2nd voice

The dispossessions begin: dispossession of his garments, dispossession of his family and social relationships, dispossession of the basic right of the human person to all things essential to life: food, water, a home, health care. Likewise there are those who lose all they have and are reduced to absolute nakedness, the nakedness of persistent inequality in the exercise of fundamental human rights. To be exposed naked and handed over to the mockery of all is a profound injury to dignity as anyone familiar with the face of exclusion knows only too well. To be divested of one’s “clothing” however is not experienced at the personal level only. Do we not see that one half of humanity experiences blatant dispossession and pauperization while the other half looks on and casts lots for its clothing?

To serve in justice and in love requires from the Christian community the desire to cover all human persons with “the cloak of the integrity of God,”* that is to say with creative responses to their needs and basic rights, as anticipated in the Last Judgment: “…For I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you made me welcome; naked and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to see me.”*