Why Are The Poor Blessed?

+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
4 Oct 2009

Most of us have heard of Christ's saying "Blessed are the poor", words which are diametrically opposed to the Australian dream.

Australia is a country of immigrants and the children of immigrants, as even the aborigines came here, probably from India, tens of thousands of years ago.

Migrants travel to strange countries in search of work or land, but especially for a better future for their children.  They want to escape poverty and in our type of society, free and prosperous, many are able to achieve this for their children or grandchildren.

The great Australian dream means upward social mobility and over our history we have experienced a steadily improving standard of living.

For twenty years now I have travelled overseas a good deal and at one stage I was regularly in Third World countries for development work.  But even by First World standards, most Australians don't realize how well off we are.

The Catholic Church too fights poverty, especially through our network of schools.  Does all this activity fly in the face of Jesus' teaching that the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to the blessed poor?

When people do not believe in life after death but do believe that God is good, the scales of justice have to work out in this life.  In ancient times many of the Jewish people thought in this way believing the successful deserved to be blessed, while those in trouble were there because of their own sins, or the sins of their ancestors.

Therefore one of the main ambitions of Jesus in outlining the beatitudes was to tell the battlers, the disadvantaged that they were not cursed, but eligible for blessings because they too belonged to the Kingdom of Heaven.

In fact in some mysterious way the poor, provided they are not embittered, not jealous of those more prosperous than themselves are at a considerable advantage in God's eyes over the proud and arrogant.

For Jesus and his followers this world of daily living is not the be-all and end-all.  Daily life is mightily important and should be beautiful, but it is not the end of the story.

Critics claim that Christianity is only good for life's losers.  Two thousand years of achievement disprove this, but Christianity does not endorse pagan common sense, where the powerful take what they can and the weak give what they must.

Christ offers hope to the poor in spirit.