Have you ever thought that the Deacon you condemn and insult had a point?
We do over celebrate success of rich men. What about the struggling widow or single mother?
There is a person who has a hard cross to bear.
Remember, as Catholics it is the cross that you carry that is more virtuous than your bank account.
The deacon was condemning capitalism, and using the single mother as an excuse.
The Church looks after widows and orphans. She also looks after single-by-choice mothers . . . who nailed themselves to that cross. But She suggests that they change their ways.
The capitalist system that the deac was condemning is far from perfect. The Church ameliorates its worst side-effects. But the socialist system that I guarantee the deac was promoting is far, far worse.
Everybody has sympathy for the struggling “single mother,” but she does not need to be celebrated.
The Church and its ministers, many of whom really couldn’t even make it in private industry, need to stop criticizing people for being wealthy, particularly when wealth has come to them through their efforts to build something great. Bill Gates is not celebrated because he is wealthy, but because the programs his company created really made possible an entirely new information society, accessible to all.
Instead, the Church needs to offer moral teaching to people that will help them do things like use their wealth properly (i.e., not in promoting abortion worldwide, although the Gates Foundation actually does some other things that are very good) and resist the temptation to think that being wealthy or powerful exempts them from “common” morality (for example, the Anthony Wieners of this world...).
And the poor need moral teaching too. The single mother in question is hardly likely to be a struggling widow, but simply somebody who was never married in the first place. The Church has virtually stopped teaching about sexual ethics and supposed Catholics sleep around just as much as everybody else and have equally little respect for marriage. Almost all the people now married in church weddings have been living together prior to finally deciding to get married, and sometimes have lived with other people in a succession of potentially single-motherhood-producing relationships before they finally pick someone to marry. Remember, the one clear thing in poverty statistics is that children from a home where there are two parents, married to each other, are far less likely to be poor than children of “single mothers.”
So the Church is doing no one any favors by “celebrating” single motherhood or victimhood. Obviously, people like that need material help and support and to my knowledge, nobody in church is refusing it to them. But the Church is a moral authority, not a social welfare agency that exists solely to channel government money to society’s victims, and it is the failure of the Church to preach Christian morality and ethics that takes much of the blame for the social situations that create these unfortunate people.
And as for wealth, why not criticize the right problem: for example, the fact that the fantastically wealthy rappers and rock stars became wealthy because people (including the poor) seem to have an insatiable appetite for out-of-control sex and violence and are happy to pay lots of money to hear it or see it. Again, where is the Church’s voice, saying that these things are evil, that people’s addiction to violence and gruesomely horrible sexuality is a moral issue and is something that the Christian message can free them from?
Getting up in the pulpit and saying rich = bad, poor = good does nothing to solve any of the problems of either the rich or the poor and nothing to advance the Christianizing of society.