The poor in the time of Jesus

Tyler Wheeler, who visited here with his family last August, sent me this quote from Raymond Browns' An Introduction to the New Testament. He noted that the poor in Honduras suffer a similar situation to the poor the time of Jesus:

Wealth/poverty and the class society found in cities of the Roman Empire created their own problems for early Christians, and both need to be discussed lest they be misunderstood in the light of modern experience. There are many references in the NT to the "poor"; and readers might envision their poverty as similar to that of the Third World today where people have no place to live or even scraps to eat and so are in constant danger of perishing. In the Gospels, however, which in part reflect Jesus' own life situation in Galilee, the poor were small farmers with inadequate or barren land, or serfs on large estates; in the cities without the assistance of produce from the land the poor were somewhat worse off.

How true here with many rural people living on inadequate or barren land or working as virtual serfs on rented lands.

I'd also note that the poor here suffer under an imperialism similar to the Roman Empire, as noted in Richard A. Horsely's Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder.

Another side of the bishop

The bishop of Santa Rosa de Copán, Monseñor Luis Alfonso Santos, is known for his outspoken advocacy for the poor and for justice, based in the Gospel call for conversion.

His Palm Sunday homily was characteristic. “The Kingdom of God has already arrived, but how do we build it up? accepting Jesus and trying to change your lives. And if you don’t change your ways of living, Catholicism is only a story,” he said.

He also pleaded with the people not to accept the yokes being imposed on them, recalling the proposal of taxes on rents and on universities as well as some proposals to raise the value-added-tax (the hidden sales tax) from its current rate of 12%.

He castigated the rule of the rich, having noted that the goods of the earth are for all. He urged the people to change their ways of thinking and to stop believing in lying leaders and false promises.

He strongly critiqued the two major parties who’ve been part of 120 years of oppression. And he recalled the coups he’s experienced in his lifetime, noting that they have often been justified as responses to communism or, as in last year’s coup, to "twenty first century socialism." "Everyone who wants to do something for the poor experiences a coup," he lamented.

A delegation from Pax Christi International is visiting Honduras and was here in Santa Rosa. They heard his homily and afterwards they went out for lunch with him. The bishop met us outside the cathedral and we walked to the restaurant.

As we walked by the cathedral the bishop walked over to a poor man sitting on the pavement, talked with him, and gave him a donation.

In the restaurant a little boy came up trying to sell us trinkets. He had sold us a few erasers while waiting for the bishop in the park. But now he had some little flashlights that he was selling for 10 lempiras, about 55 cents.

Hector told us he was 13 years old, but he was no taller than most seven year olds I know. He was also very timid and seemed to be a little developmentally disabled intellectually. The effects of chronic malnutrition were obvious.

The bishop spoke with Hector, looked at his trinkets, told him about the lunch program for kids the diocese has, and bought one of the tiny flashlights. He also bought the kid a sandwich.

The bishop’s tender care for the poor old man and for the little kid touched me deeply. Here’s a man with a strong public position for justice who also takes time to be kind and compassionate to God’s little ones.

Oh, that we might have more bishops like him!

Diocesan Via Crucis

The diocesan stations of the cross is a moving experience of faith and commitment to social justice.

Today thousands of faithful came to Santa Rosa de Copán. Some had left their homes at two in the morning to get here.

Beginning at about 9:30 am, they walked the main street of town stopping to pray the traditional fourteen stations of the path of Christ from Pilate’s praetorium to the tomb. The Mass – a celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection – ended about 1:30 pm.

But the stations were far from traditional. The meditations connected the reality of the lives of the people in this, the poorest diocese in Honduras, with the suffering and death of Christ.

Among the hymns was the Nicaraguan hymn “Vos sos el Dios de los pobres” – You are the God of the poor, a God with tanned face who sweats in the streets. The final station – the Mass – featured the Salvadoran hymn “Cuando el pobre crea en el pobre” – When the poor believe in the poor we will be able to sing freedom, we will build fraternity.

The Way of the Cross was also an expression of the deep faith of the people as they knelt on the hard road during the stations, approached a priest to confess their sins, or received Christ in the Eucharist.

This is really the Church at prayer and at work.

Rather than write much, here are some photos.

They gathered for the first station, Jesus is condemned to death.

Second Station: Jesus carries his Cross.
En Honduras more than 70% live in extreme poverty.

The bishop and several priests wait at the third station.
The boy in front, Christian, lives in my neighborhood and is selling frozen fruit ices.

Mary, the sorrowful mother.

An indigenous woman, kneeling, deep in prayer.

Jesus falls the second time:
Our country lives the Calvary of Jesus, crushed and without the power to raise itself up from poverty and it abandonment by the state.

The poster at this station reads:
Corrupt politicians with their briefcases, seeking only to fill their pockets
and forgetting the people who suffer.

Confessions in the street during the procession.

Eleventh Station:
Jesus is nailed to the Cross.

Sister Nancy Meyerhofer, OSF, Dubuque Franciscan Sister,
missionary in Gracias, Lempira,
read the reflection for the eleventh station.

Twelfth station: Jesus dies on the Cross.

Mass - When the poor believe in the poor.

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More photos from the 2010 and the 2009 diocesan stations of the cross can be found in the Via Crucis Diocesano set on my flickr site.

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Update:

After the stations I had lunch with Sister Nancy and then went home for a short time. I headed to the Caritas office about 3:00 pm and noticed there were two police and one soldier at every corner on the street parallel to the main street, Calle Real Centenario. I figured some big wig was in town. Leavign Caritas at 5 there was still the armed presence on the corners of Calle Real Centenario. I asked one of hte poiliceman what was up. "The President is in town," he told me.

I have no idea why Pepe Lobe was here - perhaps to visit the meeting of coffee producers. It's a shame that he didn't arrive a few hours earlier to hear the pleas of the poor in the stations or be disturbed by the bishop's strong social justice homily at Mass. It might have helped the future of Honduras.

Diocesan Stations of the Cross

Before changes in the Catholic calendar after Vatican II, the Friday before Holy Week was a feast of Our Mother of Sorrows.

Faithful to that tradition, tomorrow the diocese of Santa Rosa de Copán will celebrate a Stations of the Cross in the streets of Santa Rosa. I expect that more than a few thousand people will come, mostly from rural parishes, to walk with Christ who shares their sufferings and offers them hope.

Yesterday Padre Efraín Romero, director of Caritas, asked me to sit down with him and edit the text of the Stations they will be using. (We edited it down from more than 42 pages to about 29!)

A phrase repeated several times throughout the stations gives you an idea of the orientation of these prayers:

Christ, the Head, continues living His passion in His Body, which is His people; and the Passion of the People is the continuation of the Passion of Christ, because what you do to one of his least brothers or sisters, you do to Him.

The text for the sixth station, Veronica wipes the face of Jesus, gives a taste of the prayers:

In Honduras we urgently need for all of us who live here to come closer to Christ, especially we need the laity among us who can take on public responsibility to show that we can clean the image of a country subjected to a bad reputation internationally and to the lack of trust of a people who can not see the clarity of a better world. Since there is an increase of robberies, killings, drug-trafficking, corruption, illiteracy, and of all the values that tear apart our families. We need to transform all of this. No more lies or false promises! The West [of Honduras] continues being humiliated and subjected to impotence and the place that gets priority only during election campaigns and so it continues being the poorest departments [states] in Honduras with few hopes for a better future.

Jesus left us his disfigured face to orient our search for God which necessarily passed through applying law in the pursuit of justice, from which peace is born.

All this points to the spirituality of the Suffering Christ and the Suffering People which is found throughout Latin America (and other poor regions of our globe.) Martyred Jesuit Ignacio Ellacuría wrote about the Crucified Peoples and our obligation to take them down from the Cross.

Paragraph 32 from the Final Document of the 2007 Latin American and Caribbean Bishops Conference (CELAM) in Aparecida, Brazil, puts it this way:

In the face of Jesus Christ, dead and risen, bruised for our sins and glorified by the Father, in this suffering and glorious face, we can see with the eyes of faith the humiliated face of so many men and women of our peoples, and at the same time, their calling to the freedom of the children of God, to the full realization of their personal dignity and to brotherhood among all. The Church is at the service of all human beings, sons and daughters of God.

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The top photo is a work of German artist and activist Kathe Kollwitz in the Neue Wauche (New Waterhouse) memorial, Berlin, Germany. The other photo is from last year's Diocesan Stations of the Cross; note the anti-mining placard, "Life is worth more than gold."

Romero – witness of love of God and justice for the poor

Thirty years ago this coming Wednesday, March 24, Archbishop Oscar Romero, the voice of the voiceless in El Salvador, was killed by forces related to the military and the death squads. They hope to silence his voice.

Tens of thousands are gathering in San Salvador to celebrate his life. I’d love to be with them but decided to stay here.

In January I was in El Salvador to meet an Iowa State University student visiting here for a short time. We went to the hospital where he lived and the chapel there where he was killed.

I have visited the chapel many times, but I remember the visit I made in January 1986, a few weeks before my mother died, of cancer. It struck me then – and having learned more – strikes me still that he lived at a hospital for poor terminal cancer patients.

He used to visit the hospital and consecrated the chapel in July 1964. When he was bishop of Santiago de María, he would stay at the chapel when he came in for bishops meetings.

When he became archbishop of San Salvador, he insisted on staying in the sacristy of the chapel instead of a nice residence that some of his rich friends might have build for them.

Only later, after the sisters insisted, did he move from the chapel to a small three room house on the hospital grounds.

Romero’s compassion for the weak, for the poor, for terminal cancer patients, predated his prophetic years as archbishop of San Salvador and I believe shaped his life, in preparation for his later prophetic mission as archbishop. Something in the depths of his being called him to listen to their pleas, even as a young priest.

But when his good friend, Jesuit Father Rutilio Grande, was killed travelling between Aguilares and El Paisnal while fulfilling his pastoral ministry, something struck the archbishop and he began to see the need to face the structures of oppression.

The witness of Rutilio Grande, not really a radical priest but a priest committed to the poor and their rights, moved Monseñor Romero to deepen his commitment and to add another dimension to his ministry.

Not only did he feel called to preach the Gospel, but he was called to live the Gospel in the midst of the poor, listening to their voices, advocating for them, encouraging them in their struggles for life.

He combined what I think is essential for a Christian life – prayer and a deep relationship with Jesus, compassion and a personal contact with the poor, courage a willingness to face injustice and call it by name.

That’s a message we all need to try to live.

Today, Friday, March 19, I took the Iowa State University/St. Thomas Aquinas Church group that is here to the Hogar San José, a home for malnourished kids. We were there last Saturday and had hoped to spend more time with the kids. But, being the feast of St. Joseph, there was a special Mass at 3:00 pm, celebrated with Father Rudy Mejía, the pastor of the parish next door.

We decided to stay for Mass. As Mass was beginning one of the women who works there handed me one of the infants to hold. As I prayer during the Mass and as I listened to Father Rudy’s homily, I held this beautiful little girl. Beautiful despite the prickly heat sores and insect bites on her body. But, as Father Rudy said, one human person is worth more than the entire universe.

Carrying that baby made that Mass one of the most prayerful I’ve had for some time. It awakened my love for God and for others.

As I write this I recall our meeting earlier this week with Edgar, one of the coordinators of a maternal and infant health program in Caritas. The area where he’s working includes parts of the parish of Dulce Nombre. He mentioned that in the villages where the program is set up the malnutrition rate is 64%, higher than the 38% average for the whole country. I have to check with him whether this is just the child malnutrition rate or the general rate. But either way, it’s scandalous.

So tonight I think and pray for those children, the innocent victims of injustice, an injustice that appears to be engrained into the system here.

But I also remember the witness of Romero – and the challenge he calls us to, a challenge reflected in the words of the prophet Micah (6:8)

I have told you, oh human, what is good and what the Lord demands of you – only this: to act justly, to love tenderly, and walk humbly with our God.

NOTE: There’s a nice extended BBC report on Romero at their Heart and Soul web page.