At this time in the Church’s life there is an increased concern for its mission among the poor, yet the needs of the poor in Western Europe still seem to be a very secondary issue for the Church there. When the question of ‘of the option for the poor’ is broached it is too often in the context of another part of the world. I believe that many factors, theological and sociological, have contributed to this—too many and too vast to analyse in a brief article. However, I think that two issues demand some attention before one can propose positive direction.

It is a well-known fact that the church in Latin America has been the strongest voice calling for an option for the poor. The now historic conference of bishops at Medellin in 1968, which formally called the church into the struggle for reasonable dignity for the people of Latin America, set a tone for all later deliberations. The theology of liberation has brought non-European theology at last into the centre of theological debate. Yet too many still think of this development as the product of the wretched poverty of a particular people.

In the industrial world, which has a large middle class, it is easy to dismiss this theological development as if the option for the poor were only the need of a particular local church. This however is not the case.