Reflecting the stark realities of global poverty as compared to what is witnessed in the Eternal City, Pope Francis has appealed to Catholics in the Diocese of Rome to come up with concrete projects to help the tens of thousands of poor people who live in the city and to ensure religious education classes to teach the social doctrine of the church.

From 1974, Rome has become poor city, filled with desperation and conflict, Rome’s papal vicar Cardinal-designate Baldassare Reina described the Eternal City.

Reina summarized the signs as falling into four categories: crumbling and understaffed schools on the outskirts of the city, a public health care system that leaves many without treatment until it is too late, apartments that sit empty while homelessness and squatting increase and a lack of jobs that pay enough to support a family.

The Holy Father also asked those who tag priests and missionaries as communists to stop because the Church is merely doing God’s work—that of serving the faithful and ‘seeing Christ in the poor’.

“Please, stop saying that priests who work with the poor are communists—there are still people who say this,” Francis lamented during the evening meeting of the Rome diocesan assembly at the Basilica of St. John Lateran.

The assembly marked the 50th anniversary of one called by St. Paul VI to study ‘The Responsibility of Christians in the Face of Expectations for Charity and Justice in the City of Rome’, a project better known as a conference on the ‘Evils of Rome’.

Pope Francis noted how poverty has prevailed in Rome, saying that “these cannot be just statistical facts; they are stories of our brothers and sisters that touch us and that challenge us.”

“Are we able to see in their broken stories the face of the suffering Christ?” he queried. “The poor will always be with us . . . (But) the poor are the flesh of Christ and like a sacrament they make him visible to our eyes.”

In ending, the pontiff reminded Catholics that “the first thing Christ asks Christians to do, is to proclaim the good news to the poor, letting them know that they are loved by God and will not be abandoned by God’s people.”

“In the meantime,” he told diocesan leaders, "I would like to ask you to place greater emphasis on the social teaching of the church in your ordinary pastoral activity and in catechesis. It is important, in fact, to form consciences so that the Gospel may be translated into the different situations of today, and may make us witnesses of justice, of peace, of fraternity, and supporters of a new social network, one of solidarity, in the city.”