Barber’s anti-poverty efforts have taken him across the world. Next stop: the Vatican
Bishop William Barber II will travel to the Vatican next week for a conference aimed at ending poverty, hoping to speak with Pope Francis about hardships heightened by the global pandemic.
Barber, a Goldsboro pastor who is president of Repairers of the Breach and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, has been invited by Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs to speak at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.
With the U.S. census showing roughly 34 million Americans living below the poverty line, the church “cannot be silent,” Barber said, “and we have to make this an up-front issue.” He emphasized that beyond the poverty line, 140 million Americans qualify as poor and low income, making them a single emergency away from poverty.
Barber noted that Pope Francis chose his name in honor of St. Francis of Assisi, “a tireless advocate for the poor,” and expected him to take part in the Vatican conference.
“I’m actually moved by being able to be part of this,” Barber said in an interview Thursday with The News & Observer. “That is the first call of Jesus: good news to the poor, healing to the brokenhearted, sight to the blind, setting the captives free.”
Barber first traveled to the Vatican in 2017, shortly after he stepped down as president of the state NC NAACP.
For that trip’s conference, he made similar pleas on behalf of the poor worldwide, praising Pope Francis for calling poverty “a scandal.”
Barber brought his then 84-year-old mother on the 2017 visit.
He praised the pope then for choosing to live in the Vatican guesthouse over its more ornate apartments.
Recent arrest for Barber
In August of this year, Barber made headlines for getting arrested in Washington, D.C., while rallying for voting rights and a higher minimum wage — a protest that also brought the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s arrest.
Speaking to the N&O, Barber noted Congress’ inability to pass legislation aimed at repairing bridges and roads, much less invest in health care workers or raise the minimum wage for the first time in 12 years.
The job-loss and pandemic death toll have only heightened the nation’s economic inequality, he said, noting that many of the first to become sick were those in low-paying jobs who could not work from home.
“We have millions of people who before COVID were working for less than a living wage,” Barber said. “COVID exposed how our non-investment in our social safety nets and our community infrastructure and our medical infrastructure left us even more vulnerable.“
The conference runs from Oct. 3-4.
Barber said his own ministry’s differences with the Vatican, such as its recent refusal to bless same-sex unions, will not play into its work on combating poverty.
“That’s more an American issue, where the extreme who claim to be evangelical try to lift up those issues as the most important issues of faith,” he said. “They’re not.”
He added that the Vatican conference invites those of every faith to work in “true theological circles” rather than social issues that scripture scarcely addresses.
“All of them,” he said, “if you look deeply, agree on addressing and challenging the injustices toward the poor.”
This story was originally published September 30, 2021 at 1:21 PM.