Love of the Poor

A quick thought: whenever I read the lives of the saints (or Christian holy people), one constant that strikes me is their love of the poor.

Not just a humanitarian desire to make life better for the poor, but a positive love of the poor themselves-- as human beings, not objects of charity.

George Bernard Shaw famously wrote: "For my part I hate the poor and look forward eagerly to their extermination." Obviously, he was being provocative and epigrammatic here: he didn't want to exerminate poor people, but to exterminate poverty. (He also said he wanted to exterminate the other classes.)

I think we all tend to be Shavians today, in this regard. We see nothing good in poverty.

This love of the poor and solidarity with the poor seems an aspect of the Christian tradition that is rather sidelined today, even among Christians.

Funnily enough, it's familiar to me from the sort of radical left-wing, Irish republican, trade unionist environment I was born into, going back generations. (Of course, like everything in twentieth-century Ireland, it was nourished by Catholicism, often indirectly.)

I was born with the songs and the phrases of the Dublin tenements still ringing in my ears, although I never experienced them personally. I think I'm rather fortunate in that regard.

And yet, sadly, I have also fallen into modern society's attitude to poverty.