Violence Born of Economic Inequality

As we move from the Christmas Season to Ordinary Time, I am hoping that I will be able to blog a little more regularly. The past few weeks have been a complicated mix of dealing with health difficulties, the demands of the season, and some really extreme weather conditions. To those of you who have expressed concern at the inactivity on the blog page, I want to thank you for that concern and reassure you that while I realize the need to slow it down a bit, I am also, in my own opinion, doing fairly well.

Paragraphs fifty-nine and sixty of the Apostolic Exhortation speak of the violence that plagues our society and culture on the local, national and world-wide scene: . . . until exclusion and inequality in society and between peoples is reversed, it will be impossible to eliminate violence. The poor and the poorer peoples are accused of violence, yet without equal opportunities the different forms of aggression and conflict will find a fertile terrain for growth and eventually explode.

We live in a time of heightened vigilance against terrorist activity as well as gun violence in our communities. For the past twelve years, we have been engaged in foreign wars against factions within the countries of Iraq and Afghanistan. We have been pursuing the leaders of Al Qaida while trying to avoid involvement in civil unrest in Syria and in Sudan. At the same time we have witnessed lone individuals who have wreaked havoc in our schools and our post offices and our shopping malls with automatic and semi-automatic weapons. Violence against women and children in the form of human trafficking is also on the rise throughout our world. Pope Francis points out that all of these forms of violence have inequality and poverty at their root. Unfortunately, rather than dealing with the disease of economic slavery that pushes people to the brink of violence we tend to look for security in arming ourselves with more weaponry.

History has shown what happens when the poor are forced to live in what amounts to servitude to the rich. Hollywood and historians alike have documented such things as the slave uprising led by Spartacus, the revolutions in the various communist countries of the world including Russia and Southeast Asia. Currently we are witnessing such revolutions in the Middle East in countries such as Egypt and Syria. When people are left without hope having been ground into dust by poverty, violence erupts and tears apart the lives of all of us.

Pope Francis' words are not necessarily prophetic. He simply is reading the signs of the times. He points out the realities of political and economic systems that simply ignore the plight of the poor. He is not espousing one political or economic system over another. He is simply announcing the Gospel message that urges us to concern for the poor, the oppressed, the ill, the prisoner. The Gospel calls us to charity that goes beyond dispensing the leftovers, our surplus, and asks us to tap into our very substance and share it more equitably. Until we do so, we are, as a society, condemned to the endless cycles of violence that usually appear at the beginning of newscasts and in our banner headlines.

Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator