大象传媒

Good morning
The notion that God is on the side of the poor runs right through the Bible. It shouldn't surprise us, therefore, when an Archbishop of Canterbury proposes a scheme to make cheap loans available to poor people - nor when a Pope declares, in front of a crowd of three million youngsters on Copacabana Beach in Brazil, that the Church has to go out into the favelas and slums that ring many of Latin America's biggest cities, and become "the Church of the Poor". He's just doing his job, even if the implication is that other people haven't been doing theirs.
聽 The rather tarnished public image of the Catholic Church was certainly in need of a face lift. But this isn't just about shrewd PR, nor about competing for members with the rapidly growing Pentecostal churches. It is something fresh and real, and I for one am excited by it.
聽 But it does have one obvious danger. What if he can't deliver; what if nothing happens; what if the condition of the poor actually gets worse? Is he just wagging a reproaching finger at rich people, telling them to donate a little more of their spare cash to the many charities that the Church runs? Jesus's statement "Blessed are the poor" rather implies, as he also said, that "the poor are always with us". But so is sin. Indeed sin, meaning social injustice, might well be why the poor still exist. That's in the Bible too.
聽 But there is more to this than meets the eye. When Pope Francis was a young Jesuit priest in Buenos Aires, the Catholic Church was convulsed by a row over the so-called theology of liberation. This alarmed the authorites in Rome because it seemed to be an attempt to blend Christianity with revolutionary Marxism, until then regarded as a sworn enemy...