Praying for the spiritual underdog

By Ian McDonald, Contributor

Mcdonald

COMPARED WITH long ago the Christian Church is now considerably more supportive of progressive causes. This has taken priests and pastors out of their holy ivory towers into the heat and muddle and countless problems of everyday life. The Church has become more actively involved in trying to do something about the miserable daily existence of the poverty-stricken and about helping ordinary people if and when oppressors threaten.

This progressive impulse, especially in South America, especially in the Catholic Church, especially among Jesuits, is perhaps summed up best in the phase 'option for the poor.' This, I suppose, in simple terms means that the Church no longer identifies itself with wealth and power, no longer seeks to accommodate itself to whatever constitutes the Establishment in any particular society, no longer feels that materially degrading conditions are fundamentally not its concern.

This is an excellent development, potentially full of merit. The church descending from its spiritual high horse to share the daily bread of sorrow and circumstance with the hoi pol poloi is a more attractive proposition than the old Church which tended either to tuck itself away safely in some holy back-water or to hob-nob as a matter of course with the strong and the mighty.

However, there is one major concern. Where, fundamentally, is the spirituality in this activism? In all this tuning in to how the masses feel, all this involvement on the side of the poor and the persecuted, is there not a danger that the exercise of what once was a spiritual function will become simply another worldly exercise on par with all the others? At the end of the day where is true spirituality in the 'option for the poor?'

In the deepest sense religion is not about material things at all, therefore neither is it fundamentally about lack of material things. Poverty as much as wealth is a materialistic concept and surely if a Church begins to concentrate its concern on either one it inevitably becomes just another kind of welfare society, a huge Rotarian Club, or even a political faction, progressive no doubt, but still like any other. It may be this danger which the Pope sensed when he once sharply criticised those of this priests who preached what he calls "an illusory earthly liberation."

In modern life sociology, with its treatment of people in groups rather than as individuals, seems to have replaced theology as the analytical mode for attacking evil. According to Christian theology, all people are sinners, the socially victimised and oppressed as well as the victimisers and oppressors and also, of course, the reformers. Oppressors, no doubt, have more opportunity for a special set of sins - more leisure for sloth, more money for gluttony, more economic wherewithal for pride. But then the reformers might be more tempted to intellectual pride, and pharasaical complacency. And, of course, everyone, including victims, share some sins like theft, intemperance, anger, envy, slander, adultery, blasphemy, and so on.

Sociological analysis tends to ascribe sinlessness to the oppressed - or, at least, to excuse their sins as being the deplorable consequence of oppression, without extending a similar charity to the oppressors. The poor and abused are morally innocent, the victimisers morally unredeemable. But, of course, this is nonsense. Victims are as full of sinful qualities as victimisers and the essence of Christianity, whose concern has always been the care of the individual human soul, is to be deeply aware of this.

From the purely spiritual point of view, there is a good case for the Church exercising an 'option for the rich' and not one for the poor. After all, it is the rich who need spiritual succour much more than the poor. It is the rich, not the poor, who need to be ministered to most assiduously if they are to get to heaven. Is it not the soul that matters most? Did not Jesus of Nazareth, the founder of Christianity, say that it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God? And did he not also say blessed are the poor for theirs is the kingdom of heaven? And did not a certain rich man, clothed in purple and fine linen and living sumptuously on earth, end up tormented in hell beseeching the beggar Lazarus, safe in Abraham's bosom, to dip his finger in water to cool his burning tongue? And did not Jesus at one point rather impatiently point out that the poor will always be with us, with the implication that his own mission had somewhat greater significance than simply ministering to the disadvantaged.

The indications could not be clearer that it is the rich who are the spiritually underprivileged. Surely, therefore, they deserve the Church's attention at least as much as the poor do. This must be so unless the Church considers itself more concerned with the material than with the spiritual well-being of its flock. Once any church falls into the habit of showing its greatest concern for material causes, however worthy, then it runs the distinct danger of diluting its fundamental spiritual role and turning itself into just another temporal organisation with its own worldly axe to grind.

Spiritually the poor are the millionaires and the rich are the paupers. By siding with the poor the Church shows a bias towards those who already have a head start on the way to heaven. By choosing the 'option for the poor' the Church neglects its primary duty which is to attend to the spiritual underdog. Perhaps what Christianity needs, if its founder is to be believed, is an option for the rich. The world wants a few Mother Teresas of the wealthy suburbs more than it needs another Mother Teresa of the Calcutta slums.

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