World Day or a Web Summit of the Poor and the Rich?
The Web Summit and World Day of the Poor (18.11.2018), invite us to reflect on the poor. A day of the poor is impersonal for them; they are poor also in name; hardly anyone calls them by name. When a poor man dies, a few know who he is. It is strange that the miserable of the Gospel gave a name to Lazarus, while not to the rich man. On the other hand, the news give names to the richest men and their ranking of wealth, banks, and all their assets. I will propose a World Day of the Rich even if it could offend the poor.
It would be good to bring the two sides together on the same day: World Day of the Rich and of the Poor. The very, very rich and the very, very poor, the miserable, face to face as in the last judgement. It would be a “RPSummit”. In any case, relations between rich and poor are the key to almost everything going on, from Trump, Putin, Bolsonaro, Maduro, refugees dying by thousands in the Mediterranean; relations between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, slums and palaces, etc.
It would be a challenge to compare the very rich with the very poor. Who would pay the RPSUMMIT? Hardly the richest themselves. Even harder, the Poor! A site on the Web invites you to meet the 10 richest people in the world. Imagine! Each one would be responsible for more than 100 million very poor people. If the richest were 20 (and only two are women), as another website says, it would give more than 50 million poor people to every rich person; but it seems that, according to another updated website, it will be 80 very, very rich people. And yet another advances that only 15 people, with name and photo, control much of the world’s money. It’s curious! Speaking of the poor, the news from various sites no longer speak of the number of poor people, but of poorer countries, and even say that there are 9 of the poorest and some of them have percentages of 8% of the population.
It is claimed that less than a hundred super-rich people have appropriated 82% of the wealth increase in 2017 in the world; and half of the poorest population will have been left with nothing. Blacker is the fact that very, very poor children are 400 million; and 1.4 million of them are at risk of starving in Africa. Some rich, very rich, tend to react: if we were to worry about the poor, “at our gate”, and give them crumbs, we would cease being rich and others would pass us by. Will psychiatry ever decide whether, scientifically, the greed and the craving to be the richest is pathological addiction, cleverness, or heart indifference and contempt towards the poor and miserable?
The very, very rich man of the parable of the Gospel had only one very poor man at his gate. Today the very rich do the same with many poor people. The very poor do not need only crumbs. They need a Rich and Poor Summit every year not to make the richest richer as in Web Summit. Why do the great politicians, the powerful and the richest of this world, not want to share the common wealth of the planet, even knowing, scientifically, that at the end they do not take anything of it? I think the main reason is because they reject Jesus Christ.
Whoever explicitly or implicitly rejects Jesus Christ rejects also the poor. How difficult it is for a very rich man to enter the Kingdom of God. Even so, the poor will continue to be a summit judgement of the very rich and powerful people. This concentration of means in less and less people is progress, or stupidity? Some rich men do good things; they only need to do good to the poor at their gate. The poor people, in painful silence, repeat: we are the criteria and judges of your greatness and your inhumanity. Poor people shout continuously: kings, you are naked and your savants are blind. Even without organized summits, “startups” work permanently in the human forums and ask: what is your purpose of life? Money or Jesus Christ who said: I was hungry and you gave me eating. Do as Martin, who still pagan, gave half of his cape to a poor man.
Funchal, World Day of the Poor, 2018
Fr. Aires Gameiro