The relevance of this parable [The Good Samaritan] is obvious. If we apply it to the dimensions of globalised society, we see how the populations of Africa find themselves robbed and pillaged and this concerns us very closely. We see how they are our neighbours; we also see that our way of life and the history in which we are involved have defrauded/stripped them and continue to defraud/strip them.If you stop the quotation right there, you get a one-side picture, and you get headlines such as those we've seen. But he goes on:
Above all, this includes the fact that we have wounded them spiritually. Instead of giving them God, the God so near to us in Christ and instead of welcoming from their traditions everything that is precious and great, and bringing those things to fulfilment, we have instead brought them the cynicism of a world without God, in which only power and profit matter; we have destroyed moral criteria so that corruption and the unscrupulous desire for power is evident.What is he thinking of? Certainly colonialism has a mixed record, but I read this to be more an indictment of our population control programs as I said yesterday, and perhaps equally he's thinking of Marxism, which has been so devastating to so many countries, or the disinterest of the Western press in what happens to brown people, except when a story can be spun to cudgel perceived enemies (Pope's opposition to condoms causes AIDS, you know). He continues:
And this doesn't only apply to Africa. Yes, we must give material assistance and we must examine our way of life. But we give much too little if we only give material things.Now he's on Mother Teresa's wavelength --she who famously commmented that the poorest people she ever met were in the wealthy West. Note the main idea, italicized for your convenience.
Reading that, I stand by my previous post, but my point is not to make the mistake I'm accusing the press of in reverse, hijacking His Holiness for my own ends. I simply insist we err if we think Joseph Ratzinger is given to cheap political pronouncements one way or the other, and we should know by now that a provocative headline is cause for going to the actual text. His point is that if we are not virtuous people, we will not be capable of offering good solutions, because even good intentions will go astray. Or as he taught in Deus Caritas Est, politics has to be worked out through Reason, but Reason must be purified of its interested motives through charity.And don't we also find man defrauded/stripped and tormented closer to home? The victims of drugs, of person-trafficking, of sexual tourism and people who are internally destroyed, who are empty despite an abundance of material goods. All of this concerns us and calls us to have an eye and a heart for our neighbour, and also the courage of love towards our neighbour. Because, as I have said, the priest and the Levite pass on the other side perhaps more out of fear rather than indifference.
We need, starting with our interior selves, to learn again the risk of goodness; we are only capable of goodness if we become interiorly good, if we are interiorly neighbours and if we have the ability to identify what type of service in our surroundings and in the broader scope of our lives is demanded, what is possible for us and therefore what is given to us as our duty. [pp 235-236]
