“When you hear this message, I will no longer be there,” the voice, characteristically spirited, confident, just a little bit cheeky and familiar to all of France, said on a tape released this week.

The words were those of Sister Emmanuelle, a nun revered for her work with the disenfranchised, especially among the garbage-scavengers of Cairo, and renowned for her television appearances in France as an advocate for the poor. She died Monday at a retirement home operated by her order, the Congregation of Notre-Dame de Sion, in Callian, in the south of France.

She was immediately praised by the Vatican, her work and achievement likened to those of Mother Teresa. A spokeswoman for her charitable organization, the Sister Emmanuelle Association, confirmed the death. She was 99 and would have turned 100 next month.

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Poverty (of sorts) is suddenly in fashion. Politicians and commentators blame the financial crisis on greed, not only by malefactors on Wall Street but also by all the denizens of Main Street who live beyond their means, accumulate useless possessions and despoil the environment. It is not quite clear what a nongreedy Wall Street would look like. But for the rest of us, after due repentance, the solution to our financial woes is held to be a more ascetic life. If it is voluntary, rather than compelled by circumstance, it has the glow of moral superiority. “Green is good,” says a latter-day Gandhi as he goes to work by bicycle. But if you are really poor, asceticism does not mean giving up your SUV — it means eating just one meal a day because it is all you can afford.

Far more attractive to poor people, who are a majority of its adherents, is the “prosperity gospel,” a version of Christianity asserting that material benefits will come to those who have faith, live a morally upright life and, not so incidentally, give money to the church. Broadly speaking, this is what Max Weber called the Protestant Ethic, but with much less emphasis on self-denial and more on hard work, planning for the future, family loyalty and educating one’s children.
The prosperity gospel probably originated among the poorer elements of the evangelical community in America. It is now a global phenomenon, especially among the rapidly spreading Pentecostal churches in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

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The troubled U.S. economy is forcing tens of thousands of people to visit food pantries for the first time. But as the demand rises, donations to those pantries are drying up and some places have run out of food entirely, even in the nation’s breadbasket.

Although Kansas’ Johnson County is one of the richer counties in the United States, a food pantry there run by the local Catholic Diocese had to close last week.

Ellen Jones, director of Catholic Community Services, says she was stunned.

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The Holy Father expressed his hope that “in the difficult international economic context of today, particular attention is given to the people and families who are most underprivileged and the weakest of society.”

He also spoke out on behalf of those for whom life is more difficult due to the crisis: “The present situation aggravates the already worrying and sometimes tragic conditions of life for numerous people, whose human dignity is in this way gravely compromised.”

The Pontiff concluded asking God to “support all those people who are victims of extreme poverty” and bless “the efforts of those who, with their generous commitment, contribute to the building up of a more just and fraternal world, which rejects the misfortune of extreme poverty.”

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AFTER governments announced a £2-trillion bail-out of banks across the world this week, charities and churches were left wondering whether there would be enough money left to help the poor.

The World Bank warned that the “unprecedented turmoil” in the financial markets, the tightening of credit, and the global economic slowdown could do “serious and in some cases permanent damage” to the world’s poorest people. This year, 100 million people have been driven into poverty. “That number will grow,” the bank’s president, Robert Zoellick, said on Sunday.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, speaking in London on Wednesday, at the end of a meeting of Christian and Muslim scholars, was asked who was responsible for the financial crisis. Dr Williams told reporters: “I was going to say Satan. . . The root problem is human greed.” The priority given to the poor by Christianity and Islam was not always reflected in the realities of economic activity, he said.

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(ACNS) Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and Dr Hellen Wangusa, Anglican Observer at the United Nations, cordially invite you to attend An Interfaith Service of Recommitment and Witness to the Achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.

Presiding Bishop and Primate of The Episcopal Church The Most Reverend Katharine Jefferts Schori, Officiant.

The Archbishop of York The Most Honorable Dr. John Sentamu, Guest Preacher.

This service is part of the high-level event on the Millennium Development Goals taking place at United Nations Headquarters in New York City on September 25, 2008. At the halfway point towards the target date, significant progress has been made, but urgent and increased efforts are needed by all stakeholders in order to meet the goals by 2015. Convened by the United Nations Secretary-General and the President of the United Nations General Assembly, the event will be a forum for world leaders to review progress, identify gaps, and commit to concrete efforts, resources and mechanisms to bridge the gaps.

The Reverend Brian Turner, Methodist Church, Rodney Macanna, Baptist Churches of New Zealand, and the Right Reverend Pamela Tankersley, Presbyterian Church, all described the period before an election as a unique opportunity to intensify discussion about the type of society we live in.

“The affect that poverty has on vulnerable New Zealanders is an issue we need to bring to the fore as part of the call we have as Christians to serve those on the margins of society,” said Pamela Tankersley.

“A question that we need to ask ourselves is whether we are striving hard enough as a nation to put aside self-interest and to find a stronger collective social conscience in 2008,” said Brian Turner.

“When our politicians talk about the policies they plan to introduce we want them to talk about he extent to which those policies can be considered just and compassionate, and we want them to explicitly address the issue of reducing poverty,” said Rodney Macann.

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But ”“ flanked by 1,500 other faith leaders, diplomats, politicians and charity heads ”“ there was no mistaking their unity yesterday as they moved as one body in the name of justice and peace for the higher causes of their mission. Among those joining them were Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster; Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi; Sir Iqbal Sacranie; Dr Indarjit Singh; and other senior representatives of Muslim and Sikh organisations.

Inside Lambeth Palace, Dr Williams’s home and the scene of several stormy controversies in recent months, the bishops listened to a clearly moved Gordon Brown as he showed that he had heard their message. “A hundred years is too long to wait for justice and that is why we must act now,” Mr Brown said. “You have sent a symbol, a very clear message with rising force that poverty can be eradicated, poverty must be eradicated and if we all work together for change poverty will be eradicated.”

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(ACNS) The Archbishop of Canterbury will today (Thursday 24th July) lay down a challenge to world leaders on behalf of the worldwide Anglican Communion and other faith groups: you must keep your promises on aid and development as failure to do so will lead to further starvation, disease and death in the world’s poorest countries.

Dr Rowan Williams will be joined in his plea to governments across the world by UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who will also address the audience of 650 Anglican bishops, their spouses, and representatives from other faith groups and Churches. The rally, set in the courtyard of Lambeth Palace, follows a walk of witness through central London, where up to 1,500 faith leaders, diplomats, parliamentarians and NGO heads will take to the streets to highlight the urgent need for more action on tackling poverty through sustainable solutions.

In the Archbishop’s letter ”“ which is the event’s manifesto ”“ he will outline how this generation has a genuine opportunity to eradicate extreme poverty. The document stresses, however, that most of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) agreed by global leaders in 2000 to halve poverty by 2015 will not, as things stand, be fulfilled by this deadline ”“ and in fact, risk never being achieved at all.

The letter will be handed to the Prime Minister during the rally by Dr Williams, flanked by Christian and other faith leaders including Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster; Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi; Sir Iqbal Sacranie OBE; Dr Indarjit Singh OBE; and other senior representatives of Muslim and Sikh organisations.

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The Archbishop of Canterbury and other religious figures will stage a procession in London to call on governments to keep their promises on aid commitments for the world’s poor. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, discusses the importance of ending extreme poverty.

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Warning that rising food and oil prices pose a crisis for the world’s poor, Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, is calling on President George W. Bush and other leaders convening in Japan next week in an economic summit meeting to make new aid commitments to avert starvation and instability in dozens of countries.

“What we are witnessing is not a natural disaster — a silent tsunami or a perfect storm,” Zoellick said in a letter sent Tuesday evening to the major leaders of the West. “It is a man-made catastrophe, and as such must be fixed by people.”

Zoellick’s letter, obtained by The New York Times, came with a lengthy study of the impact of rising prices for food, fuel and commodities on the world’s poor. He sent the letter as Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda prepares to host Bush and six other world leaders in the Group of 8 economic summit meeting on the northern island of Hokkaido.

In recent weeks, the United States and some other countries have stepped up their pledges to get food to the poor in the 50 hardest-hit countries. But Zoellick said in his letter that the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Food Program had short-term needs of $10 billion.

Bank officials said that the world faced a shortfall in aid, but that pledges of financing had not been channeled into a central place and the size of the shortfall was not clear. “This is a test of the global system to help the most vulnerable, and it cannot afford to fail,” Zoellick said.

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Tropical diseases that ravage Africa, Asia and Latin America commonly occur among the poor in the USA, leaving thousands of people shattered by debilitating complications including mental retardation, heart disease and epilepsy, an analysis showed Monday.

The diseases, caused by chronic viral, bacterial and parasitic infections, disproportionately strike women and children and are largely overlooked by doctors, says author Peter Hotez of the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases, part of Sabin Vaccine Institute.

Hotez says the diseases go untreated in hundreds of thousands of poor people who live mainly in inner cities, the Mississippi Delta, Appalachia and the Mexican borderlands.

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The Archbishop will be joined by approximately 600 other archbishops and bishops, and their spouses, alongside other UK faith leaders for the high-profile symbol of commitment to the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) ”“ eight promises made by world leaders to halve world poverty by 2015. Taking place on Thursday 24th July, the event will culminate in a rally in the grounds of Lambeth Palace, the London home and office of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The event is being organised in partnership with Micah Challenge UK, part of the international Micah Challenge movement dedicated to uniting Christians to work together for an end to world poverty.

The bishops will walk through the heart of the capital, including Parliament Square, in a vivid demonstration of the diversity of the Anglican Communion and a witness to the work already being conducted by Churches and other faith groups to work towards the MDGs ”“ and a public pledge to work even harder to make sure they are delivered. The faith leaders will also commit to putting more pressure on their respective governments to ensure that funding promises are met, and the right policies put in place, to make a real difference to local communities across the world.

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Watch it all and note the key role of the rabbi in the leader’s work.

Demand is up for food assistance. Local soup kitchens and food pantries all report increased traffic since the beginning of the year, and some say donations are down.

Churches, a primary source of donated goods, continue to provide non-perishable items to agencies that distribute to the needy. But the growing demand is causing the need gap to widen.

Volunteers and program administrators at faith-based organizations such as Our Lady of Mercy Community Outreach, Seacoast Church’s Dream Center, Mount Moriah Missionary Baptist Church, Tricounty Family Ministries and Hillcrest Baptist Church independently confirmed that service providers have been especially challenged in recent weeks to satisfy the growing need.

Rising food prices have forced people to make hard choices and even forgo essentials, such as health care or child care in favor of food, several service providers said. Rising fuel prices have exacerbated the problem.

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The costs finally became too much for Walter Tucker.

Three weeks ago, he swallowed his pride and took a place in the soup kitchen line at Our Lady of Mercy Church on Charleston’s East Side so he could extend his already stretched food dollar with a free meal.

Prices are up so much that many people are forced to make a choice, “either a gallon of gas or a loaf of bread,” he says.

“It was hard to come to a soup kitchen,” Tucker says. “You feel a little hesitant at first, like you may be seen as a bum.” But a choice has to be made, he says. “Come in to get something to eat, or don’t eat.”

Sister Pat Keating, who directs this Sisters of Charity soup kitchen on America Street, says the soup kitchen normally feeds fewer than 100 for lunch at the beginning of the month when people tend to have more money on hand. Now, she says, Our Lady of Mercy often finds 150 or more in the food line.

“They’re running out of money because food is expensive. We’re seeing people we have not seen before.”

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The Holy See is asking for measures to keep the production of biofuels from bringing about increased food prices to the point of threatening starvation in many countries.

Monsignor Renato Volante, the permanent observer of the Holy See at the Rome-based U.N. Organization for Food and Agriculture (FAO), participated in the FAO Regional Conference for Latin America and the Caribbean, which was held in Brasilia, Brazil, April 17-18.

Monsignor Volante proposed that the production of biofuels should not bring about a decrease in the production of agricultural products destined for the food market.

Biofuels are energy sources produced from a variety of different plants or plant products. Many developed countries have begun subsidizing the production of biofuels, which has resulted in decreased production of typical plant foods.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon encouraged today a coordinated effort to face the steeply rising price of food, which he said has developed into a “real global crisis.” He said some 100 million of the world’s poor now need aid to be able to buy food. Riots have broken out in some countries, such as Haiti, over the increased prices.

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JH: What is the effect of this being, going on, continuing unchecked?

ABC: Well certainly among the poorest the effect is the erosion of family life, the erosion of self confidence. There is still a stigma about debt even though it is taken for granted in so many quarters but the stigma means people don’t want to talk about it, they don’t necessarily want to go and get the best advice about it and for young people particularly it does become crippling, especially for children.

JH: And do you think that, putting aside that aspect of it, do you think when we see people becoming in the words of another former government minister, ‘filthy rich’, our attitude is, ‘I want a bit of that myself’ and therefore a good thing for society which is what America has until very recently appeared to believe, or do you think the opposite effect?

ABC: I think it is a bit of both isn’t it. I think there’s a degree of envy and cynicism that’s bred by disproportion and that leads people to feel even more alienated from the rest of society ”“ that the gulf is even greater between themselves, between people who can’t manage there own affairs – can’t take control of their own affairs/ circumstances – and these others. So there may be an element of I’d like some of that but here is also an element of what kind of society is this? Why should I trust this system when it rewards some people so disproportionately in a way that doesn’t connect at all where I am?

JH: So you are simply saying that the government and the politicians are more relaxed about that than you are and that you are taking…?

ABC: They seem to be. I wouldn’t mind if they were a little more worried.

JH: And in what sense? Exemplified how?

ABC: I don’t want to go into the details of how regulation of high salaries might be achieved because my primary concern today is simply with the poorest end of the spectrum where I think more can be done, more rapidly and in a more focused way.

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Surging food prices could push 100 million deeper into poverty, World Bank President Robert Zoellick said Sunday at the close of the International Money Fund-World Bank spring meetings in Washington.

“Based on a very rough analysis, we estimate that a doubling of food prices over the last three years could potentially push 100 million people in low-income countries deeper into poverty,” Zoellick said at a press conference. “This is not just a question of short-term needs, as important as those are; this is ensuring that future generations don’t pay a price too.”

Zoellick called for a “New Deal for Global Food Policy” similar to a 1930s program under U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt to tackle problems related to the Great Depression.

The World Bank estimates that food prices have gone up by 83 percent globally over the last three years. Wheat prices have risen by 120 percent in the last year and in just the last two months, the price of rice has risen by 75 percent. The World Banks says increased food prices is not a temporary phenomenon but is likely to persist in the medium term.

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Karelis, a professor at George Washington University, has a simpler but far more radical argument to make: traditional economics just doesn’t apply to the poor. When we’re poor, Karelis argues, our economic worldview is shaped by deprivation, and we see the world around us not in terms of goods to be consumed but as problems to be alleviated. This is where the bee stings come in: A person with one bee sting is highly motivated to get it treated. But a person with multiple bee stings does not have much incentive to get one sting treated, because the others will still throb. The more of a painful or undesirable thing one has (i.e. the poorer one is) the less likely one is to do anything about any one problem. Poverty is less a matter of having few goods than having lots of problems.

Poverty and wealth, by this logic, don’t just fall along a continuum the way hot and cold or short and tall do. They are instead fundamentally different experiences, each working on the human psyche in its own way. At some point between the two, people stop thinking in terms of goods and start thinking in terms of problems, and that shift has enormous consequences. Perhaps because economists, by and large, are well-off, he suggests, they’ve failed to see the shift at all.

If Karelis is right, antipoverty initiatives championed all along the ideological spectrum are unlikely to work – from work requirements, time-limited benefits, and marriage and drug counseling to overhauling inner-city education and replacing ghettos with commercially vibrant mixed-income neighborhoods. It also means, Karelis argues, that at one level economists and poverty experts will have to reconsider scarcity, one of the most basic ideas in economics.

“It’s Econ 101 that’s to blame,” Karelis says. “It’s created this tired, phony debate about what causes poverty.”

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