In his first major speech on the global financial crisis, Pope Francis strongly denounced “the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly humane goal”.  He called on the world’s financial experts and political leaders to promote “disinterested solidarity” and “a return to a person-centered ethics in the world of finance and economics.

His opportunity to critique the present financial and economic disorder and call for an ethically based global financial reform came on May 15 when he welcomed new ambassadors to the Holy See from Kyrgyzstan, Antigua and Barbuda, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and Botswana.

While addressed in the first place to the governments represented by the new ambassadors, his message was clearly targeted at the world’s financial and political leaders.  And it was clearly rooted in his experience in Latin America, and especially in Argentina where over the past decades he had witnessed the country’s economic meltdown, an increase in poverty, the growing gap between rich and poor, and widespread corruption.

“The Pope loves everyone, rich and poor alike, but the Pope has the duty, in Christ’s name, to remind the rich to help the poor, to respect them, to promote them”, he told the ambassadors.  He made clear that he sees this as one of his duties as Successor of Peter.

He began his speech by noting that “the human family” has reached a “turning point in its history” if one considers the advances made.  He praised the “positive achievements”, particularly in the fields of health, education and communications, but he then moved quickly to highlight the disastrous situation that most people are living in.

Have you ever heard a young child say, “Gee, I want to be a prisoner when I grow up”?

I didn’t think so. But for far too many people in the United States today, especially people of color, that is the fate that likely awaits them unless we as a society are willing to act.

Mass incarceration in the United States has reached catastrophic proportions, and it is drawn along shockingly racialized lines. Prisons and jails are overflowing with black Americans — who comprise about 40 percent of inmates, although blacks only comprise 14 percent of the total U.S. population. African Americans go prison for drug offenses 10 times more than whites, even though five times as many whites use illegal drugs. All told, the United States imprisons more of its people than any other country in the world.

This is a crime against humanity. Its cause lies in a conflagration of systems which have been designed through history to favor white and wealthy Americans that goes back to before the founding of the country. Today this continues through negative, inaccurate, rampant distortion of the news and the media, perpetuating the myths that money equals power, that clothes are the measure of a person, that fine dining defines a rich and meaningful conversation, that looking good is equal to good intent, that good education equals entitlement, that a just wage isn’t a right that all workers deserve. We have not come as far from the system that once permitted slavery than we like to think.

The Latino population suffers from the consequences of this system in profound ways as well. While the debate about immigration continues in Congress, we hear very little about the role of mass incarceration in immigration enforcement. Figures from the 2012 United States Sentencing Commission report show that 94.6 percent of non-citizens in prison were convicted of immigration violations. Privatized immigration prisons — whose owners lobby governments to maintain a steady stream of inmates — divide families while keeping human beings in a state of legal limbo, out of sight and out of mind. Around the country we continue to harden our hearts about illegal immigration, enacting laws which have provided legal sanction for arresting innocent people whose only crime is trying to escape crippling poverty and violence in Latin American countries. We have stopped asking how the trade policies we promote and profit from are helping to keep those countries in poverty in the first place, or how our war on drugs spills southward with escalating brutality.

After the abolition of slavery, Southern lawmakers devised the Black Codes in order to ensure the continuation of white supremacy, both politically and economically. These laws governed freed slaves in such a way that would maintain them as a pool of cheap labor. This was followed by the creation of vagrancy statutes, laws that were in place in some states up until the 1970s, which allowed police to charge people who were merely suspected of criminal activity. The “Jim Crow” laws enacted between 1876 and 1965 continued to provide economic advantages to Southern whites at the expense of blacks. While the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s finally ended this regime, the widening gap in wealth inequality is doing an even better job of keeping many black Americans in crushing poverty. Today, too, there are more black men in prison than were enslaved at the start of the Civil War. The recent “Stop and Frisk” policy in New York City continues the legacy.

Make no mistake about it; we are all culpable for maintaining this deeply discriminatory society, often unwittingly. But ignorance is no excuse. Catholic social teaching calls us to concern ourselves in a particular way with the poor and disenfranchised. Our faith demands that we push ourselves toward embracing all people in a society where we can all actualize our love for both family and community. Today, that calling faces no greater challenge in our country than mass incarceration.

To live in a poor, largely minority neighborhood in the United States is to be guilty until proven innocent. It is only continual patience, compassion and love that enables good people in these communities to survive watching their youth swallowed up by predatory policing, dismal schools, environmental hazards and incarceration — often for drug-related offenses that would go unpunished in affluent suburbs — while being excluded from society’s greatest benefits. Families struggle with lack of access to proper day care, substandard health care and mental health services, the need to work overtime to meet their basic needs, inadequate housing, and a poor diet, which is all they feel they can afford.

The problem in the United States is not a lack of knowledge or tools to address these problems. We lack, tragically, the willpower to improve the lives of those who are trapped within a broken system. The problem is not that these people don’t work hard; they have to work much harder than more affluent neighbors just to eek out a living in a system stacked against them.

Ending mass incarceration must address the power structure as a whole. This means not only ending the failed war on drugs’ cruel sentencing laws, or reversing the privatization of prisons and inhumane immigration laws; it also means building affordable housing and developing school and community centers, organizing parents and community groups to demand solutions to failing schools, assuring a fair and just wage for all, enabling kids to attend summer camps, providing college-access programs, making computer and technical training available in every community, ensuring for adequate playground space, establishing youth clubs and tutoring programs, providing after-school programs and affordable day care centers. We know these things are necessary, and yet we are not securing them for too many of our children.

On the first day of last year’s “Fortnight for Freedom” called for by the U.S. Catholic bishops to oppose the Obama administration’s health care policies, I and other members of Occupy Catholics gathered on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York to have our own open discussion about what we deemed the greatest threats to freedom to be in our city, in light of our faith. At the top of the list, we decided, is the threat that the New York Police Department’s Stop and Frisk policy, which disproportionately impacts racial minorities, poses to the freedom from discrimination that all people should enjoy. Since then our small group has been determined to raise our voices, as Catholics, against the evil of mass incarceration.

Lately, we have found ourselves interfacing with other groups that are trying to take on the challenge of mass incarceration. We have found that although there are thousands of people working in this struggle, we are not yet united. Not long ago, I stood on a corner of 215th Street in the Bronx soap-boxing at a rally against police violence, and the organizers were grateful to have a Catholic standing with them. I wondered why there weren’t more.

As a grandmother, I wondered, where were all the other grandmothers were who have been able to share the extraordinary delights of raising and loving their grandchildren? Where are those who strive to imitate Christ’s compassion for the poor and disenfranchised? Catholics must resist laws which continue to perpetuate this broken system. Our faith means nothing without action.

It is time to stand together, to nonviolently urge our society to change. The statistics about mass incarceration tell the story plainly: Our criminal justice system has lost sight of justice and is being used as a system of social control. Let us mobilize our churches, temples and mosques, as well as working with righteous people of no particular faith, to help cut out this blight from U.S. history for good.

Not surprisingly I found myself in a pub around the corner from St. Patrick’s fortifying myself with dinner for the long night. While there I struck up a conversation with an elderly black women who was seated alone next to me. This turned into a typical occupy conversation. First I talked about my mission and mass incarceration. Then she told me she had only slept for one hour, had just arrived from Virginia for a one day ministerial conference and then divulged several deeply personal childhood traumas. One included this story. “The night of the worst racial rioting in Mississippi, my father gathered all of his children in the car and he just drove. He drove until they were hungry and tired and in the middle of he had no idea where but it was away from the rioting. He stopped in front of a house knocked on the door and explained his plight. A white women welcomed them in and gave them dinner, filled several large boxes with food and sent them on their way.” Minister Cornelia told me I reminded her of this woman. We ended the evening with a very long embrace and her prayers for my mission and the healing of my brokenness. Taking my large boxes off I went to make my signs and stand in front of St. Patricks. The signs read:

Occupy Catholics

Conclave wishes

No sexism

no racism

no pedophilia

Embrace the poor and

Women

 

To the Cardinals

Cooperate with what?

More of the same?

I would say that about one hundred people passed St. Pat’s that night. All stopped to read the sign. No one said a word. It was like a silent prayer. Around midnight a man came and took pictures of the sign propped up against the huge doors of the Cathedral. He never said a word. When he left, the place was deserted so I left my sign on the closed doors and went home.

Sr. Susan Wilcox, 54, is a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph/Brentwood. The order, founded in France in 1650, “seeks to promote justice, to live lives of non-violence and to respond to the needs of our time.” She entered religious life in 1999, at the age of 40. She currently teaches at St. Joseph’s College in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.

“There is a sense that women in Church are feeling that there’s no place for them, that they are second class status in the Church. It’s a structural problem that needs to be addressed. But ultimately, whatever decisions are made within the structure of the Church, it doesn’t relieve any of us of our own baptismal call to live the Gospel of Jesus. When things get big, that’s what we fall back on. It’s our own responsibility.”

Listen to the show here.

The pope is not the church.

It’s going to be very tempting to forget this fact over the next few days. The pundits, Catholic and otherwise, have been rapt in the suspense of awaiting the arrival of Pope Francis. We heard a lot of impossible hopes for who the next pope would be, along with the less thrilling reality of the actual candidates. But Catholics, along with the masses who have been suddenly and momentarily interested in Catholic affairs, should remember that the papacy is not to be confused with the church itself. At no time should this have been more clear than those strange and special few days when the Catholic Church was a people—an assembly, a community, a mystical body—without a pope.

Debates over the fairness of the tax code are as old as the federal income tax itself. A cornerstone of the tax — established a century ago, by the 16th Amendment — has been the principle that those who make more should pay more, while lower tax rates help the poor to support their families and depend less on government benefits.

That social compact shifted into high gear during the Nixon administration, which tried to incentivize work by rewarding low-income households with a tax break that became the nation’s most successful antipoverty tool ever: the earned-income tax credit. Politicians of both parties have embraced the credit, making it more progressive three times since it was enacted in 1975.

While the federal government has largely stuck by the principle of progressive taxation, the states have gone their own ways: tax policy is particularly regressive in the South and West, and more progressive in the Northeast and Midwest. When it comes to state and local taxation, we are not one nation under God. In 2008, the difference between a working mother in Mississippi and one in Vermont — each with two dependent children, poverty-level wages and identical spending patterns — was $2,300.

Thirty million people around the globe said ‘no’ to a war before it began. The New York Times wrote the next day that there were two superpowers in the world, the United States and the people. We did not stop that war, but history has proved us right. We should know from that experience and so many others that the people can rule better than the elites.

We are now seeing waves of protest in so many areas on so many issues, as the recent issues of this newsletter have shown. People ask where has Occupy gone? If they look, they will see people fighting on so many critical issues: health care because 120 adults die every day in the United States due to lack of health care, housing because millions have lost their homes, millions of homes are underwater and hundreds of thousands are homeless, poverty and hunger which effect 45 million, challenges to the unnecessary austerity and corporate tax breaks being pushed in DC and on and on. On issue, after issue, people are making waves.

The steelworkers and an ecumenical coalition headed by a Catholic and an Episcopal bishop began to demand that the mill be put back to work under some form of worker or worker-community ownership…”Why should workers not own the companies in which they work?” they kept asking. Why can’t this become an idea to put into everyday practice – now or in the future?