Cardinal Charles Maung Bo The Eucharist demands our commitment to a just world and calls for a global war on poverty, the Pope’s personal envoy to the International Eucharistic Congress has said.
Preaching at the opening Mass of the congress in the Philippine city of Cebu, Cardinal Charles Maung Bo said “in an unequal and uncaring world, the Eucharist steadfastly remains the beacon of human equality”, holding everyone to the same standard. Regardless of what is happening in the world, the Eucharist remains “a revolutionary flag hoisted every day on millions of altars, crying for justice like the prophets of old”.
The Eucharist encompasses various facets of Christian life, the Burmese cardinal declared, highlighting how adoration is an intense and personal encounter with Jesus but contrasting devotion with discipleship. “The Eucharist of the devotee is confined to the clean, decorated altars of the Church,” he said, whereas “the Eucharist of the disciple continues with the streets as altar.”
Adoring Jesus in the Eucharist, he said, must entail accepting each other as created in the image of God. This, he said, is a major challenge to humanity “in a world that kills children in the womb… that spends more on arms than on food… that continues to have millions of poor”. Identifying abortion, the death penalty, and euthanasia as challenges to the Eucharist, he recalled how adoration of the Eucharist affirms the Church’s belief in human dignity, linking how St John Paul II used to speak of the “culture of death” and how Pope Francis speaks of a “culture of indifference”.
The cardinal asked whether any moral sin could be greater than watching children starve to death, and said the death of 10 million children a year – 20,000 a day – from starvation constitutes “a silent genocide” and “the biggest terrorism in the world”.
The Eucharist and the poor are inseparable, he said, which demands our commitment to a world of justice. “The Eucharist calls for a third world war,” he continued, “a third world war against poverty, a third world war against the cruelty of dogs fed with sumptuous organic food while poor children scramble for crumbs from the table, a third world war against a world that produces more weapons whilst more than half a billion do not get enough food every day.
“Another world is possible,” he insisted, continuing, “an economic system that does not treat human beings as commodities is possible, another world where the world is our common home is possible. Until that happens, the Eucharist will continue to be challenged. Our mission remains incomplete.”
Meanwhile, in a message to the World Economic Forum at Davos in Switzerland, Pope Francis called for better wealth promotion, the creation of sources of employment and “an integral promotion of the poor which goes beyond a simple welfare mentality”.
World leaders should work to ensure as best they could, he said, “that humanity is served by wealth and not ruled by it”