A Look At 'the State Of Being Poor'
Webster defines poverty succinctly: “The state of being poor.”
As part of this special issue of The Message, we share with you a pastoral letter on poverty issued by Indiana’s five bishops. Please spend some time in that special section, and please keep it for future reference.
Fifty years ago, the federal poverty line was $1,540 for one person and $3,130 for a family of four – annually. Based on 52 40-hour workweeks, those numbers translate to $.75 an hour for one person and $1.50 an hour for the head of a family of four. Yes – 75 cents, and a buck-and-a-half.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the federal poverty line through 2014 is $11,670 for one and $23,850 for a family of four. Based on the same 52 40-hour workweeks, those numbers translate to $5.61 an hour for one and $11.46 an hour for the head of a family of four.
How can we not “see, judge and act” – as our bishops have called us to do in their pastoral letter? More than a million of our fellow Hoosiers are living at or below 100 percent of the federal poverty level.
Personally, I find myself dawn – again and again – to two elements outlined in the “act” section of the letter that relates to health care:
“Promote and defend human dignity from the moment of conception until natural death;” and “Attend to the whole person….”
Those concepts call to mind visions of a tiny coal-mining “patch” in southwestern Pennsylvania … where I grew up. When people ask me where I’m from, I always say Uniontown, Pa. because that was the county seat – and where my parish was. The house Mom and Dad bought – unfinished – in 1950 was in that little coal-mining patch – about four miles west of town.
There were maybe four-dozen homes spread across a half-dozen streets, and many of them were the kind of two-story duplexes known in that part of the world, in that time, as “company houses.” At some point before I came along, a coal company owned much of the place, and people lived in the company houses and shopped at the “company store.”
Dad worked in a mine; Mom stayed home. We weren’t rich, for sure; but Dad made way more than the hourly rate that would have landed us at or below that 1965 poverty line.
My recollection is that about three in 10 of the families in the patch lived in poverty. More importantly – in my opinion, at least – they lived in a place without hope … without any sense that their circumstances would change. Their children – some of whom were my best childhood friends – seemingly inherited that perspective; and they made their own reality of poverty.
I blame no one; point no fingers. But the fact remains that I had no advantages over them – except that I never heard that I couldn’t do anything I wanted to do … be anything I wanted to be. I thank God daily for parents who promoted and defended human dignity – mine and their own – and who attended to my whole person. I implore myself – and all of you – to help break the cycle of poverty by encouraging the poor as much as we help them in other ways.
Our bishops have completed a groundbreaking effort with this important pastoral letter. Read it, and take it to heart; please.
