What use is religion to the destitute billion?

AS the Catholic Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Most holy Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, this Corpus Christi Sunday commemoration transpires as the body of humanity suffers the crushing blows of the global pandemic and economic dislocation.

The coronavirus disease 2019 ) (Covid-19) has infected 7.2 million and killed 413,000 by last Friday’s confirmed count, with Brazil joining the United States, Italy, Iran and China on the list of Covid-19 epicenter nations.

And the World Bank projects that with lockdowns and spending squeeze across the planet, global economic output this year will be 5.2-percent less than last year, with developing nations joining the worldwide contraction for the first time in six decades.

The impact on the poor will also be the worst in more than half a century, reversing a decade of poverty eradication, as World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim extolled just the year before Covid-19 broke out in Wuhan, central China.

“Over the last 25 years, more than a billion people have lifted themselves out of extreme poverty, and the global poverty rate is now lower than it has ever been in recorded history,” Jim

Yong Kim pronounced in September 2018. “This is one of the greatest human achievements of our time.”

At the time, people suffering extreme poverty, living on $ 1.90 or P95 pesos a day, numbered 736 million, or about one-tenth of humankind. The rapid fall in destitution since the 1990s inspired the United Nations objective to eradicate poverty by 2030, the first of its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted in 2015.

Fast-forward to 2020: with the worldwide recession, the worst since the 1930s Great Depression, some half a billion people could sink into extreme poverty.

That’s the possible outcome in the worst-case scenario of 20 percent global economic contraction feared by the UN University World Institute for Development economic research (Unu-Wider) in its working paper, “estimates of the impact of Covid- 19 on global poverty” (https://www.wider.unu.edu/sites/ default/files/Publications/Workingpaper/

Unu-Wider researchers Andy Sumner, Chris hoy and eduardo OrtizJuarez warned that “global poverty could increase for the first time since 1990 … a reversal of approximately a decade in the world’s progress in reducing poverty. Under the most extreme scenario of a 20-percent income or consumption contraction, the number of people living in poverty could increase by 420-580 million.”

In sum, because of the pandemicspawned worldwide recession, the destitute, now one in ten people on the planet, could constitute one in seven. That’s more than 1.1 billion worldwide, exceeding ten times the population of the Philippines.

We need Christ’s Body more than ever

With this appalling global calamity threatening lives and livelihoods of unprecedented millions, many a soul, even Catholic ones, may be forgiven for wondering, if not scoffing, why anyone should waste a second on the annual devotion to the Body of Christ, both in the holy eucharist at Mass and in his Mystical Body, the Church.

Can Corpus Christi fill the belly of starving humanity?

Devotees and believers may argue that the question is wrong, since the eucharist is for spiritual nourishment, not bodily sustenance. And the Church strives for eternal life after death, even though its institutions and members are mandated to serve and uplift the least of our brethren in this world.

Fair enough, but such arguments may err in portraying the Body of Christ as bringing life and holiness for the spirit and for the next life. In fact, the eucharist and the Church bring graces and goodness to the entire human person, body and soul, and to the world here and now.

Those who think that God keeps out of our world and life should take note of the first Mass reading from the Book of Deuteronomy (8:2–3, 14b–16a). Yahweh not only directed his Chosen People Israel for 40 years in the desert. he also fed them with manna daily.

What about the Lord’s hand today? Can the Blessed Sacrament,