They help us continue our work. He taught by doing, challenging laws and social conventions by healing lepers, harlots, and heathens. He calls us to do the same, each in our own way. Christian artists must bring their prophetic vision and spiritual energies to inspire concrete action on behalf of street children. We have done it for the hungry in Africa and the farmers in America.
Art can move the world.
But to enter the world of street children, we must be willing to open ourselves to the realities of human cruelty and suffering in our own communities, and confront, as well, the limits we place on exercising our own redemptive powers. During Hitler's Third Reich, the Catholic Church did little to resist policies and practices that led to the extermination of the millions of Jews, Communists, Gypsies, and homosexuals in Nazi death camps. The first tendency of the Church was to protect itself and its ecclesiastical integrity from encroachment by the totalitarian regime, not to challenge it. Bishops were hesitant to conclude moral responsibility to resist actively. The silence of priests and pastors lent tacit support to systematic mass murder.