We all need to look at our priorities. Photo: Talan Sadudeewong/Shutterstock.com

The recent report by Caritas Malta about the urgent need for an updated minimum wage again makes us aware that there are poor people in Malta. They include two-parent families with two children, one-parent families with two children, and pensioners.

Why should a Church agency busy itself with such an issue of justice and solidarity, which also has economical and political implications? Can one expect those who are better-off to take a real interest in the plight of poor people, including migrants?

At the same time, one gets the distinct feeling that in the capitalistic West, to which Malta belongs, not the poor but the economy, business and entrepreneurship are the priorities. It is significant that in an economy that is doing very well, the poor have got poorer. Their concerns carry little weight.

Pope Francis’ love for the poor is proverbial, being expressed, among other things, in the name he chose. In his 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (EG), which in many ways expressed Francis’ vision for his pontificate, the Pope prominently included the social dimension of the Gospel.

Preaching Christ must promote the true interests of the poor in society. Justice issues are not an optional extra for Christians, but an integral element of their faith. Christian faith, so rooted in God’s mercy, needs – precisely because it is animated by God’s love – to be a faith that actively does justice.

Francis teaches that, for the Church, the option (or preferential love) for the poor is, as Pope St John-Paul II had written in 1987, “a special form of primacy in the exercise of Christian charity to which the whole tradition of the Church bears witness” (cf EG 198). This is confirmed by the self-effacing love of the poor of many of the Church’s great saints.

It is significant that in an economy that is doing very well, the poor have got poorer. Their concerns carry little weight

The poor are not only a reality in society, but above all, people in whom God is present and active (cf EG 198 they are created in the image and likeness of God, and so possess great dignity in God’s and the Church’s eyes. Each one of them should be able “to live fully in dignity as a child of God” (John-Paul II, 1988).

Francis has stated again and again that he wants a Church of the poor and for the poor. He was known as ‘the bishop of the slums’ in Buenos Aires, and has first-hand experience of how the poor, in their material hardship, are very close to the suffering Christ.

“We need to let ourselves be evangelised by them… we are called to find Christ in them, to lend our voice to their causes, but also to be their friends, to listen to them, to speak for them and to embrace the mysterious wisdom which God wishes to share with us through them” (EG 198).

It follows that advocacy on behalf of Malta’s poor belongs very much to our being Christian and to the whole process of evangelisation. Lending our voice to their cause, as the Caritas report does, is thoroughly in line with being a Christian. Furthering their cause also requires their empowerment, mainly through education.

It is heartening that the Caritas report was well received, and that all, including the authorities, are taking it seriously.

We all need to look at our priorities. In the social teaching of the Church and/or in every truly human world-view, the human being is above the economy. The economy is there to serve human beings and their common good, not the other way round.

The problems of the poor can only be radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation (cf EG 202). The world economy as presently structured remains, in truth, heavily weighted against God’s poor.

Christians and all people of good will look ahead in hope, and work hard for new and more humane structures to emerge that will effectively recognise the dignity of the poor, and at least remove great economic inequality.

Fr Robert Soler is a member of the Society of Jesus.