Monday, 11/3/14
The readings today are against elitism. The first reading
says of God, “You love all things that
are, and loathe nothing you have made.”
For Our Lord’s fellow Jews the tax collectors were social
outcasts, so In the Gospel the more upstanding citizens of Jericho complained
about Jesus going to dine with Zacchaeus. “They said, “He has gone to stay at the house of a sinner.” Jesus stood up for Zacchaeus,
saying, “This man is a descendant of
Abraham.”
The most precious thing for each of us is his or her
dignity, and disregarding anyone’s dignity is a grievous offence. That’s what
colonialism did to whole nations of God’s children.
The British were overly guilty of that. In 1776 James Watts
invented the steam engine, and within a decade the English were manufacturing
ten times more cloth than they had when doing it all by hand. To keep up with that
productivity, they needed ten times the amount of cotton and ten times the
number of consumers. They acquired the raw materials and the consumers not by
negotiations, but by subjugation.
Not only did the English believe themselves to be superior, but
by robbing indigenous peoples of their dignity, they had them thinking of
themselves as inferior.
Not only the English, but the Indian population as well
thought Kipling was being courteous towards their Gunga Din when he wrote, “For all his dirty hide, he was white, clear
white inside, when he went to tend the wounded under fire.” Today, justice
is satisfied by the top seats at England’s elite schools going to people with
beautiful dark skins.
Father Gustavo Gutierrez, the author of Liberation Theology,
wrote that the major deprivation the elite of South and Central American are inflicting
on the peasantry is that they are depriving them of their dignity.
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