Hard to know whether to laugh or cry at The Leo “celebration” of the “World Day of the Poor.” Poverty has nothing in common with celebration. Blathering platitudes do nothing to dull our own pain just listening to this, much less that of the penniless and broken down. Bad enough that Leo plagiarized paraphrases from Rousseau’s revolutionary Social Contract [“You forget that fruits belong to all and the land belongs to no one”], but the Readers Digest evangelism was arguably worse: “God took on their poverty in order to enrich us through their voices, their stories and their faces. Every form of poverty, without exception, calls us to experience the Gospel concretely and to offer effective signs of hope.” We have no idea what this means, but we do know that Leo clearly contradicted himself earlier in the speech when he denounced poverty as something which “must be addressed and eliminated.” Any student of Rhetoric 101 knows that bandwagon hyperbole, false positive transfers, and over-simplifications are very easy, take no talent, and typically prove nothing. In the case of the “have nots,” it only proves to make their lives unhappier.
Note: In the same speech, Leo also managed to insult the great St. Anthony by simply reducing him to “Patron of the Poor.” How ironic! St. Anthony is known worldwide as the Patron of the Lost and of Things Gone Missing; he’s even venerated by mariners lost at sea and endangered by shipwreck. St. Anthony, please help save Leo the Lost and his church.
Hard to know whether to laugh or cry at The Leo “celebration” of the “World Day of the Poor.” Poverty has nothing in common with celebration. Blathering platitudes do nothing to dull our own pain just listening to this, much less that of the penniless and broken down. Bad enough that Leo plagiarized paraphrases from Rousseau’s revolutionary Social Contract [“You forget that fruits belong to all and the land belongs to no one”], but the Readers Digest evangelism was arguably worse: “God took on their poverty in order to enrich us through their voices, their stories and their faces. Every form of poverty, without exception, calls us to experience the Gospel concretely and to offer effective signs of hope.” We have no idea what this means, but we do know that Leo clearly contradicted himself earlier in the speech when he denounced poverty as something which “must be addressed and eliminated.” Any student of Rhetoric 101 knows that bandwagon hyperbole, false positive transfers, and over-simplifications are very easy, take no talent, and typically prove nothing. In the case of the “have nots,” it only proves to make their lives unhappier.
Note: In the same speech, Leo also managed to insult the great St. Anthony by simply reducing him to “Patron of the Poor.” How ironic! St. Anthony is known worldwide as the Patron of the Lost and of Things Gone Missing; he’s even venerated by mariners lost at sea and endangered by shipwreck. St. Anthony, please help save Leo the Lost and his church.