The Old Testament routinely shows partiality to the rich, since its writers believe wealth is a sign of God’s blessing. Poverty thus marks a person as cursed by God, a sinner. Jesus in the Gospel reverses the Old Testament. He shows no partiality to the rich. whose wealth is man-made from abusing the poor. James in today’s New Testament reading cautions against betraying that witness, “Show no partiality as you adhere to faith in Jesus Christ… (if) you pay attention to one wearing fine clothes and say, “Sit here, please,” while you say to a poor one, “Stand there,” … have you not made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil designs?”
Charles Peguy was born poor in France in 1873 and died there this week in 1914, 41 short years later. Pequy was noticed as smart and so the rich made a distinction of him. They put him through their university system and trained him to show partiality to the rich. He was used by them as a token. A token is made to be used in place of a real thing, for example, one poor person educated in place of changing a system keeping people poor and ignorant. Tokens enable rulers to tell a disproportionate lie, like merit, to misrepresent a larger truth, like privilege. Peguy, however, could not entirely forsake his communion with the poor. He wanted in the depths of his soul to be a genuinely Christ-like man, not a mere token of one. He could see in the poverty around him the evil designs of the rich. He knew that to not care for the poor made wretched by the rich had “made of Christianity a wretched religion.” He decided to embrace Socialism in a desire to change the partiality shown to the rich and the injustices they did to the poor. In Peguy’s time and in modern times, the rich abuse the poor and unjustly sentence them to jail time and burdened them with criminal records for minor offenses; stealing a loaf of bread, sleeping under a bridge at night, having broken windows, sending one’s child to an out of district school, …. In times past and in modern times jail and a criminal record destroy a poor person and also their family. Already denied livable wages and affordable housing, they are additionally denied job opportunities, voting rights, and family well-being in matters of childhood, finances, and personal and social health. Those who are rich use a token phrase to explain a token problem, ‘the problem of intergenerational poverty.’ It is in place of the real problem of intergenerational wealth. Intergenerational wealth is gained and maintained precisely from wretched crimes committed by rich families against poor families over decades and centuries. They are the crimes of setting an unlivable wage, denying health care while using the poor people’s money to secure their own. But rich people are not sentenced to jail time for these crimes nor most others, nor are they burdened with a criminal record. The rich routinely show partiality to the rich. Rich Big Pharma companies like Eli Lilly, Johnson and Johnson, Pfizer, Sackler’s Purdue, and others routinely commit intergenerational wealth crimes such as bribery, unlawful promotion of prescription drugs, insider trading, and Medicaid drug pricing fraud for which, at worst, if at all, easily affordable fines are levied but rarely, if ever, jail. Rich big business companies like the Morgans, Rockefellers, Trumps, and Waltons, and others routinely commit intergenerational wealth crimes like interest rate manipulation, money-laundering, and wage theft and are rarely penalized, perhaps with affordable fines, but no jail, no criminal record. Rich war plunderers like the Boeings, Bushes, Cheneys, and others routinely commit intergenerational wealth crimes like mercenary hiring, contracting fraud, illegal invasions, wars, and human rights and international law violations and are rarely penalized, if at all, with affordable fines, but no jail. Even Peguy could not ultimately overcome showing partiality to the rich, specifically in the matter of intergenerational war crimes. When the war plunderers of his day beckoned, Peguy showed them the partiality for which they had trained him. His years were short because he died in WWI at the First Battle of the Marne. He died from the evil designs of intergenerational wealth that had wounded his heart and soul and marrow.
“How did it happen that this most Christian people, this profoundly, intimately interiorly Christian people, Christian in soul and at heart and to the very marrow of its bones, should have been turned into . . . this modern people, so profoundly interiorly unchristian, de-Christianized in heart and soul and marrow.” (Clio I – Charles Peguy)
Prayer: Spirit, keep us partial to those who are poor, in our heart, in our soul, in our marrow.
Question: How do I live in communion with poor friends in a world of rich rulers?
September 5, 2021 Gospel Mark 7:31-37 Twenty Third Sunday in Ordinary Time