Redefining the sense of poverty: Cardinal Turkson

November 29, 2012: As president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Cardinal Peter Turkson travels around the world listening to the stories of those on the front lines of the fight against poverty, hunger and disease. His task is to support them and to enable them to use the Church’s own rich tradition of social teaching on justice, peace and human rights to change the structures of inequality and oppression.
Ahead of the ‘Why Poverty’ media initiative taking place on November 29, Cardinal Turkson spoke to Vatican Radio about our changing perceptions of poverty, and about the contribution the Church can play in the struggle for development and human dignity for all.

Whether we can we talk about success for the Millennium Development Goals of halving poverty by 2015, he said that we have not yet achieved it. ‘There’s poverty and that’s about living on $1 a day, but right after the announcement of that noble objective about trying to achieve these goals by 2015, there’s also been an ongoing reflection about this, including redefining the sense of poverty. It is moving away from the $1 dollar a day concept towards defining poverty in terms of access to education, to health care, to decent living.

About the contribution of Catholic Social Teaching towards this reflection, Cardinal Turkson said that it is to do with ‘the basic sense of human dignity which generates various forms of human rights, the right to decent living, to health care, to fair wages and lately we include the right to energy and clean water.

‘In the past we looked at the Church as the mystical body of Christ, the emphasis was on spiritual relationships, then Vatican II opened that up, it brought us to recognise that we as a family, the sense of the church in terms of social commitments’, the Cardinal added.