by Joan Mitchell, CSJ
The joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the people of our time, especially those who are poor or afflicted in any way, are the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ,” the bishops of Vatican II insist in their forward looking Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes. This opening sentence called Catholics to invest in people who are poor and lack the basics of life — food, water, shelter, education, work, health care.
In fall 2015, the United Nations committed to 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. The goals aim to end poverty, end hunger, ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages, ensure education for all and end inequality in educational opportunities, end violence against women and human trafficking, ensure access to safe water and sanitation, stop climate change, protect Earth, and more.
In his teaching letter on ecology, Laudato Si’, Care for Our Common Home, Pope Francis extends our Christian commitment beyond our human brothers and sisters to Earth itself, now in peril. “Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue; it is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience (#217).
Pope Francis urges all of us to feel the threats people who are poor feel when their fields dry up or their fishing grounds can no longer feed them. “We need to strengthen the conviction that we are one single human family. There are no frontiers or barriers, political or social, behind which we can hide, still less is there room for the globalization of indifference” (#52). Sunday’s gospel challenges us to be as ingenious at investing in the poor as a wily manager, dishonest and dismissed.
Our global world encourages people to travel, meet people in need firsthand, and build connections and friendships. Mary Steiner, who entered the convent with me, cofounded with her daughter an organization called Give Us Wings. She writes, “We partner with hardworking, suffering, beautiful people in Kenya and Uganda, mostly women, in small self-help groups as they find their individual paths out of the horror of poverty.
“When my daughter and I traveled to Africa for the first time 15 years ago, we expected to meet poverty — instead we met people like the women in the photo.
“Serena is a woman, mutilated with a rusty piece of tin as a child, so she would never know the pleasure of physical love. She had no choice for survival other than to marry and bear many children — in her case seven, five of whom she had to bury; her husband is now long dead. She reaches down to find her power, farms, and weaves mats to support her mother, two children, and two of her dead sister’s children.
“Rosella fled the violence in the North of Uganda. Her husband died on the way along with two of her children. She dug their graves with her own hands. Hiding in the bush, she and her remaining three children scavenged food from garbage and roots. They got thinner and sicker.
“One day Rosella stood in front of me at a Give Us Wings health camp. She and her children were at the same time bloated and scrawny. She stood looking at me with the hollow, hot eyes of infection and malnutrition, and said so quietly that I had to let the words sit in my brain to hear them, “I think we are dying.”
“We had the necessary medical things. Another family took Rosella into their home and then helped build her a little home.”
- What goals most interest you in achieving?