Recently, in cities across America, crowds of people have been camping outside in tents within cities, some for multiple nights. These crowds of people have often become unruly, with a number of them being arrested, with some even being pepper sprayed or tasered. I'm talking, of course, about the crowds of people who took part in the annual American ritual known as Black Friday. Did you think I meant something else?
Black Friday is always one of those moments in American life that many of us tend to look at and shake our heads, but in our current climate, the ritual seemed even more ridiculous if that is at all possible. With high unemployment, higher underemployment, a slowly improving but still weak economy, and thousands of citizens taking to the street to protest economic injustice as part of the Occupy movement, a day full of rampant materialism and needless purchasing of needless items seemed a little, well, odd. The Church has acknowledged this as well, responding to these troubling economic times with a reminder of those who are left out of any kind of economic recovery, which once again is the most vulnerable of society.
Since the Occupy Wall Street movement began a couple months ago and spawned many similar Occupy movements across the United States and really across the Western World, a question that is come up time and again is "what should Catholics' response be to this movement? Perhaps unsurprisingly, many Catholic news services have criticized or outright rejected the movement. One guy on EWTN Radio even went as far as to compare them to the Nazis, although I don't recall what he said because I usually tune someone out when they start throwing out Nazi references unless they're actually talking about Nazis. First off, let me say that the Occupy movement and the Catholic Church are by no means completely on the same page. Many within the Occupy movement are largely pro-choice and there is even some talk of them receiving donations from pro-choice groups. There is also some mentions of anti-Semitic statements made by those taking part in the Occupy protests which, although by no means an official message from the Occupy movement and probably taken out of context then out of proportion, is nonetheless troubling by its presence. With that said, however, the Occupy movement is advocating many of the things that the Catholic Church has been advocating for centuries: a remembrance of the poor, advocating for the vulnerable, and a rejection of an economic system in which the rich get richer by exploiting the poor and vulnerable.
With this in mind, recently the Church released a document titled Toward Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of Global Public Authority. The document calls for more Global Authority to regulate markets, along with taxation on financial transactions and further actions to make the market more responsive to the needs of the person as opposed to nations that enjoy a financial advantage. You can read the full document here:
http://www.zenit.org/article-33718?l=english
The response to this document has been interesting to say the least. Criticisms from within Catholic media sources are once again present, but there is one criticism I wish to focus on in particular, the insistence that this is "not an official papal document" and therefore not official. True this does not carry the same weight as an official papal document as, say, Humanae Vitae and it is also true that Pope Benedict XVI probably did not write a single word in the document. That does not mean that the document does not hold merit, however. One would be hard pressed to find anything within the document that is inconsistent with papal teachings throughout the centuries.
The document also shines the light on what persists to be a very important issue yet also persists to be one that usually gets little or no attention. One of the oft quoted phrases from the Occupy movement is "we are the 99%," meant to represent that much of the economic power in this country is held by the top 1% while the 99% seem to continue to get a smaller slice of an ever shrinking pie. This must be kept in perspective however. Although I am certainly a part of that 99% of the United States populous, in comparison to the rest of the world I am probably in the top 10% and perhaps even in the top 1% of economic power. I have a car, a roof over my head, a cell phone, a refrigerator full of food, electricity, running water, heating and air conditioning, a television hooked to a satellite, and (obviously) internet access, items that as an American I largely take for granted or perhaps even feel entitled to while most of the world's population would see these items as unattainable luxuries. So while we are the 99%, we must not forget that there is an even larger 99% who is more vulnerable with even less economic say than those of us within America's 99%.
So once again we come to Black Friday. Surely we have all seen the pictures of the overcrowded stores and heard the news stories of some cases in which the crowds were at times unruly. Catholics Vote had an interesting post this morning where pictures of the Black Friday madness were contrasted with quotes by Blessed John Paul II. You can check it out here:
http://www.catholicvote.org/discuss/index.php?p=23306
So how do we, as Catholics or as Christians, respond to the contrast of a nation that has one large crowd protesting economic injustice and another large crowd taking part in an annual ritual of rampant unchecked materialism? I will not act like I have a simple answer to this question because in truth there is no simple answer. I would, however, recommend that as Christians and as a Church we look past these crowds and look at each person as an individual. The Catechism of the Catholic Church criticizes Capitalism in the same section it criticizes Socialism and Communism for a very simple reason. Pure Capitalism, pure Socialism, and pure Communism all have the same inherent flaw in that they devalue the individual in favor of the society's collective gain and is willing to exploit the populous in order to achieve this gain. So as a Church we have a duty to support the individual against a society who sees the vulnerable within the world as little more than tools to exploit for one's own gain. So whether we sleep out in a tent on Wall Street in order to protest economic injustice or we sleep out in a tent in front of Best Buy in order to get great deals on electronics, I hope that as a society we will not forget the vulnerable who continue to suffer due to exploitation yet often have no voice.
No comments:
Post a Comment