How Poor are the Poor in Rome? – Pope Francis

This is about a news story ten days old that I just ran into. The pope is on his way to some parish in Rome. He sees a shanty town and tells his driver to pull over and visits.

A good story for a pope dedicated to the poor like Francis of Assisi, his namesake.

While it is a good old fashioned human interest news story - The pope’s camera is rolling for Vatican propaganda. And the poor living in this shanty town all seem to have cell/mobile phones to snap photos of the visiting pope, no doubt e-mailing back to South America in the Andes where most of these shanty town crowd seem to hail from.

It is cynical of me to question – how poor are the poor if the poor can afford cell phones?

Or are we, am I just not being 21^st century and should accept cell phones as now part of the human species package?

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