This week, dedicated to the eradication of poverty, reminds us that poverty is always with us. But the images of poverty change.
This year the image of poverty that has haunted me is that of the body of Aylan Kurdi cradled in the arms of a Turkish soldier. It was poignant and disturbing. It jarred with our sense that poverty is simply the deprivation of material goods — Aylan was not dressed in rags but in runners any Australian child may have worn. In death he was not emaciated but could have been our own sleeping child.
The image said there is no greater poverty than death, and no greater deprivation than that of a child stripped of life. It also reminded us that Aylan was but one of millions of people who have been deprived of security, food, home, freedom and any tangible hope of making a life in their own nation. It offered us an international context in which to set our response to the many Australians who live in poverty.
The most striking images of responding to poverty have come from Pope Francis. That is not surprising because the best photographers in the world pad after him. Recently they showed him embracing poor immigrants, visiting jails in Philadelphia and Paraguay, at home with poor urban children in New York.
They showed a man as simply dressed as a pope can be, clowning with people we would regard as poor, moved to tears by their sufferings, entering their world as one of them, and encouraging them.
Words are also images. Francis has the gift for finding words that catch the conflicting feelings of prisoners, the sadness of loss and the resilience of people who live in degrading circumstances.
He also speaks powerfully of the need to address poverty. To Catholics he insists on the need for the church to move out of its comfortable centre to the margins where the poor live. To address poverty we must know people who live in poverty as our brothers and sisters. The church must be a poor church.
Phrases like that come easily off the tongue, but to turn them into reality has a sharp edge. At the heart of poverty lies insecurity about the immediate future and inability to manage risk. Should churches embrace these things?
Speaking jocularly with members of religious congregations in Cuba Pope Francis did not back off the implications of being a poor church:
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