Stephan comes and goes around the church where I work. Mornings find him wrapped up and asleep on the threshold of our handicap entrance. I let him in so he can rest on a pew in our slightly warmer church. He has a beautiful smile and a kindly way about him. It is a pleasure to give him a cup of coffee and the occasional banana. On a recent morning, I had some time, so I made him a breakfast sandwich. We divvied up our egg and cheese sandwiches, split the coffee, and talked. He told me he feared the coronavirus because finding food and shelter was getting harder. I doled out what little medical knowledge I had. “No Stephan, you don’t get stomach cramps from it, watch out for a dry cough, aches, and a fever.” If things go on much longer, he told me, he is going to have to start stealing again. He is scared of getting caught. Suddenly, I felt guilty. I complain so much about being homebound; Stephan cries because he is afraid of actually being locked up. We offer few guarantees to the poor but you can be sure we will keep prisons open for them.

Liberation Theology’s biggest doctrinal success was getting the Church to embrace the language of the preferential option for the poor. As Pope John Paul II wrote, in Solicitude Rei Socialis, “A consistent theme of Catholic social teaching is the option or love of preference for the poor. This preference must be expressed in worldwide dimensions, embracing the immense numbers of the hungry, the needy, the homeless, those without medical care, and those without hope.” Pope Francis continues to teach this in Laudato Si: “In the present condition of global society, where injustices abound and growing numbers of people are deprived of basic human rights and are considered expendable, the principle of the common good immediately becomes… a summons to solidarity and a preferential option for the poorest of our brothers and sisters.” Solidarity is necessary for a flourishing community. When it comes to the least well off, however, we need more because they need more. The preferential option for the poor is solidarity intensified and focused on the marginalized, the impoverished, and the rejected.

The preferential option for the poor is based on the simple words of Jesus, “Blessed are the poor,” and “whatever you have done for the least of these….” Jesus so clearly prefers the poor that he dwelt with fishermen and prostitutes in a destitute and oppressed imperial outpost. His incarnation was an act of solidarity with all of humanity; his decision to travel with social outcasts a refusal to conform to this world’s preferences. Christian solidarity is a socio-political principle, but more importantly it is a dogmatic claim. God incarnates with the poor. Jesus lived in solidarity with the poor in Palestine; he still lives in solidarity with Stephan and all the poor in this time of pestilence and inequality.

“God has a fresh and special memory for the smallest and most forgotten.” These are the words of Bartolome de las Casas, a Dominican friar who advocated for Indigenous rights in the 1500s. They are expression of the lasting concern of the body of Christ which enacts God’s memory by living the love of the poor. Fray Bartolome came to understand God’s memory by preaching among and preaching on behalf of the Indigenous people of the Americas. Fray Bartolome could not forget the suffering inflicted on the Indigenous and he wouldn’t let the Spanish forget either. He worked on behalf of the smallest and most forgotten as a way of enacting God’s special memory. For Fray Bartolome, Jesus is the incarnate sign that God never forgets. The divine remembrance of the poor requires that we model ourselves on God’s memory.

The preferential option for the poor may be at the heart of Christian reflections on solidarity, but it is far from the hearts of too many Americans. In the US, we don’t have a memory for the smallest, and the poor are the forgotten. We have embraced a preferential option for the rich and against the poor. In 2017, we cut taxes for those who have more; in 2020 we cut food stamps for those who have less. When we can’t eliminate food stamps, we swamp the poor with requirements to make it too hard to get those food stamps. Meanwhile, Fox News runs stories about poor folk buying lobster. We are all supposed to be horrified. Maybe they should get gruel… maybe.

And now with coronavirus sweeping the world, you can be sure that Stephan will be forgotten. We may need to bailout Boeing, I don’t know. But what about refugees in internment camps? We are shipping them out of the country faster. Are we rallying funds for clinics that service lower income communities? No, hospitals in poorer communities are closing faster. Are we taking steps to prevent the return of famine in the developing world? Are we remembering the smallest and most forgotten? No, we are instituting food stamp reductions, while liquidity is pumped into the stock market.

Worse than forgetting the poor is acting as it is the poor who are exploiting us. There is a growing chorus of voices that insist that Americans (the well-off ones at least) are suckers being taken advantage of by immigrants and the urban poor. We heap burdens on them to make sure they don’t get a little extra. We demand they work in case they might get that welfare check when they are undeserving. We impose strict policies in case someone gets extra food stamps. Money is constantly flowing up. We celebrate and lock up Stephan for shoplifting.

At my parish, there is growing talk of what to do about the vagrants. People point out Stephan to me and warn me “If you have one, you’ll end up with an encampment of them.” I smile awkwardly and tell them how kind he is. They respond that you never know when homeless people are going to snap. I refrain from telling them the same is true of me. A woman with flies swarming her swollen ankles has taken to sleeping under the scaffolding. The church doors are locked now, and a fence is going up around the garden. The hope is that vagrants will move on, will just go away. At yet, I see a priest lay hands on a homeless man in blessing. The sisters are working hard to get Stephan a home. The woman with flies asks me if I have extra socks for her. I do, but only because a choir member put together care packages with socks, toothbrush and toothpaste, and granola bars. I see the tensions between preference for and against the poor at work in my parish and in myself. I see the struggle between a heterodox Christianity and an orthodox Christianity expressed in a fence and in act of blessing.

The preference against the poor is heterodoxy at work. It prioritizes the rich while emphasizing ‘merit.’ We can see it enacted in the Varsity Blues college admission scandal where people with means paid for their kids to get into college. Merit, it turns out, has a price tag. Perhaps the preferential option of the poor is so unpopular because too many American Christians believe only in winning. If you don’t win in life, then we are against you. When Christ says blessed are the poor, we punish them. When the Church preaches a preference for the poor, we let their unemployment aid run-out. In a religion of unmerited grace, we celebrate (supposedly) merited wealth. While God remembers the smallest and most forgotten, we abandon them to internment camps and abortion clinics. A crisis can teach us what we really value. In the era of pestilence, we are finding that what we really value is money. Not Stephan, not the refugee, not the unborn, not the poor. If we don’t value them, we don’t really value Christ all that much.

As our conversation wound down, Stephan spoke of a friend of his down by the grocery store. They had been talking. Stephan told him “I wish I could beg; you’re doing it right. I just can’t.” He told me he was grateful for the little money I gave him; it would save him from shoplifting that day. He asked me about my daughter and finished his coffee “I know it’s wrong to steal. That’s what my parents told me” he said, looking down. “But still, I’d rather steal than beg.”

All I can do, is beg for Stephan. As too many Christians impose their preferential option against the poor during this pestilence and reject solidarity with anyone who doesn’t look like us, I know God remembers Stephan, I ask that you remember him too. Remember the smallest and most forgotten, obey Christ’s words, live solidarity, prefer the poor over the rich. We both had to get going back, me to my home Stephan to the streets. As we parted, we couldn’t hug, so instead, we awkwardly bumped elbows and said goodbye.

Photo Attribution: Stipa Jennifer / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)