MOST of us live a materially satisfactory life. We can manage, often with big expenses such as mortgages and school fees, to meet basic needs and more. Some are better off financially than others. But, whatever our circumstances, we can all be tempted to want more than we need or can ever use.
While this might open us to greater generosity, even philanthropy, it can also become an uneasy preoccupation with money and its acquisition to the detriment of other important values to do with interiority and virtue. This borders greed.
The recent revelations through the Panama papers on the financial activities of mostly already well heeled people is less a call to making judgments and more an invitation to question our own attitudes to wealth.
Ironically, about a quarter of Panama’s 4 million people live below the poverty line, plagued by diarrhoea and malnutrition. Meanwhile, a giant Panamanian law firm manages the world’s largest tax evasion and money laundry for the rich. The trove of documents is truly massive. 2.6 terabytes deep, enough to fill 3000 CDs. More than 370 journalists, from 76 countries, are reviewing the documents. They have found a lot. It is all about money and power, but it is always about money.
The connections between political power and money are sickening. Politicians around the globe tout their care for the poor, their interest in free education and health care, their deep interest in better, cleaner, safer cities and rural areas now devastated by poverty.
Meanwhile they feast their bank accounts on legal schemes that avoid their paying taxes to support the public trust. Bluntly, what they say and what they do collide in noisy contradiction. Taxes must help the poor providing it is not their taxes.
There is something deeply wrong with what went on in Panama, where half the rural poor suffer painful poverty, in metaphorical sight of billions of dollars and Euros and Rubles flowing through their land. There is something deeply wrong all over. It is obscene what is happening in the world and Christians cannot afford to be silent. We must be part of the solution.