The Big Question

We called them Hobo’s when I was a kid. They weren’t tolerated by communities and governments of course, and so you never saw them on the sidewalk or begging at a street corner. They preferred to be invisible and they stayed on the move, mostly on foot I suppose despite the romanticized stories. I remember that occasionally we would see one walking alongside the road and my Dad would say, “There goes a retired ag-pilot”, which is what my Dad did for a living so it always seemed funny. Eventually we called them bums and today we call them homeless, but although the number and makeup of these people has changed dramatically, who they are hasn’t. We are they (or they are us) and we are all the children of God. In fact we are all just a couple of pay checks away from being them literally, so be especially thankful for what you have and for what you can share.

 

In my first class on Catholic Social Teaching, we were introduced to social justice (again) and presented with a historical look at the Church’s understanding of the poor, exploited, and underprivileged. All through this lecture I was nodding my head “yes” because I “get it”, while at the same time I was thinking “no” because so many people don’t “get it”. I have a difficult time understanding why there is so little being done about this problem given that we are commanded to love our neighbor as our self. Near the end of this first class I asked “why is it that so many seemingly bright people, many of whom are in every other way Christian so against the idea of social justice?

 

Those of us that get the message of charity are nodding our heads during the homily and those that are unsure listen carefully, but some quietly get up and leave. What scares me is that this isn’t just a small fringe group of miss-informed Catholics, but rather it's a large main stream group of Christians who firmly believe that it’s all a big lie created by liberals to force re-distribution of wealth and more big government. Since that first night my bewilderment has developed into a more complex question. Is it possible that we’ve been deceived by the messenger as some would claim? Are we our neighbor’s keeper, and if so who is our neighbor? What does Scripture really say about this? Our instructor suggested that I might try to understand the other view and present it as a paper for this class, which you can find in the Written Assignments section on the right titled Good Enough.