By Tim Muldoon

Barefoot children stand beside a smoldering heap of junk computers, sent overseas from the U.S. and Europe to this massive landfill in Accra, Ghana.  The acrid smoke that might choke a visitor is nothing new to those who come here daily to scavenge anything valuable, such as the copper in wires or the metal skeletons of discarded desktops.

The scene is miserably common, to be found in places like Mexico City or Calcutta or other places where the poor dig through the refuse of the rich for something that might sustain them for another day.  These garbage heaps ("one man's trash...") reflect a stark, if perennial, reality that lurks in the backdrop of Pope Benedict XVI's new encyclical Charity in Truth.  There is a grotesque gap between the world's few rich and many poor, and in the age of globalization we must ask what we intend to do about it.

Of course the rich-poor gap is hardly new; Jesus himself, realist as he was, observed that the poor would always be with us (Mt. 26:11, Mk. 14:7, Jn. 12:8).  Yet inasmuch as Jesus sought to reconcile people to God and each other for the sake of what he called "the kingdom of God" -- a phrase (or one like it) used over a hundred times in the Gospels -- Jesus called people to imagine the world in a new way, a way that more closely reflected the kind of authentic friendships that God had created people capable of forming.  Benedict's opening line reflects the basic dynamic of Jesus' mission:

Charity in truth, to which Jesus Christ bore witness by his earthly life and especially by his death and resurrection, is the principal driving force behind the authentic development of every person and of all humanity.

The theme of the encyclical (a letter that represents the most formal expression of the pope's office as teacher, inheritor of the role of Peter) is human development writ large.  It is the most recent in a line of social encyclicals that stretch back to 1891, the year Pope Leo XIII issued a document about the condition of laborers in the industrial revolution.  Rerum Novarum ("new things"), as it was called, was a watershed, inasmuch as it turned the Church's attention squarely on modern problems: its focus was not a distinctively theological or spiritual question -- at least as such questions had been understood up until then -- but rather on the ordinary, everyday concerns of people seeking to work in order to feed their families.

The underlying thesis then, as for Benedict today, is that the Church is concerned about the progress of human beings: issues of peace and justice, living wages and good government, economic structures, and international relations all bear on the Church's mission to help build the kingdom of God.  For the kingdom, as contemporary theologians are quick to point out, is not only a distant hope, a strictly life-after-death matter.  It is an already unfolding reality, the blueprints of which are inscribed on every human heart when it seeks to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly in search of God.

What, then, should the world look like if people heeded what Benedict calls for in his encyclical?  I offer four key points.