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Extra Pauperes Nulla Salus: A Short Utopian-Prophetic Essay

By Jon Sobrino

The Need to Reverse the Course of History

In his speech in Barcelona on November 6, 1989, which was programmatic and turned out to be the last speech he gave, Ignacio Ellacuría said:

Only with hope and utopian vision can one believe and be motivated enough to try, along with all the poor and oppressed people of the world, to reverse history, to subvert it and thrust it in another direction…. What on another occasion I called copro-historical analysis, that is, the study of the feces of our civilization, seems to reveal that this civilization is gravely ill and that, in order to avoid a dreadful and fatal outcome, it is necessary to try to change it from within itself.1

This gravely ill civilization is the civilization of capital, which Ellacuría also called the civilization of wealth. It makes “the accumulation of capital the motor of history and makes its possession and enjoyment the principle of humanization.”2 It has offered no adequate solution to the basic wants and needs of the majority of the people on the planet, nor has it provided them a humane and fraternal civilization. The conclusion is clear: “In a world sinfully shaped by the dynamic of capital and wealth, it is necessary to commence a different dynamic, one that can salvifically overcome that other dynamic.”3

This different dynamic is the one that arises from a civilization of labor, which Ellacuría also called a civilization of poverty. “Deriving from a materialist humanism that has been transformed by the light of Christian inspiration, it makes the universal satisfaction of basic necessities the principle of development and makes the growth of shared solidarity the foundation of humanization.”4

Ellacuría insisted, obviously, on maintaining all the important achievements of the historical present: scientific research, which has improved many aspects of life; the ethico-cultural progress in human rights; and other ideological-cultural advances, such as certain elements of modern-day democracies. To “overcome” salvifically, then, does not mean “starting from zero,” but it does mean “starting all over” and “starting up against” the principles that shape the present civilization of wealth.

For Ellacuría, in his day, the evils that needed to be overcome were evident. They included poverty, expanded exploitation, the scandalous distance between rich and poor, and ecological destruction, as well as the perversion of the advances of democracy, and the ideologization and manipulation of human rights…. And he insisted ever more strongly on the deterioration, degeneration, and prostitution of the human spirit, in a word, on the dehumanization of society, about which there was, and is, little real discussion. Suffice it to recall the criticism he spelled out in his Barcelona speech, his criticism of “the palpable dehumanization of those who abandon the task of painstakingly making themselves and prefer the agitated, harried productivism of possessing and accumulating wealth, power, and honor, and the ever-changing gamut of consumer goods.”5 Such is the grave case of dehumanization, ever-present and specific, that is a product of the civilization of capital.

To overcome the present civilization of wealth and its evils, Ellacuría proposes “to awaken a collective consciousness of substantial changes…and to create economic, political, and cultural models that make it possible for a civilization of labor to replace a civilization of capital.”6 Both tasks are necessary, but both are also extremely difficult. To achieve them, he urgently encourages his listeners toward a utopian vision and toward hope, together “with all the poor and oppressed people of the world.”7 Thus do we find a proper focus for the subject of this essay: in order to heal a gravely ill civilization there is required, in some form or other, the contribution of the poor and the victims.

A World That Is Gravely Ill

We have recalled Ellacuría’s words from 1989. And today? History has, without a doubt, brought about important new developments. René Girard believes that, seen in historical perspective, a new spirit is emerging in humanity, one that is more concerned about victims and more compassionate toward them: “Never before has any society been so concerned with victims as is ours.”8 Girard makes it clear, though, that “it is really only a great comedy”9 and that in speaking thus he does not wish to “exonerate from all censure the world in which we live.”10 Nevertheless, however, he insists that “the phenomenon is unprecedented”;11 it could be something akin to what happened during the axial age, from the eighth to the sixth centuries B.C.E., of which Jaspers speaks. And Bishop Pedro Casaldáliga, despite the severe condemnation that we cite below, affirms that “humanity ‘is moving’ and is turning toward truth and justice. There is much idealism and much commitment on this disenchanted planet.”12 However this may be, in our present day we are basically still involved in a civilization of capital, which generates extreme scarcities, dehumanizes persons, and destroys the human family: it produces impoverished and excluded people and divides the world into conquerors and conquered. Our civilization continues to be “gravely ill.” In the words of Jean Ziegler, both material life and the life of the spirit “have received death threats.”13

Evils Suffered by the Majorities: Injustice, Cruelty, and Death

There is more wealth on Earth, but also more injustice. Africa has been called the world’s “dungeon,” a continental Shoah. Some 2.5 billion people survive on Earth on less than two Euros a day, and 25,000 persons die every day of hunger, according to the FAO. Desertification threatens the lives of 1.2 billion people in some one hundred different countries.—Bishop Pedro Casaldáliga14

At times one hears that the present globalized world offers new possibilities of life to poor peoples, especially by means of migration. There is no need to exclude that possibility, nor to deny that migration may alleviate some evils, especially when it happens out of dire necessity. However, the migrations today are not a simple readjustment of the human species—something that has occurred often in history and can be potentially enriching. Present-day migrations, because of their causes and the ways they take place, are especially cruel. Let us quote again from Casaldáliga:

Immigrants are denied simple fraternity, and even the ground beneath their feet. The United States is building a 1,500-kilometer wall against Latin America, while Europe is raising up a barrier against Africa in southern Spain. All of this, besides being iniquitous, is programmed. One African immigrant, in an astonishing letter, written “behind the walls of separation,” warns us: “I beseech you not to think that it is normal for us to live this way; it is in fact the result of great injustice that has been established and sustained by inhuman systems that kill and impoverish…. Do not support this system with your silence.”15

With hardly the blink of an eye, we continue on with our madness and our shamelessness, in which injustice, cruelty, contempt, growing inequality, and often cover-up converge. To mention just a few facts:

The spending on arms is estimated at $2.68 billion a day, and agricultural subsidies in the United States and the European Union are one billion dollars a day. (Federico Mayor Zaragoza)16

The arms market is one of the most profitable for all governments of the international community. The countries of the G-8, together with China, are responsible for 90% of arms exports. At least a half million people are killed annually with small arms. (Amnesty International) 17

The objective of globalization is to dominate other people, another country, another world…. Globalization is nothing but westernization. The West wants to be the center of the world. (Aminata Traoré)18

All of this—whether hunger, the spread of arms, or forced displacement of people for lack of land, water, or soil—results in death, either directly or indirectly. And to these hard realities must be added many others which in one way or another lead to the same end: AIDS, malaria (necessarily involved with the scandal of multinational pharmaceutical firms),19 unemployment, exclusion, and a long list of others. None of this is part of the order of nature. It is a product of historical causes, and it is important to recognize that in our day and age, the fundamental cause is capitalism:

“Real capitalism” is responsible for the terrible ethico-moral organization of the world economy and for the shameful, irrational, and absurd coexistence, in an ever more integrated world, of outrageous poverty with unprecedented wealth.20

All this tends to take place today without anyone noticing it.21 Criticism, when it does exist, is more concerned with what adjective to use (“savage capitalism”), instead of treating the topic of capitalism itself and the principle that sustains it: the right of property.22 As long as that principle is maintained as absolute and untouchable, every economy will be structurally configured by a dynamic of oppression, human beings will be classified according to their ability to produce wealth, their right to possess and enjoy wealth will prolong and even increase human oppression, and most certainly it will widen the distance between the haves and the have-nots.

Ultimately, such a society is a cruel society, because of the suffering that it produces among the oppressed and because of its unfeeling attitude toward the suffering that it generates, even with important exceptions, in a world of abundance. Leonardo Boff states, “When future generations judge our epoch, they will call us barbarous, inhuman, and ruthless because of our enormous insensitivity in the face of the sufferings of our own brothers and sisters.”23 One example: “If there existed even a modicum of humanity and compassion among human beings, the transference of barely 4% of the 225 greatest fortunes in the world would be sufficient to provide food, water, health, and education to the whole of humanity.”24 We are dealing with a metaphysical obscenity.

Such quotes could be endlessly multiplied.25 They are from today, not from some era of preglobalization, and they are from far-sighted and responsible sources. But if we want such data to help heal “grave illness” of our civilization, we would do well to heed the warning of a Comboni missionary who has spent eighteen years in Uganda: “Statistics don’t bleed; people do.”

We are always seeking excuses to avoid confronting—or even coming into contact with—reality. Looking into the past, we might say that fifty years ago there was more misery on the planet, and in a sense that is true. But we must tell the whole truth; only then will we confront reality with honesty.26 Looking into the future, we might even feel euphoric: in two decades China may eliminate the hunger of hundreds of millions of people27—though we do not know whether they will achieve that goal and, even if they do, at what human cost.28

But even if we try to be optimistic, our reality continues to cry out, “It just can’t be this way!”29 “God is furious.”30 “The irrational has become rational.”31 And we haven’t even mentioned Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Darfur….

Evils Affecting the Spirit of Human Beings: Dehumanization

What we have just said means that the vast majority of our world is a “crucified people…whose human semblance is continually effaced by the sin of the world, whom the world’s powers keep despoiling of everything, and whose life they keep snatching away, their life above all.”32

In this text Ellacuría insists on the despoilment of life, and with that we begin. The civilization of wealth does not produce life; it produces death in diverse forms, to greater or lesser degrees. Furthermore, it does not humanize, and that is what we want to insist on now. It is already inhuman to deprive others of life, but all the more inhuman when this is done unjustly, cruelly, and contemptuously—even in the name of some god. Furthermore, it is inhuman when the despoilment of some people’s lives is closely connected with other people’s unrestrained pursuit of success and the good life. The civilization of wealth produces primordial ways of thinking and feeling that in turn mold cultural and ideological structures that contaminate the very air we breathe. Therefore, not only is the oikos, the basic symbol of life’s reality, gravely ill and in need of salvation, but so is the very air that the spirit breathes. We are dehumanized by going beyond the pale of truth—by concealment of the truth and proliferation of the lie, by silence in the face of scandalous inequality between rich and poor, by the dormant state of the rich—and also of the poor—that is precisely intended and shaped by the mass media.

It is dehumanizing also to go beyond the pale of basic decency, as in the mockery that is made of victims, with complete panache, through the denial of fundamental human rights to whole peoples or through wholesale disregard of important resolutions of the United Nations; as in the widespread corruption in almost all spheres of power, half justified by the unquestioned dogma of profit; as in the impunity that exists before, during, and after the perpetration of atrocities, often committed by governments themselves. And it is also beyond the pale of decency to convert Western-style democracy into absolute dogma, without regard to verification.33

It is dehumanizing also to go beyond the pale of maturity, above all in this time when we declare that the world has “come of age.” We are speaking of those fundamentalisms—individualism, comfort, or pleasure (so soft in appearance, but with grave consequences)—that are accepted without justification and unquestioningly prized and promoted. We are speaking also of the simplistic and infantile attitudes that may express themselves in very pretentious language, sometimes in the political sphere and very frequently in the religious.

It is dehumanizing that the West is obeisant to empire—imperium magnum latrocinium, Augustine used to say—even if such language is no longer so common. This obeisance, in whatever form, makes of the West an accomplice in the empire’s economic and military crimes and in its violations of human rights. It accepts as normal the arrogance and dominance of some human beings with respect to others. And it accepts obedience to the empire’s directives as necessary, or at least comprehensible, if we want to be assured of a “good living,” “success,” and “security,” or whatever passes for definitive salvific goods.

In sum, we are dehumanized by our selfishness34 and by our insensitivity before the drama of AIDS, exclusion, discrimination, and poverty’s endless misery and cruelty. We are dehumanized by our contempt for the poor, for Native peoples, and even for Mother Earth.

Such dehumanization is assumed with an attitude of impotence and naturalness (“That’s the way things are!”), and it is hardly noticeable since, in contrast to the evils that produce physical death or move people toward it, the evils of the spirit are not so obviously calculable. But they are harmful.

There is insistence that poverty must be eliminated—that’s positive. But the attempts to eliminate it—even without assessing the results—are dehumanizing.

The first dehumanizing aspect of the attempts to eliminate poverty is the way they effectively bracket people’s dignity, as if it were a matter of principle, as if one thing had nothing to do with the other. It is simply accepted that any means is good as long as it alleviates poverty. This way of thinking is not only unethical, but is dehumanizing, for we are not talking about feeding a species of wild animal, but about nourishing human beings.

It is also dehumanizing to accept readily in practice, even if theory may dictate otherwise, the sluggish pace of overcoming poverty and the extended time lapses that countries accept. Seen from the perspective of abundance, the pace may appear relatively human and rapid, but seen from the perspective of poverty—and decency—it is inhumanly slow, and in some cases, as in the sub-Saharan countries, there has actually been regression in the dates that were set for certain goals. The United Nations asserts that the millennium goals are already becoming obsolete and that little or nothing has been done to diminish poverty. “Reducing to one-half the number of people who suffer hunger will be accomplished within 145 years, and not by 2015, as 189 heads of states had determined”35 as part of the millennium goals.

Furthermore, it is dehumanizing that the so-called generosity gap is growing rather than diminishing. “Aid from the rich countries has diminished by 25% in the last 15 years.”36 During this period the per-capita income of the rich nations rose, while the amount assigned to development decreased. Today, the per-capita aid for sub-Saharan Africa is less than it was in 1990.

Dehumanizing also is the blatant way in which, in the search for solutions, ethics is bracketed. No doubt, to eliminate hunger there is need for strategies, technological know-how, and a good dose of political pragmatism. But ignoring ethics is a serious matter. As a ranking official of the FAO has stated, “Solving the hunger problem today is not basically an economic or political problem; it is an ethical problem.” It is also a serious matter for reasons of principle: if to resolve human problems we can dispense with the potential of the ethical, then effectiveness and ethics can definitely be divorced from one another, without harm to what is human. It means the disappearance of the ancient ideal, at least in aspiration, of bringing about a convergence of virtue and happiness. There remains only pragmatism, with a strong potential for brutishness.

Something similar must be said about the language that is frequently used concerning human problems such as hunger: resolving such problems requires political will. What needs to be recognized first is that there is no such will, for such hunger still exists. Second, since political will is nothing more than human will, it seems that an effort is being made in the political realm to hide something behind language. If there is no political will, then there is simply no effective human will to eliminate hunger. In the face of the scandal of a hungry world, the language of “political” will appears more respectable. Recourse is made to such language because it conceals far more than the alternative. To speak of “human will” raises the question of whether we human beings really have the will to eliminate hunger. Regarding the political aspect of that will, there can be many debates and evasions, and for that reason such language is preferred. Regarding the human aspect of the will to eliminate hunger, there can be no evasions.

Jean Ziegler states, “A child who dies of hunger dies a murder victim,” 37 words that bring to mind Ivan Karamazov.38 Recall Ivan’s indignation when children were destroyed by dogs on orders of a landlord who was a former military official, and how he refused to be consoled when told that those children would go to a place where they would be embraced in a universal harmony: “If they invite me to that heaven, from this moment, I refuse the invitation.”

The ambiguous and obscure language of “globalization” is dehumanizing.

Language can be a source of dehumanization when it is used as a means of manipulation, concealment, and deceit. For that reason, the choice to use one kind of language or another is anything but innocent. Consequently, a battle is always being waged in that regard, so that language comes to signify that which favors determined interests, independently of whether reality is well reflected in it or not. That happens with terms like “democracy” and “liberty,” and it used to happen with terms like “socialism” and “revolution.” The same happens with religious language, starting with the word “God.” Whoever wins the language battle has won half the war—and has gained significant power.

Something of that sort is happening, I believe, with the term “globalization.” Something new has happened in history, but to express what that is we do not use terms like “planetization” or “a more bonded, interdependent humanity.” The term that has been chosen is “globalization,” and I do not believe the choice is completely haphazard. The use of that very term suggests, at least subliminally, that “something good” has happened, and certainly “globalization” sounds better and more humane than “capitalism.” The term suggests the idea of salvation, even though a great many of globalization’s fruits are evil and at times perverse.

With the word “globalization” an attempt is made to communicate and impose a judgment value: what is happening is good; we live in an inclusive world, one belonging to all, and it is—or soon will be—a basically homogeneous and harmonious world for everybody. We do not live, after all, in an irregular, deformed polyhedron, though it might be possible to fit everybody just as well into such a shape; rather, we live in a world that is on the way to perfection. These statements represent the connotations of “globalization”: the beauty of roundness, and the equity that reigns within the whole, the equidistance between all the points on the globe and its center;39 that globalized world is preached as an eschatological good news, as that for which all humankind has longingly awaited; and nowadays such a world is preached with better arguments—and greater possibilities—than those put forward by Fukuyama with his “end of history.” Concerning all this I would like to make three critical comments.

The first is that when we use the term “globalization” today, we commit a sin of omission, as if there had not been important globalizations previously. I mention just two of them, described years ago by Hinkelammert. First, the “discovery” of America globalized geography and significantly broadened the self-understanding of human beings, especially regarding the unity of the human race. Second, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 also globalized the human species, but in a very different way, now because of global fear: the possibility for the first time that the whole of the species could perish. Both events made possible the discovery and the appreciation of the global dimensions of the earth and the human family, while at the same time manifesting the ambiguity that is inherent in all created reality. Nowadays, though, language does not reflect seriously the ambiguity of globalization: whether it consists in planetization or conquest,40 whether it has more of one aspect than the other, and which of the two it contains more. Nor does our language reflect the fears, in the form of impotency or inevitability, that can be generated by a globalized world: fear of being absorbed and so losing cultural identity, fear that jobs will be transferred to other places for the sake of higher profits, fear that new superpowers will arise….

My second criticism refers to our taking for granted that globalization is automatically a form of progress, so that it is thereby completely justified and should be promoted without questioning. In reality, Western officialdom is not in the habit of evaluating with honesty the past history of its own progress, nor does it analyze critically what it today considers progress. A candid look at the past will make us lose our innocence. Jürgen Moltmann writes:

The fields of history’s corpses, which we have seen, prohibit us from having…any ideology of progress and any taste for globalization…. If the achievements of science and technology can be used for the annihilation of humanity (and if they can, they some day will be), it becomes difficult to get enthusiastic about the internet or about genetic technology.41

The “anti-globalization” or “alternative globalization” movements do not want, strictly speaking, “more progress,” but precisely “another” world.

A third criticism, in my opinion the most serious, is that language usually conceals what actually gave rise to the term “globalization” and what keeps making it specifically what it is. Economist Luis de Sebastián says that globalization is simply “the present situation of the world economy.”42 It is today’s “real capitalism.”43 And with clairvoyance he adds, “Globalization, like every process of social change, has produced winners and losers, beneficiaries and victims.”44 When globalization is seen as economic reality, we learn two important things. As regards its salvific potential, despite its being “global,” globalization is no different from other economic processes; it is not as if, by its nature, it only produces good things. Globalization also produces evils, losers, victims. As regards its evaluation, this will vary, depending on whether this is conducted among the winners or among the losers.

In a world of poverty, conspicuous abundance and silence in the face of misery are both dehumanizing. And more dehumanizing still is the simultaneity of the two phenomena. We look at some recent examples.

Singapore, July 6, 2005. That day there was a celebration of the city’s selection as the site of the 2012 Olympic Games, with all the pretensions of universality that this implies. However, the planetary dimension of the Games did little to promote a greater awareness of the universal reality of the planet and its diverse peoples and cultures, and even less did it help shed light on the oppression and domination of some people at the hands of others and of the many aberrant conflicts and wars. The reality of the planet was thoroughly diluted in the language of pomp and ended up being distorted by deceitful and hypocritical language.

There is celebration of the apotheosis of sports, though properly speaking it is not really sports, but elitist sports that are celebrated, that which has sold its identity to industry and commerce. There is celebration of liturgies, of Olympic Games, of world championships, that ever more resembles a Hollywood production, the fashion industry, or even the world of pulp fiction. The real center of it all is Wall Street. In view of the misery that plagues the countries south of the Sahara, the money that moves among the elite of European soccer and U.S. basketball is shameless.

The image left by Singapore is one of pomp, wastefulness, and worship of prosperity. It entertains and energizes, but at the deepest level it narcotizes. Symbolically, it projects the whole of the planet on a screen, but what it thinks least about is the 6 billion human beings who inhabit the planet—and the vast number of those who barely survive.

Gleneagles, England, G-8, July 8, 2005. On that day, the powerful ones presented themselves, though with a certain semblance of humility, as benefactors of humanity: they forgave the debt of some African countries. But Aminata Traoré told them the truth: “We are accustomed to G-8 announcements that in the end are never made effective…. Because of their free-market policies, what they will do is negotiate away the competitiveness of our economies in relation to the markets of the North.”45

The injustice is manifest, but what we would like to insist on now is its conspicuous character. In seven capitals of the world the G-8 promoted Live 8 concerts in a campaign to collect funds and develop awareness of and solidarity with Africa. But there was no real generosity. The greatest beneficiaries of the concerts have been Time-Warner, Ford Motor Company, Nokia, and EMI Music. Once again, industry takes priority over music, and the North is enriched through Africa’s pain.

Alongside this ostentation in the North is the silence about the South. Just one example from recent days. The organization Doctors without Borders published a list of “the most forgotten humanitarian crises in the international media during 2005.” They take for granted the existence of innumerable crises and therefore concentrate only on the “most painful and shameful,” the “humanitarian” crises. And since they take for granted that all crises are usually forgotten, they ask about the “most forgotten” ones. Heading the list is still the Democratic Republic of the Congo: “Millions of persons subjected to a situation of extreme destitution and daily violence that has gotten worse in recent months; nonetheless, they are completely off the radar of the rest of the world.”46 That is silence in the face of the reality of the Third World.

Besides this we find the everyday cases of forgetfulness, which are now just second nature. The event of 9/11 is well known: terrorism against the United States. But 10/7 is completely unknown: it was October 7, 2001, the day when the international democratic community bombed Afghanistan. A date well known in Spain is 3/11, when there was an attack in Madrid (March 11, 2004). But on March 20, 2003, the bombing of Iraq began, and 3/20 does not exist. The poor have no calendar. They have no existence. Forgetfulness is natural. And all this occurs in a world that is more interrelated than ever before, a globalized world.

The extraordinary and growing inequality between the poor and the rich is dehumanizing.

Finally, we find dehumanizing the insensitivity involved in the very fact that the rich live cheek by jowl with the poor, which appalls us even before asking whether any causal relationship exists between the wealth of the former and the misery of the latter. We see a profound inequality of wealth and opportunity that has become something normal, something that we believe belongs to the order of nature, not to that of history.

The parable of the Rich Man and the Poor Lazarus is the true parable of our world. The story apparently had its origin in an Egyptian legend recalled either by Jesus or by Luke; such an origin means that the scandal comes from afar and persists throughout history. For me the most impressive part of the parable is Abraham’s final statement to the rich man: “They will not be convinced, even if someone should arise from the dead” (Luke 16:31). And it is true. We have no idea what needs to be done before the “international community” begins to feel remorse about this extraordinary inequality of opportunity between rich and poor and begins to respond with radical compassion.

Even before we ask why it is happening, our simple contemplation of the cheek-by-jowl coexistence of the rich man and Lazarus, who represents all humanity, should cause us to be ashamed. It is not simply unjust, but disgraceful, that in the world of abundance four hundred times more in the way of resources is spent to care for the gestation and birth of a baby than in Ethiopia; that a Salvadoran woman in a sweat-shop earns twenty-nine cents for each shirt that the multinational Nike sells to the NBA for forty-five dollars; that “in terms of broadcast information, one kidnapped white person continues to be worth more than a thousand tortured and murdered Congolese”;47 that the abyss between rich and poor is growing rapidly, according to the United Nations Development Program: the disproportion has increased from 30 to 1 in 1960, to 60 to 1 in 1990, and to 74 to 1 in 1997. And nobody reacts. Eduardo Galeano says that “a U.S. citizen is worth as much as fifty Haitians.” And he wonders: “What would happen if one Haitian were worth as much as fifty U.S. citizens?”

On February 13, 2001, a soccer game was played between the teams Real Madrid and Lazio; the market value of just the twenty-two starting players would have been about $700 million, as sportswriters reported before the game with no sense of indignation, but rather with satisfaction. They did not report, however, that that figure might well have equaled a major proportion of a black African nation’s annual budget, and was perhaps twice as large as Chad’s whole budget. And according to what one hears these days, I doubt that things have improved much since then.

The civilization of wealth gives rise to many of these evils. Afterward it covers them up. Furthermore, it dehumanizes. It makes the human spirit breathe a poisoned air. At times strong words are heard, such as those we have cited, and there are also others. John Paul II: “Today, more than yesterday, the war of the powerful against the weak has opened up profound divisions between the rich and the poor.”48 Mayor Zaragoza: “The most powerful and prosperous countries have abdicated democratic principles (justice, liberty, equality, solidarity) in favor of the laws of the market.”49 Harold Pinter: “Without a firm determination…to define the authentic truth of our lives and our societies,…we have no hope of restoring what we have almost completely lost—our dignity as persons.”50 J. Taubes: “We are debtors, and we have little time left to pay off our debts.”51 And though it may cut to the quick, there is still much truth in what Ellacuría said about the United States: it mocks democracy and its principles. “It does not respect the will of the majority of humankind or the sovereignty of other nations, nor does it respect the United Nations resolutions that are approved with massive majorities or the sentences of the international court of the Hague.”52 (Today he would denounce the savagery of preventive warfare and its theoretical justification, as well as the atrocity of using the term “collateral damage” for what are in fact monstrous murders.) All this continues to sink into oblivion and silence. The democracies do not make opposing such lies a central concern. And very few of the churches dare to take their prophetic duty seriously.

There are always a Romero and a Casaldáliga, a Chomsky and a Galeano, as before there were an Adorno and a Martin Luther King. But there are not many. Nor are there many like Ivan Karamazov, ready to refuse entrance into the paradise of this industrial, globalized, and democratic world of ours, which produces—or tolerates—the death of children. And the most radical dehumanization of all is to keep living normally in this world etsi paupers non darentur, to give a twist to Bonhoeffer’s phrase etsi Deus non daretur.

The Poor and Salvation

The Need for a New Logic to Understand Salvation

Paul exclaimed, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:24). Our times have little room for that type of question, but the terror caused by the world we have described above prompts a similar question: “Who will deliver us from this cruel and inhuman world?”

In the face of such an immense problem, our response must obviously be modest, but we can attempt to offer at least the beginning of an answer. We will do so by understanding salvation in relation to the poor and by seeing in the poor a locus and a potential for salvation. Although it may sound defiant, the formulation extra pauperes nulla salus is indeed quite modest. Strictly speaking, we are not saying that with the poor there is automatic salvation; we claim only that without them there is no salvation—although we do presuppose that in the poor there is always “something” of salvation. What we aim to do, ultimately, is to offer hope, in spite of everything. From the world of the poor and the victims can come salvation for a gravely ill civilization.

Our way of proceeding will be fundamentally through mystagogy, that is, by trying to enter into a mystery that exceeds our grasp. Even the full knowledge of what a human being is exceeds our grasp, and therefore so also does the full knowledge of what salvation is—although some of its elements are not at all mysterious, such as the eradication of hunger. That very formula exceeds our grasp: extra pauperes nulla salus. Of course, concepts and arguments are necessary for entering into the mystery, but they do not suffice. We must also take into account—and make converge with those concepts and arguments—wisdom, reflection, testimony, and experience, and certainly in this case we need the esprit de finesse of which Pascal speaks.

The formula defies instrumental reason, and our hubris rebels against it. For that reason it does not appear, as far as I know, in any modern or postmodern texts, for it is not easy to accept that salvation comes from the unenlightened.53 What prevails is the metaphysical axiom: whether saved or damned, “Reality is us!”

The formula is also a limit statement and therefore acquires meaning only after an analysis of the different contributions of the poor to salvation. And most definitely it is a negative formulation, which does not make it any less, but rather more, important: indeed, it seems to us that the more important things are these days, the more they need to be formulated in negative terms.54 But even with all these difficulties, we maintain the formula, for it is an expression that is vigorous and is suitable for breaking—at least conceptually—the logic of the civilization of wealth.

Accepting the formula presents still other difficulties. For some people, the greatest difficulty is the inability of poor people to produce goods on a massive scale. For me personally, the major difficulty lies in the fact that even the world of the poor is invaded with the mysterium iniquitatis. There come to mind the evils we see daily among the poor, and we are reminded of this wickedness by those who live and work directly with them. In one way or another they ask us if we are not idealizing the poor or yielding to “the myth of the noble savage,” a phrase I heard in Spain during the quincentennial celebration in 1992. And it is not easy to give an answer that soothes the spirit. Seeing the poor in their base communities is one thing: generous and committed to liberation, both their own and others’, under the inspiration of Archbishop Romero; it is another thing to see them disenchanted, spoiled by the world of abundance and its offerings, struggling against one another to survive. Then there are the horrors of the Great Lakes region of Africa, or the dozen daily murders in El Salvador. All of these horrors happen in places where poor people live, even though the immediate responsibility is not only, nor always, theirs. We do not even think that the principal responsibility is theirs. And we must also take into account that poor people’s reality varies greatly with different times and places.

The theological novelty of this formula also presents difficulties. Some type of relation has always existed between the poor and Christian faith, as we can see in various ways.

Our faith allows the poor to move us to extreme indignation, to limitless compassion, and even to radical conversion, which can lead to the “option for the poor” (Medellín) and to living in obedience to “the authority of those who suffer” (J. B. Metz).

An ultimate question is raised about whether and why we believe in God (theodicy), when it seems that God cannot or will not eliminate the horrors of our world.

Our salvation or damnation depends on our attitude with respect to the poor: “Come, blessed of my Father, because I was hungry and you gave me food…. Depart from me, you cursed…” (Matt. 25).

Finally, since as believers we are “sacraments” of God—representing either God’s “presence” or “absence,” depending on how we act toward the poor—one way or the other, we will be able to understand what the Scriptures denounce when they repeat five times (three referring to God and two to Christ) that “because of you my name is despised among the nations” (Isa. 52:5, Septuagint version; Ezek. 36:20–22; Rom. 2:24; James 2:7; 2 Pet. 2:2). Or we will make real what Jesus asks of us: “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 5:16).

Medellín gave special importance to the “option for the poor,” but we now go a step further, and do so with some novelty: we propose “the option to let salvation come from the poor.” Accepting such a proposal is not easy; a new logic is needed. We do not simply add a new concept to an already established mode of thinking. Rather, the new logic is the product of a basic globalizing attitude, with a constitutive caesura: not only is it necessary to be and to act on behalf of the poor (Kant’s question, what must I do?), but we must also pose the other two Kantian questions: what can I know? and what can I hope for? We would add two further questions: what can I celebrate? and what can I receive? And all of this “from among the poor.” If in answering these questions poor people become a central theme, then the mode of thinking can be moved by a new and different logic, and we will find reasonable the acceptance and the understanding of the formula extra pauperes nulla salus. It is not at all easy, but however that may be, the added dimension of the new logic is necessary.

Such a new way of thinking is what we are trying to offer in this modest essay. In so doing, we are guided by the poetic/creative/prophetic intuition of Bishop Pedro Casaldáliga and by the analytic intuition of Ignacio Ellacuría. The reader will also become aware of how much our thought must wrestle with complexity and uncertainty in treating this topic. The urge to engage in the struggle comes from Rahner’s statement, “It just can’t be that way!” and from some words of Casaldáliga, who was kind enough to write me: “You say it well, and it needs to be repeated incessantly: outside the poor there is no salvation, outside the poor there is no Church, outside the poor there is no Gospel.” And of course we have the hope that others will correct, develop, and complement what we are going to say.

The New Logic of Experience

It happens very often that visitors who arrive from places of abundance find among the poor and the victims a certain “something” that is new and unexpected. That happens when the visitors discover in the world of the poor “something” that is good and positive. They have found “salvation.” From Brazil José Comblin writes:

The mass media speak of the poor always in negative terms, as those who don’t have property, those who don’t have culture, those who have nothing to eat. Seen from outside, the world of the poor is pure negativity. Seen from within, however, the world of the poor has vitality; they struggle to survive, they invent an informal economy and they build a different civilization, one of solidarity among people who recognize each other as equals—a civilization with its own forms of expression, including art and poetry.55

These words affirm that in the world of the poor there are important values; further, they build a civilization of solidarity. This is not an isolated opinion—it is repeated often by others. Many people today seek a more human humanity, and we say this without redundancy, just as Luther was seeking a benevolent God. But people do not find such humanity in the societies of abundance, or in globalization, or even in the democratic order. People do find important elements of humanity in the world of the poor: joy, creativity, patience, art and culture, hope, solidarity. This experience is dialectical, for they have found human life on the “reverse side of the world of the rich.” Such experience is salvific, for it generates hope for a more human world. And it is an experience of grace, for it arises where we least expect it.

Chilean theologian Ronaldo Muñoz says something similar in response to the optimistic report of the United Nations Development Program for 2005. He tempers our enthusiasm for the report and recalls the serious ills that still afflict the majority of people. But he insists above all on seeing things in a different way, from a different perspective:

Rather, we should be amazed at the forbearance and the personal and social development of the women; amazed at the spontaneous solidarity of so many poor people toward their more needy neighbors and companions; amazed at the new organizations of adults and young people, who keep rising up against wind and tide to share in life, to work and celebrate together; amazed at the new dignity of the Mapuche people and their struggle for their rights; amazed at the small Christian communities, Catholic and Evangelical, that keep cropping up and yielding fruits of harmony and hope.56

From India, Felix Wilfred, having witnessed what happened during the tsunami, describes both the positive and the negative sides of the world of the poor. And he concludes:

Facing up to human suffering and responding to it in terms of compassion has developed in the victims some of the values we need in order to support a different sort of world: solidarity, humanity, a spirit of sharing, survival techniques, readiness to assume risks, resistance, and firm determination in the midst of adversities. In the world of the victims, as opposed to the world of empire and globalization, the good is not identified with “success.” The good and the just are ideals that the world needs in order to struggle unremittingly to attain something. The cultural resources of the poor, which reflect the values and ideals of a world of the future, help them to confront life with both individual and collective courage.57

Let these quotes suffice. Obviously we cannot deduce from them a thesis, but they do express something fundamental: there is “something” to be discovered in the world of the poor. These people, who do not take life for granted (as we, who are not poor, so often do), these people who die before their time, who have (almost) all the powers of the world against them, still possess “something” that makes them truly live and that they offer to others. That “something” consists of human goods, more than material, and it is therefore “something” humanizing. Those goods are the ones that are not found, or are found only with greater difficulty, in the world of those who are not poor.

The “poor,” with all the variety of shades that we will analyze, and above all the “poor with spirit,” as Ellacuría called them (thus systematically unifying the beatitudes of Luke and Matthew58), are those who humanize and offer salvation, those who can offer inspiration and energy for the creation of a civilization based on solidarity, as opposed to selfishness. For this reason Ellacuría used to speak of “the immense spiritual and human wealth of the poor and of Third World peoples.”59 How many of those kind of poor people there are in reality will vary, according to times and places. Obviously not all are like that. In the world of the poor, goodness and evil frequently coexist, especially in times of great crisis. But as regards the healing of a gravely ill society, I believe there are “more than enough” of them. The problem is to take them into account.

Most important of all, in the world of the poor a logic is generated that allows reality to be seen in a different way. Such a logic makes it plain that salvation cannot be identified simply with progress and development—an insight we consider significant. Such a logic makes it plain that salvation comes from the poor. Thus, the experience of grace is for the nonpoor. The option for the poor is not just a matter of giving to them, but of receiving from them.

The Logic of Salvation in the Christian and Biblical Tradition

What we have just said should come as a total surprise, though it needs some explanation. The nucleus of the logic described is already present—in idealized form—in the biblical tradition concerning Jesus of Nazareth, even though it is ignored by Western culture. The content of salvation fully appears in that tradition, both in symbolic form and in several other dimensions, such as the historical/social dimension of the reign of God, the personal dimension of the heart of flesh, and the transcendent dimension of the new heaven. These dimensions do not offer concrete models or recipes for salvation, but we can find in them basic elements that show us how salvation is produced and expressed.

For that tradition it is fundamental that salvation comes from the world of the poor, and that it spreads out from there into diverse realms. In the Old Testament Yahweh’s option on behalf of a poor, oppressed people is quite evident. We also see, at important junctures of history, that the symbolic bearers of salvation are the small and the weak, and above all—mysteriously—the victims, the servant in his or her individual and collective dimension. Conversely, from the upper strata of society, from the realm of power and abundance, no salvation comes. In fact, the Deuteronomic tradition makes the kings—symbols of power—look pretty bad, with only two exceptions: Josiah and Hezekiah.

From that same perspective are also presented Jesus and the salvation that he brings. Regarding Jesus himself, the savior par excellence, there is historically an insistence on his smallness: people say, “We do not know where this fellow comes from” (John 6:14), because he comes from Nazareth, a small and insignificant village from which nothing good can ever come. And transcendentally it is claimed that he became sarx, flesh, and assumed the weakness of flesh (John 1:14). But I would like to insist on something that is usually neglected. We ask ourselves where salvation came from for Jesus himself, in his historical form; we ask if something of that salvation came to him also from the world of the poor. I do not know whether, or to what extent, that can be proved from the Gospels, but the matter seems crucial to me. This question should not scandalize us, for it is said also of Jesus, for example, that he went before God with joy and with doubts. As the letter to the Hebrews states, he was like us in all things except sin (Heb. 4:15). He was the firstborn, the eldest brother in the faith (Heb. 12:2).

For that reason we ask not only whether Jesus was salvation for others, but also whether there are indications that others, certainly the heavenly Father and the poor of the earth, were salvation and good news for him. Some indications of that might be in his words: “I give you thanks, Father, for the simple folk have understood and not the wise” (Matt. 11:25). In saying this, was Jesus just overjoyed, or did he feel himself, besides, being evangelized by those simple folk?

We can wonder what Jesus was feeling about the faith of the little ones when he said to the woman with a flow of blood and to the blind Bartimeus (Mark 5:34; 11:52), “Your faith has cured you,” and to the sinful woman in the house of Simon the Pharisee, “Go in peace, your faith has saved you” (Luke 7:50); or what he felt when he saw a poor widow throw a few cents into the temple treasury, giving more than the rest, since she was giving all that she had to live on (Mark 12:44); or what he felt before the Canaanite woman, who assured Jesus he was right, “It is true, sir,” but who also corrected him movingly, “But it is also true that the dogs eat of the crumbs that the children toss to them.” And Jesus declared, “Great is your faith” (Mark 15:28). Without any need to fantasize, we may ask ourselves whether Jesus felt blessed by the faith of these simple folk, whether he would not say within himself—as did Archbishop Romero—“With these people it is not hard to be a good pastor.” Our question, then, is whether Jesus experienced salvation coming from the poor.

The most important element for understanding the logic of salvation in this biblical tradition of Jesus of Nazareth is the theologal grounding. The Most High, in order to be the God of salvation, has come down to our history, and he has done so in a twofold manner: he has come down to the human level and, within the human, to what is humanly weak. To express it more precisely, transcendence has become trans-descendence, benevolent closeness, and thus has become con-descendence, affectionate embrace. The same is expressed in the Christological language of the first centuries: salus autem quoniam caro. Christ is salvation because he is flesh, sarx. That is the new logic.

In principle, grasping that logic is possible anywhere, but it does not normally occur outside the world of the poor. As corroborating evidence, allow me to include some quotes from Jesuits of the Third World; I explain why later. They know well the complexity of salvation. They speak of it in different contexts, but they coincide in their fundamental insight.

From Sri Lanka, Aloysius Pieris writes that the poor are chosen for a salvific mission, not because they are holy but because they are powerless and rejected: “The poor are called to be mediators of salvation for the rich, and the weak are called to liberate the strong.”60 Engelbert Mveng speaks from the context of Cameroon: “The Church of Africa…announces the good news of liberation to those who have succumbed to the temptation of power, wealth, and domination.”61 From El Salvador, we have already heard the proposal of Ignacio Ellacuría: the civilization of poverty is necessary in order to overcome and redeem the evils generated by the civilization of wealth.62 And from Venezuela, Pedro Trigo writes:

Against the current position, which holds that the salvation of the poor (some of them) will come about only as an overflow or a redundancy of the health of the economic system, the mission of Jesus (and therefore the Christian mission) proclaims that the salvation of the non-poor will come about only through participation in the salvation of the poor. Nowadays that sounds ridiculous.63

The reason for quoting Jesuits in this context is that they may well be influenced by the meditation on the two standards in the Spiritual Exercises (nos. 136–48) of St. Ignatius. That meditation presents two “principles” of reality that are dynamic, distinct, and counterpoised. One of them leads to humility and thus to all the virtues; the other leads to pride and so to all the vices. To use our terms, one leads to salvation, and the other to damnation. St. Ignatius also insists that what each principle generates, through successive steps of a process, is in a dialectical relationship with what the other generates: insults versus worldly honors, humility versus pride, all the virtues against all the vices. Most important of all is understanding the origin of the whole process: on the one hand it is poverty, which leads to all the virtues and to salvation; on the other it is wealth, which leads to all the vices and to damnation. There is no reason that this Ignatian intuition should be limited to the path of individual perfection; it can also be historicized. Ellacuría thought that “it is a question…of awakening dynamics that will structure a new world.”64 By starting from (the civilization of) poverty and opposing (the civilization of) wealth, the world can be turned around.

We already stated that this thesis is countercultural, as it was in Bonhoeffer’s day: “Only a God who suffers can save us.” It is also difficult to defend, for nonsalvation, the mysterium iniquitatis, runs wild in the world of the poor. And the biblical basis for supporting the thesis—“the suffering servant brings salvation”—is the supreme scandal for human reason. But the thesis is necessary, for the world of abundance left to itself does not save, does not produce life for all and does not humanize.

What Salvation and What Poor People

We have argued that in the world of the poor there is “something” salvific that is not easily found in other worlds, as we shall explain in short order. First, however, it should be understood what we mean by the terms “salvation” and the “poor.”

Forms of Salvation

The salvation of human beings and the need for it can be seen in different spheres of reality. There is personal salvation and social salvation, there is historical salvation and transcendent salvation, although we cannot always neatly distinguish these different types. Here we will concentrate on the historical/social salvation of a gravely ill society. We should also distinguish between salvation as a positive state of affairs and salvation as the process by which that state is reached. In both cases salvation is dialectical, and at times it is dual. It takes place in opposition to other realities and processes, and even in conflict with them.

As a state of affairs, salvation occurs in diverse forms. Letting ourselves be guided sub specie contrarii by the negation of life and the dehumanization that we have analyzed, we may say the following: salvation is life (satisfaction of basic vital needs), over against poverty, infirmity, and death; salvation is dignity (respect for persons and their rights), over against disregard and disdain; salvation is freedom, over against oppression; salvation is fraternity among human beings who are brought together as family, a conception opposed to the Darwinist understanding of the human race as mere species; salvation is pure air, which the spirit can breathe in order to move toward that which humanizes (honesty, compassion, solidarity, some form of openness to transcendence), over against that which dehumanizes (selfishness, cruelty, individualism, arrogance, crude positivism).

Salvation is concrete—as is seen in the diverse salvations in the Synoptic Gospels. This concreteness should be recalled in order to counter the danger of “universalizing” in nonhistorical ways the concept of salvation and of the realities that accompany it either positively or negatively, such as poverty or development. That is the way the UNDP understands human welfare, and it has its advantages, but obviously the substance of salvation will be understood differently in different places; one understanding will pertain in the residential suburbs of Paris and the World Bank reports, and perhaps quite another in the refugee camps of the Great Lakes district or in the testimonies of the grassroots communities. From Brazil, Bishop Pedro Casaldáliga wrote that “freedom without justice is like a flower on a corpse.” “Freedom” and “justice” are both expressions of salvation, but we must not assume that we, from some supposedly universal space, can understand them adequately and prioritize their need and their urgency.

This leads to the question about the locus from which we theorize about salvation. Such theorizing is a very important task today, since globalization, as ideology, seeks to make people believe that the world’s reality is essentially homogeneous and that it is therefore quite unnecessary to ask about the “most appropriate” place for knowing what salvation is or for asking questions about the meaning of being human, or of hope, or of sin, or of God. Liberation theology does not proceed thus; it considers extremely important the determination of the locus that is appropriate for helping us to know the truth about things. That locus is the world of the poor. For that very reason, liberation theology, and not other theologies, has been able to formulate, even if negatively, the locus of salvation: extra pauperes nulla salus.

Finally, we must also take into account the diverse forms that the process of salvation takes. Since this process normally takes place against structures of oppression, salvation often takes the form of liberation: “It is necessary to liberate from…” In addition, there is frequently the need not only to struggle against the negative products generated by the structures, but also to yank out their roots; then salvation becomes redemption. For that to happen, according to the Christian biblical tradition, it is necessary to take on the reality of the sin. Thus, inherent in redemption is the struggle against evil, not only from without, but also from within, by taking it on.

Diverse Dimensions of the Reality of Poor People

We need also to determine the diverse dimensions of being poor, for the contribution of poverty to salvation depends on the way it is lived out.65

Before classifying the different ways of living poverty, we should recall the basic distinction that Puebla makes when it treats the soteriological dimension of poor people. First of all, poor people, just by what they are, independently of “their moral or personal situation,”66 “constantly summon [the Church] and call it to conversion”—and such calling to conversion is a great good. Second, the poor evangelize, they save, “since many of them practice in their lives the evangelical values of solidarity, service, simplicity, and readiness to receive the gift of God” (no. 1147), which is the spirit with which they live their poverty. Let us now see who the poor people are.

First, there are the materially poor, those who do not take life for granted, those for whom staying alive is their primary task, those for whom the nearness of death, physical or some other type—of their dignity, of their culture—is their normal fate. This is the economic understanding of being poor, the primordial sense, in which the oikos, the minimal nucleus of life, is threatened. The poor are “those who die before their time.”

Second, there are the dialectically poor: not those who are needy simply because nature yields no more, but those who have been impoverished and oppressed. We are speaking of those who are deprived of the fruit of their own labor and who are increasingly excluded from even the opportunity to work. They are likewise deprived of social and political power by the people who, through such plunder, have enriched themselves and have assumed power. This is the sociological understanding of being poor: it denies that the poor can be “associates” or “companions.” Besides, they are generally ignored and despised. They are considered nonexistent. They have no name, either in life or in death.

Third, there are the consciously poor, those who have achieved an awareness, individual and collective, about the very reality of material poverty and its causes. They have awoken from the dogmatic slumber into which they had been induced; that is, they have stopped believing that their poverty is natural and inevitable—at times, even desired by God.

Fourth, there are the liberatively poor, that is, those who transform that new consciousness into grassroots organization and the practice of liberating solidarity. They have become aware of what they themselves can accomplish and their responsibility toward all poor people. They emerge from their own groups and communities to free others.

Fifth, there are the spiritually poor, understanding the “spiritually poor” here in a precise sense: those who experience their materiality, their consciousness, and their activity with gratuity, with hope, with mercy, with fortitude in persecution, with love, and even with that greatest love, which is giving one’s life for the liberation of the poor majorities (this is the spirit of the beatitudes for living reality fully). Moreover they live thus with trust in and availability to a Father-God, both at the same time: they confide and rest in a Father, and they are completely available to a God who does not let them rest (the spirit of Jesus before the mystery of God). These are the poor with spirit.

Finally, if we view the reality of the poor from the Christian faith perspective, their poverty possesses both a theologal dimension (God’s predilection for them) and a Christological dimension (Christ’s presence in them). And this—at least to the extent that believers view the poor this way—renders even more radical the appeal of the poor and their offer of salvation to the nonpoor.

The different dimensions of the reality of poor people—depending on epochs and places—will produce diverse types of fruits of salvation. To put it in synthetic form, by their raw reality they can produce conversion and compassion, and also truth and just practice; and by their multiform spirit they can humanize in various ways the impure air that the spirit breathes.

Historical Forms of Salvation Coming from the World of the Poor

It is not easy to characterize the salvation that comes from the world of the poor. To do so we might be helped by thinking of it in three forms: as an opportunity for overcoming dehumanization, as positive elements for humanizing and attaining goods, and as an invitation to universal solidarity.

Overcoming Dehumanization

We have already said it. By virtue of what they are, poor people can move others to conversion, and if they do not do so, one may well ask what ever will. Perhaps this point is what is most directly stressed in the phrase “extra” pauperes: apart from the poor there is no easy conversion. The nonpoor can see the immense sufferings of the poor and the world’s cruelty toward them. They can compare their own “good life” with the life of the poor, above all if they consider their own situation as a kind of “manifest destiny,” and they are able to recognize their sin. None of this is easy, and it does not occur on a massive scale, but the opportunity is always there.

Society may boast of having moved beyond concepts like conversion, but such a belief is a serious error. Other concepts, such as change and desiring a different world do not express the radicality of the shift of direction and way of proceeding that is necessary—and even less do they express the necessary pain, repentance, and purpose of amendment, all of which are implied in conversion. Looked at positively, conversion can lead to truth, to hope, and to praxis. Human beings may find there answers to their most basic questions.

What I can know. The poor are bearers of truth. By virtue of what they are, they offer light to the world of abundance, so that this world might see its own truth and thus be able to move toward all truth. Ellacuría used to explain this by using two vigorous metaphors, the inverted mirror and feces analysis. A crucified people is like an inverted mirror in which the First World, on seeing itself disfigured, comes to know itself in its truth, which it otherwise seeks to hide by every means possible. The reality of the crucified peoples appears also by means of coproanalysis: the feces show what the First World produces, its state of health and its truth.67

Even if that light of truth is unappealing, disdaining and discarding it is senseless. Science analyzes reality, but in order to see reality as it is, it first needs light. The light that comes from the poor is what makes it possible to overcome voluntary blindness.68 This light can awaken people from the dogmatic dream to which the West has succumbed: the dream about its own reality. That was how Ellacuría saw it, and in Central American University he recommended that people at least try to “work from the light and in the light that the world’s oppressed majorities throw on the whole world, for the blinding of some, but for the illumination of others.”69

What I am allowed to hope for. Poor people give new life to utopian vision, which was so valued by Ernst Bloch and is now so devalued by postmodernity. Moreover, the poor project such a vision in a precise way. “Utopia” means a dignified and just life for the majorities; it is not the (impossible) ideal of social and political perfection, conceived out of abundance, as in the republics of Plato or Thomas More or Campanella (utopias that are naturalist, theocratic, and aristocratically communist).

The poor transform the very notion of a historical utopia, which is their most important contribution: for them it is not a question of ou-topia, that “no-place” that does not exist, but of eu-topia, that “good place” that must exist. What we call the “good life,” “quality of life,” “welfare state”—prosperity for the minorities—are feats along the road toward the utopia that is conceived out of the abundance of the nonpoor. But of course they are feats with which they are not content, so that they unleash a frantic race for progress. This is the flight forward, despite the presence of a humanity in crisis. In contrast, the utopia of the poor is the oikos, the existence and the guarantee of an essential core of basic life and of human family.

Correlatively, from the poor comes hope, true hope—that is, the way to hope. In the “world of abundance” there exist expectations, which are extrapolated on the basis of calculations, but there is not a radical break between the present and the future. That’s fine, but it is not hope, for, in the Christian sense at least, true hope is hoping against hope. The root of hope is not in objective calculation; neither is it in subjective optimism. Rather it is in love, which bears all. The hope of the poor passes through crises, through epochs of “disenchantment with the immediate,” for there do not appear any “immediate and calculable outcomes and victories.”70 But there is a faith that overcomes darkness, and there is a hope that triumphs over disenchantment, as is well shown in poor people’s historic patience and their determination to live. It is what we call primordial holiness. That hope is precisely what they offer to the First World. Ellacuría used to say of the First World, comparing it with the hope he saw in Latin America: “The only thing they really have is fear.”71

What I have to do. The poor mark out the direction and the basic contents of our practice. Let us consider this in what are today two necessary points. The first is that, correlatively to the truth that the poor express and require, they make possible true prophetic condemnation. The profound truth they reveal is that, more than anything else, condemnation is necessary in order to be in tune with reality, that is, in order to be real. For that reason, minimizing the need for prophecy and discrediting it as mere “protest” is a serious error. We must go beyond psychology. By its nature, prophetic condemnation means becoming an echo of a reality that wishes to speak forth. Condemnation means “being the voice of a reality that is oppressed and, moreover, deprived of a voice.” If mere protest is something easy, as is sometimes simplistically or cynically supposed, such is not the case with prophetic condemnation. It is costly, for to echo reality you have to be in it (incarnation), you have to see it as it is (honesty with what is real), and above all you have to be moved to mercy and decide to work for justice (taking responsibility for the real), by accepting the inevitable consequences of persecution and even of death (bearing the real).72

The second point is that the intolerability of poverty requires a dynamic not only for condemning it, but for creating economic, political, and cultural models that overcome it, as Ellacuría used to say. In this sense, “there is no protest without a corresponding proposal.” In any case, the poor demand that the new models not be inhumane or dehumanizing.

Signs and Leaven

The poor, as persons and as communities, have remarkable values that are generally ignored: resistance, simplicity, joy in life’s basic elements, openness to the mystery of God, and so on; recall the earlier citations of Comblin, Ronaldo Muñoz, and Felix Wilfred. With those values they give new shapes to society, as modest as they may seem to outsiders. In my view, these values are above all in the line of humanization. They are important for living more humanly, but they also facilitate the production of basic goods.

The poor offer models, sometimes small ones, sometimes notable ones—but their own models—of grassroots economics, community organization, health care, housing, human rights, education, culture, religion, politics, arts, sports…. In many cultures they possess a great ecological consciousness, and they take care of nature and Mother Earth in ways far superior to the ways of the West.

Furthermore the poor, depending on places and circumstances, organize themselves into people’s liberation movements, even revolutionary ones. They accumulate social and/or political power, depending on the issues. They do so to defend their own rights, but also to defend the rights of other poor and oppressed people, and sometimes the rights of a whole people. They seek and sometimes obtain power. Such a victory then makes them run the risk of dehumanization, but often they show a great, humanizing generosity. And they get results.

To put it plainly, the poor have values and produce positive realities and new social forms that, even if not given massive expression, do offer orientations and elements for a new society. At times they do not stay enclosed in their own communities, but appear as a sign for others. Like the lamp in the gospel, they illuminate their surroundings. They can then become the salt that gives flavor and the leaven that makes the dough expand, which means that they produce salvation beyond themselves. This quality is what Ellacuría used to find in poor people’s communities, especially in the base communities:

There are signs that the poor are evangelizers, that they are saviors. The splendid experience of the base communities, as a ferment of Church renovation and as a factor of political transformation, and the frequent example of “poor people with spirit”—who organize in order to struggle in solidarity and in martyrdom for the good of their brothers and sisters, for the most humble and the weakest—already give proof of the salvific and liberating potential of the poor.73

The Convocation to the Solidarity of the Human Family

The poor unleash solidarity, which, as has been said so beautifully, is “the tenderness of the peoples.” We have defined it as “unequals bearing one another mutually.” But we need to analyze the concept in depth and see what poor people contribute to it. Solidarity means poor people and nonpoor people mutually bearing one another, giving “to each other” and receiving “from each other” the best that they have, in order to arrive at being “with one another.”74 Often what is given and what is received are in quite different orders of reality: material aid and human acceptance, for example. And what the nonpoor receive may be, as a humanizing reality, superior to what they give. This kind of solidarity goes beyond mere unilateral aid, with its intrinsic tendency toward imposition and domination. It also goes beyond alliances between those who wish to defend their own common interests over against other people’s interests.

Understanding solidarity in the sense of unequals bearing one another mutually is something novel, but such solidarity is necessary in a world of unequals; it can resolve the ambiguity and root out what is harmful in the falsely universalizing concept of globalization. Most importantly, the source of solidarity thus understood and the call to practice it do not come from just anywhere; they come from the poor. Historically such solidarity happens locally, in small ways, through what has happened in places like El Salvador or Nicaragua, but it makes an immense contribution to our understanding of true solidarity, especially now with the proliferation of aid organizations and ideologies, private and governmental, religious and secular. It seems to me most important that such organizations operate according to the objective dynamic of bearing one another mutually, and not according to the self-interested directives of the United Nations, the European Community, and others.

Victims and Redemption

Historically, the poor are victims, and as such they also shape the process of liberation, now in the form of redemption. Archbishop Romero, without pretending to theological precision, said with brilliant insight, “Among the poor Christ desired to place his seat of redemption” (Homily of December 24, 1978).

The term “redemption” is ignored today, as if it explained nothing important about how to heal a sick world; but it explains a lot. In the process of salvation it is necessary to eliminate many evils, and it is necessary to struggle against the structures that produce them. When the evil is profound, enduring, and structural, however, it is necessary to eradicate evils in order truly to heal. This task is so difficult that it has always been thought to require an extraordinary effort, something outside the normal. In metaphoric language this has been expressed by saying that, in order to heal a corrupt world, it is necessary to “pay a price,” which is precisely the etymological meaning of “redemption,” redemptio. In other words, besides the normal labors and sufferings involved in the production of goods, “adding on” something burdensome is a necessity. In more historical language, we might say that to eradicate the roots of evil, we must struggle against evil not only from without, but from within, ready to allow evil to grind us up. Here there appears the “extra” suffering that in history is always related to redemption.

In El Salvador we have often said as much, in the presence of violence. This violence must be combated in diverse ways: from without, as it were, with ideas, negotiations, and even, tragically and in extreme cases, with other violence, making use of it in the most humane way possible. But in order to redeem violence we must combat it also from within, that is, be ready to bear with it. All the martyrs for justice have borne witness to this: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Archbishop Romero…. Ignacio Ellacuría had just such a premonition on September 19, 1989, two months before becoming a victim of violence himself. In the presence of presidents Óscar Arias of Costa Rica and Alfredo Cristiani of El Salvador, he gave a frankly political speech aimed at moving negotiations forward; he stated, apparently without intending religious overtones:

There has been much pain suffered and much blood shed, but now the classical theologoumenon “nulla redemptio sine efussione sanguinis” reminds us again that the salvation and the liberation of the peoples takes place through very painful sacrifices.75

This redemption thesis should be understood well. We are not defending any Anselmian theory, as if suffering were necessary—and effective—for placating the divine wrath and obtaining salvation.76 In order to save, God does not require a sacrifice that kills his creatures, and therefore there is no need to seek out excellent victims for sacrifice. This would mean that the victims’ suffering, by its nature, would “disarm” the power of evil, not magically, but historically. This is a way of trying to explain conceptually the saving element of Christ’s suffering on the cross: sin has discharged all its force against him, but in doing so sin itself has been left without force. So it is not that suffering placates God and makes him benevolent; rather what it does is disarm evil. As for God, the cross is proof of his love, since he accepted us precisely at the moment when he could have rejected us, because of the suffering we have inflicted on his Son.

Nor do we seek to defend any kind of sacrificialism, as if suffering in itself were something good for human beings. We do insist on venerating the victims who suffer, because in them there is much of the mystery that is fascinans et tremens. And we insist on gratitude, for often such suffering accompanies or follows on great generosity and supreme love. We venerate and give thanks for a positive, primordial reality: in this cruel world, and opposed to it, true love has appeared.

Redemption continues to be a mysterium magnum, but sometimes a miracle happens, and the mystery appears visibly as a mysterium salutis. Of this we can speak only with fear and trembling, and above all we should speak through our decision to give life to the victims and to pledge our own life in that endeavor. Still, we should not ignore the salvific potential of such a mystery, out of respect for the victims, but also out of a properly understood self-interest, namely, not to impoverish ourselves even more. As we have already seen, the innocent victims save precisely by moving us to conversion, to being honest with reality, to having hope, to practicing solidarity…. And sometimes, even amid horrors, immediate and tangible fruits of salvation are miraculously produced, like leaven that humanizes the dough. It is the miracle of a redemption that is offered and received.

In Auschwitz, prisoner denies prisoner, but Father [Maximilian] Kolbe breaks with that norm: prisoner offers his life for another prisoner who is unknown to him…. Although the Enlightenment—so rational and rationalizing—could never comprehend such an act, even in Auschwitz it is possible to live from loving grace in dialogue with the light…, to encourage the hope and remove the despair of the others sentenced to the cell of punishment.77

“After Auschwitz we are able to continue praying because in Auschwitz they also prayed,”78 according to the memorable words of J. B. Metz, one who was not at all given to naïve theodicy. And Etty Hillesum put down in writing what she was hoping for in Auschwitz: “to help God as much as possible.”79 Suffering has wrought redemption.

The Great Lakes region of Africa is the Auschwitz of today, and there also an incredible humanity has been engendered. “It is not difficult to sing and give praise when everything is assured. The marvel is that…the prisoners of Kigali, who today will receive visits by relatives, who with great travail bring them something to eat, can still bless and give thanks to God. How can they not be the favored ones, those from whom we must learn the meaning of gratuity! Today I received a letter from them. Perhaps they do not realize how much we receive from them and how they save us.”80

When the Peace Accords were signed in El Salvador in 1992, it was insisted that the peace was an achievement of the martyrs and the fallen. But beyond the great truth of these words, though it is often distorted, there is also the truth that, as in Auschwitz and in the Great Lakes, the “extra” of the victims’ suffering has generated redemption, an offer of humanization. In a Salvadoran refugee camp during the war, on the Day of the Dead, some campesinos prayed for their murdered relatives and also for the murderers. They said: “You know, we believed that they also, the enemy, should have been on the altar. They are our brothers despite the fact that they kill us and murder us. Of course you know the Bible says: it is easy to love your own, but God asks that we also love those who persecute us.”81 We do not know whether the murderers ever came to receive that offer of salvation that the victims made to them, or whether they accepted it. But with that prayer for the assassins and with other proofs of the victims’ love, the world became impregnated with humanity—a capital that should not be squandered, but rather should be put to work, like a great treasure.

That treasure is grace. And if we ask why it should be mentioned in talking about the salvation of a sick society, then we have not understood Jesus of Nazareth, nor human beings, nor the society we live in, which is bursting with sin, but is also teeming with the grace of the victims. We come to be truly human not only by making our own selves—often in Promethean fashion—but by letting ourselves be made human by others. That is the gift dimension of salvation.

But our times don’t seem right for talking this way. Society’s ideal—comprehensible, but dangerous—is to save only by producing goods, as if all evils will gradually disappear by themselves, without leaving scars and without activating sin’s particular dynamic of “returning,” of coming back to produce more death and inhumanity. For that reason, it is not possible to speak of salvation without keeping present the historical need for redemption.

This point appears quite clearly when we analyze what the martyrs of our time bring about.82 Today the great entrepreneurs of redemption are the Jesuanic martyrs, taken as a whole; they include both the active martyrs, who live and die like Jesus, and those who are made to die slowly through unjust poverty and/or violence, in massacres, anonymously, in groups and in collective bodies. Strictly speaking, the second are more redeeming than the first, though often no clear dividing line between them is apparent. They all bear the sin of the world, and they weaken the roots of evil, though they never finally eradicate them. Thus do they bring about salvation.

In order to see things this way faith is needed, just as it was in the case of the suffering servant of Yahweh. Sometimes, though, the testimony occurs in verifiable fashion. The case of Archbishop Romero is paradigmatic. A bishop, pursued by the local powers of every sort, murdered innocently and defenselessly by mercenaries in connivance with the empire, generated new hope, fostered new commitment, and called forth an unprecedented universal solidarity.83 And Archbishop Romero was not just a single individual. Rather, it may well be said that he was the most visible head of a whole people that was struggling against the sin of the world and bearing that sin.

Without making light of the problem of theodicy, on the one hand, or falling into victimology, on the other, we believe that in the immense pain of the victims there is “something” that can heal our world. We approve of Ivan Karamazov’s gesture of refusing to enter a heaven to which people must ascend to recover lost harmony. But we do accept entrance into a destroyed earth, to which we must descend in order to find “something” of humanity. Seeking suffering in order to find salvation would be blasphemy.84 But in the presence of the victims’ suffering, it is arrogance to refuse to open up to their salvific power and let ourselves be embraced by them.

Redemption is necessary. “Linking the future of humanity with the fate of the poor has become a historical necessity…. Only the victims can redeem the future.”85 And it is possible. As on the cross of Christ, likewise in history, suffering and total love can be united. Then love saves. As Nelly Sachs says, “They loved so much they made the granite of the night jump and break into pieces.”86

The Analogy of Being “In the World of the Poor”

So how much salvation can arise in the world of the nonpoor? Undoubtedly, the nonpoor can cooperate in healing a gravely ill society, but on one condition: that they participate really and historically, not just intentionally and spiritually, in the world of the poor.

Many goods are produced among the nonpoor: the science of Pasteur and Einstein; the revolution of “liberty, equality, and fraternity”; the universal declarations of human rights; economic models that can indeed overcome poverty; plus the political power that can make them work. And that can be said as well for the globalization we have already criticized.87 We are not going to belabor the point.

The nonpoor may also be necessary to make effective the salvation that comes from the poor. They can become prophetic figures who help the poor to recover and maintain confidence in themselves, to develop practices and to spread hope. When such figures do not appear, frustration may increase among the poor, but when they do appear, the community of the poor is empowered and creates an even greater ferment. These prophetic figures may come from among the poor, but also from among the nonpoor. Archbishop Romero and university president Ellacuría were not from the world of the poor. But as they lowered themselves, they received salvation, and the poor became empowered as saviors.

Left to itself, however, there is no evidence that the world of abundance can bring salvation, and normally the salvation it brings is totally ambiguous: Hiroshima or useful energy? Nourishment and health or individualistic consumerism and spiritless commodification? Universalization or conquest? Such salvation usually arrives mixed with sinfulness: imposition, violence, and the arrogant pretension of beneficence. For salvation to come from this world, it is not enough just to produce goods and heap them on top of the evils; rather it is necessary to purify their ambiguity and cleanse their sinfulness. The world of the nonpoor is capable of attempting both these tasks: it presents proposals that are generally ethical, humanistic, and religious. But the most radical possibility, without which the others are usually not sufficient, consists in lowering ourselves to what is poor in history.

This does not usually happen by our own initiative; it happens only by the encouraging invitation, or by the actual pressure, that comes from the world of the poor. It is difficult, but it can occur, and in diverse ways. The heart of the matter is our participating in some way, analogously, but truly, in the reality of the world of the poor.

This can happen in many forms: by actual, comradely insertion in that world, by unequivocal service on its behalf, by liberating praxis alongside the poor, by running risks to defend them, by assuming their fate of persecution and death, by sharing their joys and their hopes. All this is real and verifiable, not just intentional. And when such participation really takes place, as analogous as it may be, then salvation can come also from the world of abundance. But we must be clear about what analogy does not include: it does not consist in mere intentionality that is unsullied by real poverty. Some people believe that there is no longer any need to participate in that world nowadays; they hold that a well-managed self-interest is sufficient to bring salvation, so that no significant cost is necessarily involved. It’s the bargain of our times: in order to save, there is no need for generosity or sacrifice. It recalls the old fallacy: that it is enough to be “poor in spirit,” without any sort of participation in real poverty.88

Extra Pauperes Nulla Salus

We could have written all the foregoing without mentioning at all the formula extra pauperes nulla salus. Moreover, this formula appears nowhere in either traditional or progressive theology. It does not even appear in liberation theology, as far as the phrasing goes, although it is quite coherent with it. We use this formula because, as such, it has historical antecedents that go back to the extra ecclesiam nulla salus of Origen and Cyprian, and because it defines in radical fashion the problem of the locus of salvation.

After Vatican II, Schillebeeckx wrote: extra mundum nulla salus, outside the world there is no salvation, as a way of rephrasing the traditional formulation. By that he meant that “the world and the human history in which God works salvation are the bases of the whole reality of faith; it is in the world, first of all, that salvation is attained or damnation is consummated. In this sense, it is true that extra mundum nulla salus.”89 Thus, in his analysis of the place of salvation, Schillebeeckx made the globalizing caesura effected by the council into something productive. 90 The new formula overcomes the danger of exclusivism that is found in the rigorist interpretation: not only the Church, but also the world is the place of salvation.91 It also overcomes the danger of reductionism: salvation is not only religious, but also has a historical and social dimension.92

This conciliar caesura was an epochal novelty, comparable only with the much earlier council—or rather, assembly—of Jerusalem, where it was decided that salvation was possible for all human beings, without having to pass through Judaism. This put an end to Jewish religious exclusivism. With good reason did Rahner claim that Vatican II had been the most important council in all the Church’s history since the Council of Jerusalem.

Shortly afterward, however, around the time of Medellín, there occurred an even greater caesura, one that also affected our understanding of salvation and the place where it happens. Medellin was a fruit of Vatican II, one of the more important ones, if not the most important,93 but it also surpassed the council. The fundamental advance was that it now related faith and the Church not to the world, but to the poor. And it did the same with theology. In terms of the intellectual task, Medellín granted the poor a status of hermeneutical privilege; that is, Medellín prioritized the ability to understand realities and texts from their perspective, precisely what liberation theology did. Medellín insisted that all the contents of theology should be seen in relation to the poor. Thus did it proclaim “the Church of the poor,” a conception that in the council had barely been touched, despite the attempts of John XXIII, Cardinal Lercaro, and Bishop Himmer of Tournay with their formula, primus locus in Ecclesia pauperibus reservandus est. And in a peak moment for theo-logy, Archbishop Romero reformulated the famous sentence of Irenaeus: gloria Dei vivens pauper.94 From among the poor he reformulated the mystery of God—and I believe that even now we have been incapable of assimilating his novelty and boldness; we still reduce his words to eloquent rhetorical flourishes. For its part, theology also asked in radical fashion about the locus for finding God. Porfirio Miranda responded, “The question is not whether or not someone looks for God, but whether he looks for God where God himself said he was.”95 In the poor of this world.

From the theological dynamic of “from among the poor,” there developed also a rethinking of the locus from which salvation comes. In this way we arrived at the formula extra pauperes nulla salus (outside the poor there is no salvation). I read the formula for the first time in Javier Vitoria’s doctoral thesis on Christian salvation from the perspective of liberation theology96 and then later in González-Faus’s analysis of what remained of liberation theology,97 as some people were wondering a few years ago. As far as I recall, Ellacuría did not use that formula precisely, but in proposing the civilization of poverty as an expression of the kingdom of God, he had the same intuition: he related poor people to the “place” of salvation (a categorical ubi: “outside of them”) and to the “contents” of salvation (a substantial quid: “what salvation”). Furthermore he recovered a central truth by making it historical: salvation comes from the suffering servant of Yahweh. Finally, he recovered redemption as an essential dimension of salvation: it is necessary to produce goods, but it is also necessary to eradicate evils, by taking them on.98

Let us return to the formula. We already said that it is countercultural, since the world of wealth believes that it already possesses “salvation” and the means that lead to it, precisely in virtue of its not being the world of the poor. It cannot conceive that salvation might come to it from without, much less from the poor. Whether saved or damned, says the world of wealth, “Reality is us.” This is the hubris that Paul denounces.

The formula is also defenseless before the objections presented by history and reason, but it is necessary, at least as therapy for a society that is suffering a “moral and humanitarian failure.”99 The formula should not be discredited simply because the mysterium iniquitatis is present also among the poor. Even the church fathers of antiquity called the Church casta meretrix, the chaste prostitute. The Church is not the place of salvation because it has no sin in it,100 but because of the presence of Christ and his spirit in it, which will always produce life and holiness, an effective way of expressing faith. Something similar may be said of the world of the poor—though here also faith becomes analogous. Besides their raw reality, in the poor there will always be something of the spirit. Further, what is not just possibility, but essential affirmation, is that in the poor there will always be something of Christ. Both Medellín and Puebla insisted on that in radical fashion, referring to Matthew 25: Christ “has desired to identify himself with the poorest and the weakest in the most tender way” (Puebla, no. 196).101

The Mystery of the Poor

Even as we conclude these reflections, we still feel the disquiet, mentioned at the start, that is produced by the novelty and the scandalous aspect of the topic. We are aware of many limitations. We have not offered a sufficiently satisfactory concept of salvation,102 nor have we defined well enough the different ways that the poor and the nonpoor bring about salvation. On the one hand, the nonpoor save more by way of producing goods and knowledge for individual and community enjoyment; on the other, the poor save more by way of “inspiration,” “attraction,” and “impulse,” by causing “ferment” and by providing modest models for a different type of society. I also believe that it is necessary to analyze more in depth the relation between the simply “needy poor” and the “poor with spirit.”

Having said this, though, I feel sure about one thing. There will be no salvation or humanization if redemptive impulses do not emerge from that world of the poor. What the domineering and arrogant “world of the nonpoor” produces can generate no salvation, if it does not in some way pass through the “world of the poor.” To put it in the form of a maxim: salvation and humanization will come about only “with” the poor. “Without” the poor there will come no salvation that is humane.

The disquiet we allude to remains with us, and we recall the words of Ellacuría about the suffering servant, chosen by God to bring salvation: “Only by a difficult act of faith is the one who sings about the servant able to discover what appears to be totally contrary to the eyes of history.” 103 Similarly, only by a difficult act of faith—even if it is a reflective faith—are we able to accept that in the poor there is salvation and outside of them there is not. The reason is that the world of the poor places us before a mystery, and they themselves express a mystery.

The Mysterium Iniquitatis: Evil and Wickedness

First of all, to ward off accusations of naïveté, we recognize the mysterium iniquitatis that is present in the world of the poor. We see there deficiencies that reinforce the selfishness that is part of every human being, the contamination of the imagination by offerings that come from the North—even though the poor have every right to enjoy the benefits of civilization that are within their reach—and simple wickedness: abuse, rape, gross machismo, deceit, mutilation, massacre, and sometimes larger human catastrophes.

In recent epochs, the members of the security forces and the members of the resistance organizations were all poor people, and Archbishop Romero bitterly bemoaned the fact that the very same factor uniting them, the need to survive, also separated them, to the point where they killed one another. Right now something similar is happening with the youth gangs to an appallingly aberrant degree: they are all basically poor people slaughtering one another. Fourteen years after the Peace Accords, in a country of 6 million inhabitants, we have an average of twelve homicides a day.

Mysterium iniquitatis is the tragedy of Rwanda and the Great Lakes region, for which the North has a long-standing responsibility, compounded by its present-day insensibility, but for which the African peoples are also responsible. Congolese Bishop Melchisedec Sikuli recognizes this in enumerating the huge problems that distress his country: poverty, injustice, displacement of persons, rape of women, sacking of villages, all against the background of the sin of colonialism. But he does not hide the evils of Africans, which he illustrates with the drama of the child-soldiers, even though his compassion in the face of so much suffering moves him to seek some type of explanation. He cites, vulnerably, some words from the book of Kouroma, Allah is not Happy: “When you don’t have anyone at all in the world, neither father nor mother nor sister, and you are still a child, living in a barbarous, destroyed country where everybody kills everybody, what do you do? You become a child soldier in order to eat and to kill: that is the only option left to us.”104

There is no need, then, for idealizing anyone, but neither is there any room for hypocrisy, as when the world of abundance recalls—even if with a badly disguised air of superiority—the horrors of the world of the poor, ultimately in order to avoid taking seriously its own atrocities: Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the Gulag, Vietnam, Iraq, the national security regimes…What certainly remains is the question: Why, Lord, why?

The Mysterium Salutis: Primordial Holiness

Despite all this, the poor who have suffered so much oppression and repression, in our country, in Central Asia, in the Great Lakes region; the mothers who after a catastrophe hold fast to their children’s hands and carry all their possessions on top of their heads, seeking refuge, journeying hundreds of kilometers in mile-long caravans; the people sick with AIDS, who only want to die with dignity; and so many others who have struggled against oppression in all its varied forms—despite all this, I say, these people are still capable of resistance and celebration.

About the prisons and the refugee camps there are many tales of cruelty and misery, but what is incredible is that there are also tales of love, of hope, of longing to live and help others, of grassroots organizing, both religious and secular, for the sake of pronouncing their word and maintaining their dignity. Teresa Florensa, a religious who has worked in the Great Lakes region, writes:

These human beings continue to be the refuse of humanity. There are millions of people, too many in our world. Nobody knows what to do with them, and they know that they don’t count for anybody. Stuck to their skin they have a whole history of suffering, humiliation, terror, hunger and death. They are sorely wounded in their dignity…. But this work with the refugees of the Great Lakes is also an invitation to trust in human beings and their ability to overcome even the worst conditions.

For the nonpoor people of the world of abundance, this can produce shock and guilt (“What have you made of your brother?”), but, even more, it should produce respect and veneration. We have given a name to this striving for survival—and for peaceable sharing with others—in the midst of great sufferings, and to the labors to achieve this with creativity, dignity, resistance, and limitless fortitude, defying tremendous obstacles: we have called all this primordial holiness.105 Unlike the official kind of sanctity, this type is not judged in terms of what it possesses by virtue of freedom or necessity, of virtue or obligation, of grace or merit. It has no need to be accompanied by heroic virtues, but it expresses itself in a life that is completely heroic. Such primordial holiness invites us to a mutual giving, a mutual receiving, and a mutual celebration of the joy of being human.

I have asked myself if the wickedness and the holiness described above are the same as those found in the world of wealth, and I believe there are real differences, at least as far as they affect me personally. The wickedness of the world of the poor appears “less” wicked, for it is the result of the need to survive and the desperation of a life of chronic misery. There is always freedom, or crumbs of freedom, one might say, but such freedom exists in the midst of vulnerability, weakness, and the oppression that comes from society and its institutions. The poor are those who have (almost) all the powers of this world arrayed against them. For that reason I do not find it easy to accept a total historical symmetry between the poor and the nonpoor, between their concupiscence and the original sin they remind us of.

In like manner, holiness from below appears to be “more” holiness. To paraphrase freely from Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, where he distinguishes between “worth” and “dignity,” I believe that in the world of wealth, even one possessing dignity, the culture of “worth” tends to prevail, whereas in the world of poverty “dignity” predominates. Jesus said that the poor widow had given more than all the rest, for she had given out of her poverty. She had given “all.” The difference is not in the quantity, but in the quality. The poor do not have money, and so with much greater ease they can give themselves.

We have stated that there exists a disproportion in the gross inequality between the rich man and the poor Lazarus, but there also exists a disproportionate difference of dignity between the two. Poor people are, often enough, the true “shepherds of being.” Certainly, they are “guardians of dignity” and “aristocrats of the spirit,” as Jon Cortina used to say.

This world of the poor is what produced Ellacuría’s hopeful exultation, both utopian and realistic. He knew well the difficulties, but he discerned also “the immense spiritual and human richness of the poor and the Third World peoples, a richness now stifled by misery and by the imposition of cultural models that are in some ways more developed, but not for that reason more fully human.”106 That richness is drowned in a thousand problems, but it is not eliminated. And very often it shines forth radiantly.

The Mystery of God in the Poor

And in the poor one glimpses God. Let us say this in conclusion, using some cherished words of Gustavo Gutiérrez.

In the midst of the suffering of the innocent, it is asked “how to speak of God from Ayacucho,”107 a Peruvian city whose name in Quechua means “corner of the dead.” Here, those asking for God are Job, Ivan Karamazov, Jesus on the cross.

And from among the poor comes the answer, in the well-known verses of the Peruvian poet César Vallejo: “The lottery seller who shouts ‘One for a thousand!’ contains an unfathomable depth of God.”108 Here the answer comes from the Roman centurion at the foot of the cross: “Truly this man was the Son of God!” (Mark 15:39). He has found God.

The poor have recourse to God because God is in them, hidden and at the same time manifest. And they are “vicars of Christ.”

On the eve of the Fifth Latin American Bishops Conference, in Aparecida, Brazil, I end this essay by offering a text of Ignacio Ellacuría that throws light on what should be the nature and the function of the Latin American Churches. It is a text on the option for the poor, and it is also a text on the option of letting ourselves be saved by them.

The great salvific task, then, is to evangelize the poor so that out of their material poverty they may attain the awareness and the spirit necessary, first to escape from their indigence and oppression, second to put an end to the oppressive structures, and third to inaugurate a new heaven and a new earth, where sharing trumps accumulating and where there is time to hear and enjoy God’s voice in the heart of the material world and in the heart of human history. The poor will save the world; they are already saving it, though not yet. Seeking salvation by some other road is a dogmatic and historical error. If this means to hope against all hope, it is most definitely a sure guarantee that all this will be attained some day. The poor continue to be the world’s great reservoir of human hope and spirituality.109

—Translated by Joseph Owens