Agnes (not her real name) is the mother of four children. Her husband is unemployed. Two of their four children are employed but they are also single mothers. Agnes has to take care of their children as well.

One son needs constant vigilance for he is constantly hovering on the precipice of drug addiction. She is expected to solve all the family’s problems, provide for its financial and emotional needs, do all the housework and manage its meagre budget. On top of it all, she has mental and other health problems.

I read about Agnes in the January edition of the Jesuit magazine, Lil Ħbiebna.

I recounted the story to a small group of people. Their reaction brought to the surface a number of myths about poverty: “The poor are poor because they are lazy or don’t want to work” or “They are not really poor – they just don’t manage their money properly.”

Other canards proffered were that the poor remain poor because they do not make the best of the schemes the government and civil society craft for their benefit. The poor are also accused of benefit fraud, which enables them to live comfortably while bloating the deficit.

There is a common strand between these unjust and fundamentally untrue statements: the root of poverty is individual not structural. The blame is shifted from society to the individual poor person. This assumption is a very comfortable one for us who are not poor, as it frees us from any responsibility. We can pacify our conscience through the occasional charitable donation.

I am not implying that there is no shred of truth in any of these statements. There definitely is. But the anecdotal evidence propagated by the media as proof of these myths is, at best, marginal to the cause of the problem. There is benefit fraud, for example, but many times the culprits are not the poorest. Besides, benefit fraud costs the country much less than tax evasion, which is not indulged in by the poor.

The belief that poverty is not the direct result of unjust socio-economic structures spawns another myth. Education is the key that provides for its eradication. In no way do I want to diminish the importance of education, but the neo-liberal hypothesis that education is a panacea is manifestly wrong. (Prof. Peter Mayo’s stimulating contribution to the subject in his Facebook account, which in part inspired this commentary, deserves divulgation.)

Education is neither value-free nor politically neutral. An educational system built on the consensual values of a society fired by the neo-liberal economic ethos and the glorification of middle-class values will not break the cycle of poverty.

Besides, this educational system tends to be reduced to training in the skills that lead to employability. On the contrary, a system that treats education as a very important public and social good that fosters critical thinking would attack poverty at its roots.

However, within the dominant political discourse – even in Malta – based on the singing of the praises of the values of the middle class, critical thinking and creative imagination will play second fiddle to need of the business classes to push just for skills and employability.

An educational system based on raising critical and creative individuals would rock the neo-liberal boat, something not on the agenda of neither the right-wing politicians nor of the left-wing ones who spout neo-liberal clichés and mantras even more than their adversaries.

The experiment with students from Cospicua, led by Prof. Carmel Borg and concluded in February 2013, is a sterling example of an educational initiative based on critical thinking in line with the theories of Don Milani, but such experiments are like a flash in the pan of our educational system.

The Catholic Church has a very important role to play. It should be the prophetic and critical voice that haunts the neo-liberal conscience. The pandering to the middle class at the expense of the poor is intrinsically immoral.

Pope Francis’s recent encyclical is just one in a series of encyclicals showing us what can be done so that the poor will not always be with us. If this is not a challenge for responsibility and action, I do not know what is.

(The Jesuit magazine quoted above wrote that Agnes helps herself by stringing crosses and necklaces made of beads and selling them. You can send a €2 donation to Ċentru Fidi u Ġustizzja, 79, Triq Markiż Scicluna, Naxxar.)

• The Communications Office of the Curia, in reply to my queries, has informed me that the bishops will be publishing the results of the Vatican questionnaire in preparation for the October Extraordinary Synod about the Family.

This is good news indeed. It is a sign of courage on the part of the Bishops. They will be emulating, among others, the German, Swiss and Belgian bishops who published the results of their questionnaire.

The bishops of England and Wales as well as the Irish bishops have unfortunately not published the results, hiding behind the excuse that the Vatican does not want them to publish them. Such a decision is a direct insult to all those who took the time to fill it.

The pandering to the middle class at the expense of the poor is intrinsically immoral

The Curia also informed me that the results will be published in a few weeks’ time when Discern, the Curia’s research office, is expected to finalise its analysis and report of the answers received.

This means that the Church in Malta has missed the January 31 deadline originally set by the Vatican for receiving the reports and will be missing it by another few weeks.

I was unofficially informed that over 7,000 people answered the questionnaire but the preliminary report will be based on a sample of around 1,000. Statisticians told me that since the respondents were not randomly chosen but they selected themselves to answer, then the results cannot be extrapolated to the whole Maltese population. This notwithstanding, the results can still prove to be a valid exercise even if it does not reflect the opinion of the whole population.

One should not be surprised that a long time is needed. Coding the answers given to so many open-ended questions penned by such a big sample, analysing the results and compiling a report is a vast piece of work. It entails the training of a limited number of coders preferably through some common exercises to ascertain uniformity. The inputting will also take a long time.

The very limited resources of Discern must have been overstretched. Perhaps this exercise should help the Church reflect whether it should beef up the resources of its research institute.

joseph.borg@um.edu.mt