Poverty and evangelization

On September 22, the Archdiocesan Office for Peace and Justice put together a program at Catholic Charities’ St. Vincent Center on N. LaSalle Street to announce the names of 20 local economic development and community groups being given grants this year from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. The CCHD collection is taken up each year at Thanksgiving time, and the Archdiocese of Chicago has consistently been among the most generous dioceses in contributing to it. It aims to help local community organizers and others address the causes of poverty.

Addressing the causes of poverty is not just a humanitarian task. The Archdiocesan Evangelization process, being brought to our parishes over the next three years, has three goals: personal conversion (believe); communion in the Church (share); and transformation of the world (solidarity). When one’s life has been turned around by the grace of God, sharing the gifts of Christ in his Church should lead to a desire to share these gifts universally and to change whatever in a given society is an affront to the Gospel. Working for justice, peace and universal charity are part of evangelizing. Social justice concerns are integral to the Gospel and must be part of an evangelizer’s personal concerns. The Catholic Campaign for Human Development finds its place in the third goal for evangelizers.

Working for social justice is not new to the Chicago Archdiocese. The legendary rector of Mundelein Seminary, Msgr. Reynold Hillenbrand, used the papal encyclicals of the last century to help Chicago seminarians a generation ago see the connection between preaching the Gospel and working to change society. Lay people, priests and religious have understood that connection, and Chicago has for many years had a vibrant tradition of social activism grounded in the Church’s proclamation of the Gospel.

Such activism is needed still. If the poor of Chicago comprised a city, it would be the 12th largest in the country. There are more than 840,000 people living in poverty in the metropolitan Chicago area. Our suburban poverty rate increased in the last decade, one of only two such metropolitan areas in the Midwest to see such an increase. As the city gentrifies, Chicago exports its poor. Catholic Charities has seen demands for emergency aid—food and clothing—quadruple this past year in the suburbs and in Lake County. Illinois has more than three million people living in poverty and, last year, our state led the nation in job losses. Nearly half of those living in poverty are children.

Housing is a basic need, necessary for human dignity as well as for shelter. Over half a million renter households in Illinois spend thirty per cent or more of their household’s income on rent. Because of limited affordable housing, more families are at risk of homelessness than ever before. The situation is as bad in other large metropolitan areas of the country, but that fact is of little comfort to the homeless here. Through the Office for Peace and Justice, the Archdiocese supports numerous affordable housing efforts, from Welcoming Our Neighbor for public housing residents to advocating for more set-aside affordable housing with the Balanced Development Coalition.

While poverty doesn’t necessarily cause violence, violence always causes poverty. One cannot work or study or play with constant threats of violence. One cannot plan one’s life responsibly with the expectation of being shot from one day to the next. Chicago has led the nation in homicides the last two years. There are parishes where the priest sometimes takes to sleeping under his bed rather than on it, for fear of being killed by a stray bullet.

The Archdiocese participates in the Chicago Project for Violence Prevention, which attacks killings as if they were a plague and has had excellent results in some neighborhoods. The recent release of many put in prison for violent crimes has increased danger on the streets, because many ex-offenders have no jobs or places to stay (see Returning Home: Understanding the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry; The Urban Institute, 2003). The Archdiocese’s Kolbe House works with offenders and ex-offenders to ease their transition back into our communities. The Church assists families affected by domestic violence through Catholic Charities and the Office for Family Ministries. (To learn more about the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, contact the Office for Peace and Justice at (312) 751-5333; and to learn more about the services of Catholic Charities, call (312) 655-7000.)

Evangelizers who leave their homes to preach the Gospel in lands far from that of their birth are called missionaries. On October 19, World Mission Sunday this year, Pope John Paul II will celebrate the 25th anniversary of his election as Bishop of Rome by beatifying Mother Teresa of Calcutta. She was born not in India but in Albania. Her life as a missionary in India was spent in service of the poor. After spending 15 years as a vowed religious in a teaching community in Calcutta, she heard in 1946 “the call to give up all and follow Christ into the slums to serve him among the poorest of the poor.”

Thousands of women have also heard that call and joined the religious congregation Mother Teresa founded, the Missionaries of Charity. They are found in homes for the dying, in orphanages and refuges for abandoned children, in clinics and hospitals for lepers, in food pantries for the hungry, in treatment centers for alcoholics, in refuges for the aged and the poorest of the poor in cities around the world. In Chicago, we are privileged to have a community of the Missionaries of Charity in St. Malachy parish on the near West Side, and a community of the contemplative branch of the Missionaries lives in St. Procopius Parish.

The Missionaries of Charity give their lives to the service of the poor. But they are not simply humanitarians. They give their lives to God by serving the poor, and they are missionaries because clearly they do what they do in Jesus’ name. Years ago, on my way to visit my Oblate confreres in Bangladesh, I stayed overnight at one of the houses of the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta. One night was enough to convince me that their vocation was not mine! And yet it is, for every disciple of Jesus Christ is called to be a servant of the poor. The poor are our passport to God’s kingdom. The poor are not objects to be helped but guides to be followed. The rich must walk the path of salvation in the footsteps of the poor, who will be first in the Kingdom of Heaven. Mother Teresa was a saint because she knew that Gospel truth and lived it each day of her life. May we, who are called to be evangelizers here, do the same. God bless you.

My prayers are with you; please keep me in yours.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Francis Cardinal George, OMI
Archbishop of Chicago

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