Poverty can be seen in the loneliness suffered by old people, poor parenting and the distraction offered by superficial pursuits, Archbishop Vincent Nichols said last week.
The Archbishop of Westminster made his remarks during a homily in a Mass to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Blessed Frédéric Ozanam, the founder of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, the international charity which serves the poor.
Archbishop Vincent Nichols said it was not only material poverty that afflicts people today. “We see every human being through the eyes of faith, each person endowed with God-given dignity, born and flourishing in relationship to others and to God.
“This suggests that we need to have eyes for the poverty which robs people of these truths: the relational poverty experienced by so many elderly people today; the poverty of parenting which undermines family life and even children’s’ health; the spiritual poverty of those fed on an exclusive diet of superficial excitement or much worse,” he said during the Mass at Westminster Cathedral on 28 September. “These are poverties made more visible in the light of faith and in that same light we can act to relieve them.”
“Superficial excitement,” the archbishop’s spokesman explained, was a problem when it became so dominant that it distracted people from pondering the deeper questions in life.
Caritas Westminster – the social action arm of the Archdiocese of Westminster – is involved with projects for the elderly andchildren.
Archbishop Nichols has recently visited an initiative to alleviate loneliness among old people run by Caritas and Contact the Elderly and last week went to a Catholic school in east London where the charity Magic Breakfast provides free breakfasts for pupils. The archbishop said that the Church needed to follow the example of Blessed Frédéric in its work with the poor.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday Archbishop Nichols blessed the newly-opened Basil Hume House, which provides five flats for young homeless people, at the Cardinal Hume Centre in Victoria, central London.
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