Church stands alone in war on poverty

Sydney
23 June 2002

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Church stands alone in war on poverty

By Kathleen Carmody

The Church is alone in its efforts to highlight “the moral imperative” of addressing poverty, according to Professor Mary Ann Glendon.

Affluent nations are washing their hands of poor countries and poor people, she said.

The Harvard Law School professor, who was delivering the Caritas Australia Helder Camara Lecture, said the UN Declaration of Human Rights is under attack, particularly in the areas of economic and social justice.

Some African and Asian nations claim it does not reflect their values, while in the Muslim world it has been dismissed as “nothing but a Western document”.

The West has also played a part in deconstructing it over the past decade, she said.

“Human rights groups have continued the Cold War practice of selectively promoting the parts of the Declaration they favoured while ignoring others,” she said “The parts that speak to economic and social justice are being almost completely ignored.

“It is a moral scandal that the poorest people and countries are being increasingly marginalised in the global order just when, perhaps for the first time, we have recognised that poverty is not necessary; not fixed in the order of things,” she said. Only the Church continued to lift up before the world the moral imperative of addressing poverty, she added.

The Church did not treat poor people as problems to be solved. Rather it “exhorts us to view the disadvantaged as persons whose human potential “deserves to be realised,” she said

Prof Glendon said the world was in a better position than ever before to make good on the pledge “to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedoms” made in the Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

“We already know a good deal about how poverty has been conquered, wealth created, and the formerly poor empowered to unleash their creativity,” she said. “But we need to know more, and to apply what we learn.”

The most pressing task was to reunite the commitment to personal freedom and the sense of one human family for which we all bear common responsibility.