A LEADING American professor has said the Church stands alone in its fight against poverty.
Harvard Law School professor Mary Ann Glendon, speak
ing at the Caritas Helder Camara Lecture in Australia last week, said affluent nations were washing their hands of poor countries and poor people. The UN Declaration of Human Rights was under attack, she claimed, particularly in the areas of economic and social justice.
Only the Church continued to lift up before the world the moral imperative of addressing poverty, she said.
The Church does not treat poor people as problems to be solved, she added. Rather it exhorts the world to view the disadvantaged as persons whose human potential "deserves to be realised".