If there's one thing I simply cannot stand, it's poverty shaming.

[Joe Chi Minh]

35. If this isn't the last word on poverty and wealth distribution (Comment on Ambrose copied fromWiki),

I don't know what is. And almost as beautiful are those of St Basil, below it:

'Ambrose considered the poor not a distinct group of outsiders, but a part of the united, solidary people. Giving to the poor was not to be considered an act of generosity towards the fringes of society but as a repayment of resources that God had originally bestowed on everyone equally and that the rich had usurped.[30]

St Ambrose

-------------------------------------------------

"Who is the covetous man? One for whom plenty is not enough. Who is the defrauder? One who takes away what belongs to everyone. And are not you covetous, are you not a defrauder, when you keep for private use what you were given for distribution? When some one strips a man of his clothes we call him a thief. And one who might clothe the naked and does not—should not he be given the same name? The bread in your hoard belongs to the hungry; the cloak in your wardrobe belongs to the naked; the shoes you let rot belong to the barefoot; the money in your vaults belongs to the destitute. All you might help and do not—to all these you are doing wrong"

Bishop Basil of Caesarea (330-379 AD)

Perfect equality is not really the issue in practical terms, given that some are more innately worldly and others, more spiritual, due to the Fall. But an ample sufficiency for the poorest in this world's goods is surely not going to hurt those better off. It didn't in the UK during the sixties and seventies.

Some church traditionalists vilify the sixties, and certainly, from a Christian point of view, the pendulum swung too far towards promiscuity and has anything but recoverd, but it was a new Renaissance, there was also a tremendously 'up-beat' zeitgeist, a joy, a cheerfulness. The subsequent degeneration with the plunge into cynicism of most former hippies was inevitable given the wealth and power of the 'deep state' who had just been biding their time. What a shame the Christian churches, for all the massive amount of good they had done and have continued to do in the world, let the young down. Their thirst for spirituality, scorned by the rich Mammon-worshippers to this day, was not assuaged by eastern religions or drugs, and eventually, as the song goes, 'the music stopped.

I know Don MacLean had other ideas when he wrote Bye Bye Miss American Pie, but to me the tapering off, during the seventies, of all those wonderful pop groups with the craziest names, and the pop songs, also often with the craziest words and themes is very, very sad. Reagan and Lady Cardboard put paid to the beautiful nonsense so loved by the young - and even the great songs of the more orthodox singers.