inside america

Grace and Poverty
WE CONTINUE OUR EXPLORATION OF THE ROOTS OF AN ISSUE THAT POPE FRANCIS PUSHES TO THE CENTER OF THE CHURCH’S MISSION, ONE THAT WE CANNOT FULLY UNDERSTAND WITHOUT FAITH.

by lorenzo albacete

Pope Francis continues to fascinate the secular and the Catholic media who wish to understand where he wants to lead the Church and how. The latest discussion deals with the Pope’s view of Liberation Theology (LT). When he was elected Pope and began to talk about the need to prioritize in the mission of the Church the defense of the poor, most observers, liberal and conservative, thought he was talking about individual or institutionalized charity which, in theory, can be emphasized or de-emphasized in the design of pastoral plans for a parish, a diocese, or even the Holy See.
Soon it became clear that there was much more to Pope Francis’ view of the mission of the Church in a world ravished by inhuman poverty and misery on one side (by and large the majority) while the other extreme is characterized by the ever increasing gap between rich and poor.
For Pope Francis and most of the bishops of Latin America, how to understand and respond to this situation was the most important question facing the Church in their world, especially in those countries or regions where political power was in the hands of Catholics “in good standing.”
When Pope Francis spoke about the problem of poverty in the mission of the Church, this is the situation that he had in mind.

However, this does not mean that there are countries where this problem is not present. The reality of globalization makes this impossible to ignore. All of us are involved with this situation through our politics and our “economic habits.”This involvement of the individual sin against justice is expressed in a kind of institutionalized sin that embodies itself in the structures that regulate our social, political, and economic life.
The discussion about our involvement in the sin of injustice became a discussion about the “structures of sin” and our involvement with them. (Before he became Pope, Cardinal Bergoglio wrote a book with a Jewish Rabbi in Buenos Aires, where he was Archbishop. In the book, he seemed honestly scandalized by how much is spent on pets these days compared with what is spent on programs to help the poor, as the current debate on the right to health care demonstrates.) In any case, the point to be remembered is that individual involvement with sin is asserted to be found in how we submit to the demands of the structures of sin.
This is where the clash between Liberation Theologians and the conservative defenders of tradition appear to disagree totally. The question, simply put, is this: Granted that structures of sin exist, which comes first: individual, personal sin designing, so to speak, the structures of injustice, or do the structures come first, involving what we do in the sins of injustice? Concisely, which come first, structural or individual sins?
For LT, the structures come first, and our salvation by Christ consists in allowing us to recognize the effects in us of the sinful structures and giving us the ability to change them accordingly. This is where faith is opened to a defense of the Revolution.

The concern of the Magisterium, however, was not only the use of Marxism to analyze the social, political, and economic structures of society, but a concern about the claims that sociology–any sociology–can understand reality by purging the atheism out of sociology, making it possible to include faith in its analysis. Here we have the question of the relation between grace and nature that has characterized most theological debates of the twentieth century: What is a proper anthropology of grace, and what Christology and ecclesiology does this anthropology betoken?
The Latin American Bishops have been discussing these issues since Vatican II, especially through a series of continental meetings. The election of Pope Francis now pushes the issue of faith and poverty to the center of the Church’s pastoral and doctrinal concerns.