By Michelle Martin

(Martin is a Catholic New World staff writer. Tom Sheridan’s column will resume in the next issue.)

When I have to work on the weekends, I try to bring my family with me. It gives the people I’m with an understanding that there is more to my life than work. And it gives my kids, especially my daughter, Caroline, more of an understanding of what it is I do when I leave the house every day.

But sometimes, Caroline’s questions challenge my understanding more than anything I could do for her.

Going to greet the “Braking the Cycle of Poverty” bicyclists as they arrived at Old St. Mary’s Parish seemed like a natural to take my husband and kids: It wouldn’t take too long, there would be no speeches or presentations that the kids would have to be quiet for and, best of all, there would be ice cream. (See story, Page 16)

So I told Caroline that I had to go talk to some people at an ice cream social, people who had ridden their bicycles to Chicago all the way from California, and would then ride all the way to Washington D.C. Caroline’s just 5, but she knows that’s a long, long way.

She wanted to know why they would ride that far. I told her they were doing it to remind people to think about poor people, and help find ways to make it so they wouldn’t be poor anymore.

Then she asked the stumper: “Mama, who do we know who’s poor?”

Several groups of people came to my mind: the people who ask us for money in downtown Chicago when she visits me at work, the people she sees lining up for the Tuesday and Wednesday evening suppers in the Catholic Charities building that houses The Catholic New World offices, the people who sleep under the highway bridges. Then there are the children who go to the public school behind our house, more than 80 percent of whom receive free or reduced-price meals, and some of her classmates at our parish school who also benefit from the lunch program. At times over the years, some of our relatives probably have qualified to be counted among “the poor.”

But as the people I thought of came nearer to our hearts, the less I wanted to name names.

So we talked about how there are many people who don’t have enough money to provide all the necessities for themselves and their families, and how her dad and I work to make sure we can. We also talked about how people who are poor don’t really look any different, and you can’t always tell, and maybe you shouldn’t try. Sometimes people who are poor don’t want other people to know—they might be embarrassed, even though it’s not their fault.

Of course, poverty exists in many forms besides material: spiritual, emotional, intellectual. No one can tell whether the people they meet on a superficial level are suffering from unmet needs of many kinds.

Catholic social teaching has always called for a double effort to help the poor: charity, such as the meals given to men, women and children at the St. Vincent Center, to try to meet immediate needs, and the kind of systemic changes the “Braking the Cycle of Poverty” tour is trying to highlight.

CCHD calls poverty “America’s forgotten state,” home to 33 million of our neighbors. It’s a state that most of us—including me—prefer not visit, even as tourists.

That brings me back to Caroline’s question. Who do we know who’s poor? Is the question hard for me to answer because it’s not something I like to think about? If people I know and care about are poor, then maybe, I would have to do more than write about it.

 

Martin is a Catholic New World staff writer. Tom Sheridan’s column will resume in the next issue.

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