Cardinal Cahal Daly has urged people not to turn a blind eye to the suffering of others at a time of “global and national gloom and worry and fear” and he said the crisis had taught that people could not put their trust in money.
In a Christmas message delivered on Vatican Radio this weekend, Cardinal Daly noted that media were filled with reports of deepening economic recession.
“Businesses, large and small, are collapsing every day. Jobs are being lost or threatened. Homes are being repossessed. There are old people who cannot afford to buy enough food or enough warmth simply to survive,” he said.
“At the same time, there is still worse poverty in other continents: millions are chronically hungry or are suffering from poverty-related diseases and without medical care. How are we to celebrate Christmas in a world of desperate need, a world of shameful inequality, a world of gross injustice?”
Cardinal Daly recalled the parable of the Good Samaritan of Luke’s gospel.
“In today’s world there are so many battered persons left lying along life’s road, mugged by global forces. People pass by on the other side, pretending not to notice,” he said.
“In Jesus’ story these include a priest and a levite, people held in high esteem in Jewish society. Then a Samaritan stranger comes along, a person whom pious Jews wouldn’t even talk to; and it is he who he binds up the man’s wounds and leaves money to pay for his needs. Are we that Samaritan? Or do we too pretend not to see, because it isn’t our business?”
Cardinal Daly also recalled the teaching about the Last Judgement, when he said Christ said he was himself present in the poor and the starving and the homeless.
“When we help them we are helping him. But when we neglect to help them we are neglecting Jesus Christ himself.”
He said the greatest thing people could give and share was their faith.
“Faith is the one treasure of which we are sure and certain. The global recession which we are passing through now has surely taught us that we cannot put our trust in money, however carefully banked it is, no matter how securely invested it is.”
He recalled the words of Jesus Matthew’s gospel: ‘Do not store up treasures for yourselves on earth, where moths and woodworms destroy and thieves can break in and steal. But store up treasures for yourselves in heaven, where neither moth nor woodworms destroy and thieves cannot break in and steal.’
The cardinal said: “Moths and woodworms have their modern counterparts and are called by new and strange names: sub-prime lending, leverage, lack of liquidity, all these eat into and devour investments and pension funds which we used to think would never let us down.
“These factors do precisely what moths and woodworms did to coins in Roman times when our Lord spoke.”