, suburbs and working-class neighborhoods. In particular, the education of girls became a priority.
Apparently, the Popes do not realize that educating women destroys total fertility rates and family formation. [cf., for instance: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5] The very thing the Church lauds, female education, actually undermines and actively destroys the "original cell of social life." (CCC 2207) The very thing the Pope celebrates in his first apostolic exhortation obliterates what the Church describes as the foundation of society, the family. But he moves on from logical contradictions to outright fabrications:
90. The bishops stated forcefully that the Church, to be fully faithful to her vocation, must not only share the condition of the poor, but also stand at their side and work actively for their integral development. Faced with a situation of worsening poverty in Latin America, the Puebla Conference confirmed the Medellín decision in favor of a frank and prophetic option for the poor and described structures of injustice as a “social sin.”
The Puebla Conference was held in 1979, over 45 years ago. While poverty may have been worsening in 1979, during a world-wide economic crisis, that crisis is also long-since past. Invoking it now, as if it were a present danger or a present reality, is simply a bald-faced lie. This is how poverty has changed since 1980. Maybe the Pope hasn't heard.
The problem is precisely that the Pope doesn't appear to have heard about any of the advances made against poverty in the last 50 years.
95. As it is, “the current model, with its emphasis on success and self-reliance, does not appear to favor an investment in efforts to help the slow, the weak or the less talented to find opportunities in life.” [100]
The Pope complains of a growing gap between the rich and the poor, but seems oblivious to the growing gap between his apostolic Catholic poverty porn fantasy and the reality of the world that these same Catholics inhabit:
What caused this extraordinary change in the number of people experiencing extreme poverty? Hint: it wasn't the Catholic Church. Yet the Pope seems not only completely oblivious to this, he actively denies that there exists a demonstrated process which does help the poor:
114. At times, pseudo-scientific data are invoked to support the claim that a free market economy will automatically solve the problem of poverty.
It is telling that the papal claim lacks any footnote to back up his bald assertion. But how could he back up his claim? What he asserts is simply false. It was capitalism, and the legal structures which favor the protection of private property, which lifted the poor from their poverty. World Bank data estimates that titling programs in Latin America increased household incomes by 20-50% for participants. [cf., 1, 2, 3, 4] :
"Without land tenure systems that work, economies risk missing the foundation for sustainable growth, threatening the livelihoods of the poor and vulnerable the most. It is simply not possible to end poverty and boost shared prosperity without making serious progress on land and property rights."
And keep in mind, the Pope is arguably and actively contradicting Scripture. After all, even the Apostles recognized the right to private property:
While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not under your control? Why is it that you have conceived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to men, but to God. (Acts 5:4)
Notably, Peter did not take the line Leo takes. Peter did not chastise Ananias and Sapphira for refusing to share their private property with the community's poor. Instead, Peter, the first Pope, expressly recognized and affirmed their right to do with their own property whatever they chose. At no point did he say that they sinned by refusing to share their wealth. Rather, Peter insisted their sin lay in pretense: sharing only a small portion while pretending to have given everything. Their sin was in lying, not in refusing to give what they had to the poor.
How is it that neither Popes Leo nor Francis, nor even St. John Chrysostom, references this very telling passage when they discuss the plight of the poor and the duties of the wealthy?
Now, is poverty a problem? Certainly. Roughly 9% of the world still lives in extreme poverty, defined as a significant risk of starving to death. We must continue to work to end this. But this extreme poverty is largely the result of legal structures which do not protect private property, and government officials who do not enforce laws on private ownership, thus preventing the poor from protecting anything that they may manage to accumulate. Why private property laws are strong, poverty disappears. Why laws are weak, or weakly enforced, poverty grows.
Of all the saints who understand the need to protect the poor, certainly the Blessed Virgin figures most prominently. Why then, does this Pope, alone among all the popes in the last century, refrain from referencing the Blessed Virgin Mary in his closing panegyric on the poor?
You will search in vain through the apostolic exhortations and encyclicals of the previous several centuries for a papal document that closes without referencing or invoking the Virgin. The only such document that comes to mind is Mit Brennende Sorge. Pope Leo has now added his very first apostolic exhortation to this very short list of BVM-free closings.
Which is sad. After all, doesn't that reflect a certain.... shall we say... poverty?
No comments:
Post a Comment