Your church's social justice group ostensibly encourages voluntarism in the community and liberal governmental policies that help the poor. In reality, church-based social justice groups turn their backs on the poor and promote snivelling, guilt and anti-abortionism--and are in actuality just another forum for status competition.
Social justice is accepted as a self-defining term; in reality, it is not obvious what social justice is.
If a certain amount of money has been dedicated to helping the poor, we should find out where the poorest people are--and try to get the money to them. The world's poorest people are those for whom a small amount of money will make the biggest impact.
We shouldn't spend any of it in the USA, since--for the same amount of money--we can help many people in the Congo, where per capita GDP (at $300) is less than 1% of ours.
Eden Prairie's gigantic Pax Christi Catholic Community likes to present itself as ultraprogressive--it features both an Óscar Romero Room and a Dorothy Day Room--but the church promulgates a brazen contrarianism, with regard to helping the poor: When the pastor hired social justice expert Allison Boisvert:
"I told him I wasn't much interested in the third-world stuff," said Boisvert, who is of Native American extraction and lives in the Phillips Neighborhood of Minneapolis. "It's easy to get enamored with nice little brown people from Ecuador but not so much with the Indians on the Red Lake reservation.
"We somehow look at third-world poverty as being more deserving," Boisvert added. "Unfortunately, what most see as poverty in this country is on the 10 p.m. news; it's always black and it's always scary."That's right: If you believe that the world's poorest people ought to be Target #1 for the parish's giving, Pax Christi considers you an ignorant bigot.
Per capita GDP in Ecuador--at $7,600--is more than 25 times that of the DRC. If your church is giving money to Ecuador you should tell them, 'We can help twice the number of people we're now helping in Ecuador by redirecting our aid to the Congo. We can help more people more dramatically if we apply basic economic common sense, when giving.'
