Rev. Fr. Anton C.T. Pascual
March 23, 2008

 
     If you cannot experience God in your life, then you will not grow in your spiritual life.
 
     God loves all His children. So do all parents. But they love their “weakest” children like God gives the most special attention to the poorest of the poor.

     Luke 4, 18 affirms that “the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.”
 
     Who then are the poor? To quote Gustavo Gutierrez: “In the Bible, poverty is a scandalous condition inimical to human dignity and therefore contrary to the will of God.”

     Poverty then is not the will of God, it is man’s.
 

     The Bible mentions five categories of poor: ÉBYÔN is the one who desires, the beggar, the one who is lacking something and who awaits it from another (61 times in the Old Testament); DAL is the weak one, the frail one; the expression the poor of the land (the rural proletariat) is found very frequently (48 times in the Old Testament); ANI is the bent over one, the one laboring under a weight, the one not in possession of his whole strength and vigor, the humiliated one (80 times in the Old Testament); ANAW means “humble before God” (25 times in the Old Testament); PTOKOS is the one who does not have what is necessary to subsist, the wretched one driven into begging (34 times in the New Testament).

     In Metro Manila, a family earning P300-500 a day is considered materially poor. They are poor not because they are lazy, but because they lack the opportunity, the security or the influence to live a materially comfortable life.
 
     Evidently, society does not love the marginalized poor, nor does it care for the powerless. More so, the structure of our laws favors the rich, not the poor.
 
     Conversely, the poverty of Jesus tells the opposite. He was born poor in a humble stable. He opted to live poor as an itinerant preacher. He was executed as a poor man under the Roman Empire . He was buried poor in a borrowed grave.
 
     “Though He was in the form of God, He did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross” (1 Philippians 2:6-8).
 
     Being the church of Jesus Christ who is poor means that we must be “a Church that embraces and practices the evangelical spirit of poverty,” a church: whose members and leaders have a special love for the poor; where, at the very least, the poor are not discriminated against; which “will be in solidarity with the poor”; that “before today’s forms of exploitation of the poor,… cannot remain silent”; which not only evangelizes the poor but where the poor themselves become evangelizers; where “pastors and leaders will learn to be with, work with and learn from the poor”; whose leaders and better-off sectors will “orient and tilt the center of gravity of the entire community in favor of the needy”; finally, which “is willing to follow Christ through poverty and oppression in order to carry out the work of salvation.”
 
     There are three perspectives in empowering the poor: 1) Embrace and practice evangelical spirit of poverty (disposition not dispossession). What matters is detachment from possessions with the profound trust from the Lord as the soul source of Salvation; 2) The poor are to be active agents in the evangelization mission of the Church (BEC as a way of life of the church and a powerful strategy for integral development and evangelization); and, 3) There are strategies for overcoming poverty, as follows: poverty alleviation, poverty reduction and poverty eradication.
 
     Poverty alleviation includes works of social services/corporal works of mercy like feeding, visitation of the sick and imprisoned, emergency relief, gift-giving and care for the orphans.
 
     Poverty reduction includes works of social development like education, housing, preventive health and health care, livelihood and micro-entrepreneurship, cooperatives and micro-finance.
 

     Poverty eradication includes works of social justice like advocacy in politics, economic and culture; lobbying; and direct non-violent actions addressing the roots of injustice both personal and structural.
 
     “Love of neighbor, grounded in the love of God, is first and foremost a responsibility for each individual member of the faithful, but it is also a responsibility for the entire ecclesial community at every level: from the local community to the particular Church and to the Church universal in its entirety.”

     “As a community, the Church must practice love. Love, thus, needs to be organized if it is to be an ordered service to the community. The awareness of this responsibility has had a constitutive relevance in the Church from the beginning:

     “All who believed were together and had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need” (Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est).
 
     Indeed, the love of Christ urges us to love the poor. (2 Corinthians 5, 14)