I think people are surprisingly always aware of what you’re noting here. And they use this knowledge to justify their inaction. You claim, “The issue with this approach in my opinion is that it ultimately considers bad things not something caused by people doing evil stuff, which is the reality, but because of a structural issue that can be tinkered and engineered away, which it can not be and never will be.” Yet humans can and do create systems that perpetuate inequality all the time. And then Christ’s admonishment that there will be poor always gets trotted out as rationale for focusing on other problems and ignoring our own hand in poverty. That’s just weird Christianity. I’d welcome Church leaders who call us out on such weirdness.
Sure, but systems are not evil, period–they are incapable of being evil just like guns and airplanes are incapable of being evil–rather, people (can) commit evil acts through systems.
Changing the system is a bandaid at best, a perfunctory and temporary action done by lofty intellectual types at worst who do it to justify their paychecks by academic departments and government offices. I don’t think changing systems is
necessarily a bad thing–we NEED bandages, after all!–but! it is so deliciously easy to pretend that oh, if we
just have
one more program, one more this, one more that,
if only our government were like this instead of that, everything will be solved. False! Completely and utterly false. I think that’s a joke. I think such a view, if anyone has it, shows an astounding lack of faith,
as if we will ever solve poverty. How
proud can we be? Note here that I am criticizing a particular expression of a certain world view, I’m not naming names, because names don’t matter.
I am trying to privilege what I think is a delicately balanced viewpoint, which I think is very much in line with Catholic teachings:
we must help other people in corporal ways
because they are humans in need and this obligation comes from God
yet we will never succeed in this world, we will never create a utopia, so let’s stop pretending that we will be able to, because this directly and actively creates (and has done so in the last century) all kinds of nasty atheistic side-plots in human history.
I think much of the negative aspects here come from a rationalization of suffering. But you
cannot rationalize suffering except to say: it exists because we are sinful. We will always be sinful, so we will always suffer. We should accept suffering as a reality that we will never get rid of on earth.
We create it despite, and sometimes
as a direct result of, our best intentions.
Furthermore, in the Church’s ministries to the world I think we need to talk more actively and loudly about the aspects of purgation and positivity that can come out of suffering. Suffering is bad, yes, but God can make good things come from it. So, let’s try to limit suffering, yes, absolutely, but for the things we can’t eliminate–and there are so many, so let’s not pretend like we will be able to get rid of them–let’s try to help good things come from such suffering otherwise. This is a very old part of Catholic spirituality and I think it is only because of certain technological advances in certain parts of the world that certain (read: secular Western elites) have forgotten about it. In fact, now that I think of it, I think this may be one of the things Pope Francis is talking about when he says that the Church is not an NGO.
phew
