One of the seminal books of Liberation Theology is "Marx and the Bible" by José Porfirio Miranda --- I read it in the early 70's but still remember the way he put forth his theme. In fact the Bible is FULL of concern for the poor, sometimes called just that ("the poor") and sometimes categorized as "the widow, the orphan, and the sojourners in the land." Go to a Bible search engine and give it a spin: it's a truly pervasive Biblical theme.
And it carried right through from Deuteronomy, the Prophets of Israel, the Gospels and Epistles, the Fathers of the Church, the Lives of the Saints, etc. etc.
HOWEVER. The category "the poor" has been mishandled in a Marxist-toned ideological way. There's the "interesting poor" (a distinct sociological class, the proletariat and lumpenproletariat, felons, Third Worlders, etc.) and the "unintersting poor" (dispossessed white Zimbabweans, murdered Cambodians, starving Soviet kulaks, Ukrainians, North Koreans, and oh, Down Syndrome people, your insurance-less underemployed Republican aunt and uncle, etc.)
The secular response to the poor is almost always entirely materialistic and skewed by the crudest partisanship; and it mostly centers on reducing them to, or maintaining them in, a degrading state of lifetime dependency.
All this is 100% unBiblical, unChristian, ands frankly unCatholic, if you go by the actual doctrines of the Church.
But the clerical and lay bureaucracy of the Church are very much the swarming grandchildren of Jose Porfirio Miranda.
Hard to see how to turn this around, except by God Almighty treating us with tough love like in most of the OT (famine and foreign conquest) and God Almighty raising up exemplary saints.
Oremus.
Thanks for your thoughtful and informative reply. You’ve obviously given this a great deal of thought over an extended period of time.
I think, however, I must still take exception with your fundamental assumption that the Bible is “full” of concern for the poor. There are places where it figures prominently, but is really very far from a dominant theme.
I read the Bible in its entirety three times in my teens and early twenties, so I am rusty but not unfamiliar with it. Just now, to refresh my memory for the sake of the point I’d like to make, I did a very quick browse through the entire Old Testament, scanning every ten pages or so, and never once did I catch the word “poor” anywhere. Literally, it was entirely about the Lord and the people of Israel, and the relationship and covenant between them, and nothing else. That’s it. The major stories of Genesis and Exodus, the Ten Commandments, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Kings, Chronicles, Job, The Psalms, the books of the prophets, etc. - although general righteousness is occasionally brought up, this is simply not a treatise on “the poor.”
Next, the New Testament? Same thing when I scanned that. The Gospels are not about “the poor,” nor is Acts, nor the letters of Paul and others, and certainly not Revelations. This is about the new covenant with the Trinity, and a correspondingly revised view of righteousness with a greater emphasis on love. But again, this love is not merely “concern for the poor,” but is tempered by a deeper, truer wisdom that prevents a merely sentimental or manipulative approach to the suffering of others.
I still maintain that, while the Bible does offer moral guidance for living a righteous life that is pleasing to God, and while our actions towards the poor (and all others as well, BTW) are part of that moral code, the Bible is so very, very far from and so infinitely greater than a Marxist treatise on “helping the poor,” that the Catholic Church should never have allowed such dangerous nonsense to even get the slightest foothold in their theology or practice.
I think you and I are probably saying the same sort of thing, just with viewpoints and emphases that, while different, are likely well within the margin of error. Again, thanks for your thoughtful reply, and the push to go back and again peruse The Bible. You might have even spurred a complete re-reading and reconsideration.