Prepare to share: visit Poverty USA

The Grinch who stole Christmas won’t be touring America’s second-most populous state this year. Why bother?

After all, that state is poverty according to the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD). According to CCHD more people live within the boundaries of the "state of poverty" than live in Connecticut, Kentucky Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, and Nevada combined.

In Poverty USA, annual income for a family of four is $17,184 or less. Such a family won’t have many Christmas presents for the Grinch to haul back up the chimney!

To have even a tree much less something under it, the 32 million people who live in poverty will have to cut some already sharp corners and rely on the generosity of others. We need to pay more than seasonal attention to people in this crisis situation.

The Catholic Campaign wants "to promote a spirit of solidarity among those who are successful, those who have acquired some share of this nation’s goods, and those still trapped in poverty." This month they conclude the first of a three-year consciousness-raising campaign. In January which they have christened "Poverty in America Awareness Month" they begin a new phase which focuses on children in poverty.

In the name of all Catholics who believe that creation and created goods are to be shared by everyone (see Vatican II’s The Church in the Modern World, #69) the Catholic Campaign reminds people of conscience that poverty is not usually noble but demeaning disempowering, destabilizing, even dangerous.

On CCHD’s Web site povertyusa.org, you can experience poverty for yourself. Or you can learn from someone you know.

According to the Campaign, four in 10 Americans currently know someone who is poor. Allow that person to inform your attitudes.

The Grinch is fictional. Poverty is real. Around the world, poverty contributes to the festering resentment that can inspire terrorism. Around the nation, it results in hunger, homelessness, untreated health challenges and political apathy. CCHD has made praise-worthy efforts to communicate this.

When the Infant Jesus grew old enough to speak in public he used the words of Isaiah 61 to tell us all that his work was to bring glad tidings to the poor and freedom to the oppressed. The Catholic Campaign for Human Development continues that mission. Together we can make Poverty USA an uninhabited wilderness.

"Prepare to Share: Visit Poverty USA," editorial by Carol Ann Morrow, from St. Anthony Messenger magazine, December 2001, reprinted by permission of St. Anthony Messenger Press, http://www.AmericanCatholic.org

The Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) has dedicated itself to educating the public about the struggle of the poor in our society. To find out more about the Poverty: America’s Forgotten State, contact Chris Loetscher, Director of Social Concerns and Family Life for the Diocese of New Ulm, MN. (507) 359-2966.