Blessed are the Poor

by Gianni Valente

“Blessed are you poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God,” says Jesus in the Gospel according to Luke. And those who follow Jesus on the path of world history notice and recognize that on this path the poor are facilitated. This is the sign of predilection, of the “preferential option” for the poor that marks the mystery of salvation throughout history.
The poor and the little ones pass more easily through narrow doors and difficult passages. They are facilitated, precisely because they have fewer burdens and weights to carry. They are the first beneficiaries of the “hundredfold on this earth” that Jesus promises to his followers in the Gospel.
And they can radiate a happiness that does not belong to them, that is not the result of their performance. They possess nothing of their own, they are empty-handed. And this is precisely why their happiness is and manifests itself as a free gift, a reverberation of a miracle of predilection.
Gifts that are conditionally more distant for the rich and the great, those with "a ready-made soul" (Charles Péguy), those who are "self-made". And they cannot buy a drop of additional happiness with all their accomplishments.

The predilection of Jesus, of the Father and of the Holy Spirit for the poor is inscribed in the Mystery and history of Salvation. Pope Francis also refers to this Mystery of predilection when he insistently repeats that "the poor are the flesh of Christ".

It is Christ himself who identifies with them. And salvation can reach everyone through those whom Christ himself chooses. The words of Pope Francis also recall this dizzying dynamic, always recognized and confessed in the Church of Christ.

God gives his happiness and his light to the poor, He privileges them. He prefers them. And through the mystery of charity that animates the Church, even those who are not poor, even the rich can participate in the same joy, if they allow themselves to be embraced by this predilection. Not by an ascetic effort, but by following something that attracts them more than their surplus budgets.

Saint Augustine wrote that Christ, in his work of redemption, wanted to touch the heart of the king starting from the announcement made by the sinful fisherman, and not the other way around. In order to manifest more clearly that his salvation is communicated freely, by grace, and not by pressure, calculation and human effort.

Not so long ago, for the ideological grids of influential ecclesial circuits, it had become suspect to speak of preference and preferential option for the poor. It was said that it was a politicization of the evangelical message.

Today, apparently, this is no longer the case. But even today, under other paradoxical masks, we feel the same impatience, the same unease and the same suspicion in the face of this predilection, when it manifests itself.

All compassionate conservatisms and progressivisms, all the poses of pauperism à la page do not recognize, are structurally incapable and little interested in recognizing the effective and operative predilection of Christ himself for the poor, privileged beneficiaries of the enjoyment of the pledge of his salvation, already on this earth.
They treat the poor, in the end, according to the categories of the world. They treat them as wretches, failures, ultimately passive recipients of the gifts and attentions of others. Amorphous and passive plastic matter, human matter to be modeled, inert matter in which they claim to breathe life through their own strategies of "valorization".

The poor, reduced and neutralized into an abstract category, can become decorative products of neo-clerical choreographies. Choreographies in which every subversive and prophetic impulse of the ecclesial currents that in the last century had recognized and embraced the real power of the multitudes, already exercised historically, is also dissipated and suppressed. They had also recognized that their struggles were potential factors of structural change in the global mechanisms of production and exploitation, of distribution of power and wealth.

In the time of the Church, and starting from the Gospel, from the deacon Saint Lawrence, from Saint Ambrose and from the Fathers of the Church, the poor have never been treated as shadows in search of visibility, eager to beg for their "quarter of an hour of media fame" that today's society grants to everyone, as Andy Warhol prophesied.

The Gospel and the Roman Fides have never said that the poor are without sin and without human misery. But they always maintained the tacit evidence that the poor could more easily enjoy the happiness which the Lord had given them by his free choice and preference. Not only the groaning, not only the cry of the oppressed poor, but also their gratuitous and unimaginable happiness touches and moves the heart of God.

The Fathers of the Church have recognized and attested to this. Great priests of our time, such as Don Lorenzo Milani and Don Primo Mazzolari, or Rafael Tello and Lucio Gera, the best known Argentine representatives of the "Theology of the People", have also repeated it in their own way. For the latter two, it is not ecclesiastical declarations and conjectures that have given dignity to the poor. For Christ himself sacramentally preserves the poor in the memory of their dignity. A dynamic, writes Father Rafael Tello, inscribed and expressed in popular spirituality, that with which the people of God's poor evangelize themselves "better than priests usually do", and whose concern for the baptism of their children is "the most important manifestation": "A sensitive fact, the rite of baptism, explains Father Rafael Tello, perceived as a sign that God takes them for himself. For our people it is like this. He takes the child to baptize him and clothes him in Christ. This is Catholicism, to the end: I bring the child to this, he can live like a wretch, but he is already clothed in Christ".

("I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike". Mt 11:25)

(Agenzia Fides, 19/11/2024)

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