Mountaintop removal sites like this one near McRoberts, Ky., in central Appalachia were among the many places visited by a U.N. delegation led by Father John Rausch.

In December 2005 Glenmary Father John Rausch led a tour of Appalachia for a U.N. delegation traveling the United States to study poverty. Father John has lived and ministered in the central Appalachian region of Eastern Kentucky and Southwest Virginia for over 30 years. Leading this tour, he says, “opened my eyes to looking at poverty from the stance of human rights.” He focused on the tour in the following column which is distributed to Catholic newspapers around the county. As Human Rights Day, Dec. 10, approaches, he says he hopes this column can be helpful in opening the eyes of others, too.

Dr. Arjun Sengupta, the United Nations Independent Expert on Human Rights and Extreme Poverty, traveled to the United States to study poverty. His itinerary included the homeless of the Bronx, N.Y., Immokalee farm workers in Florida, those devastated by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the ethnically and culturally diverse in the Mississippi Delta, Native Americans in upstate New York and the people in the hollows of Appalachia.

The purpose of the trip focused on the expressions of poverty and possible efforts to address them. The underlying assumption of the trip: Poverty is an abuse of human rights.

Why come to the richest nation on earth to study poverty?

What about the 2.8 billion people of the world who survive on less than $2 a day, those living in mud huts, those with little more than a sarong or loin cloth? Those graphic images depict absolute poverty, and charge overindulgent nations with social sin.

But the effects of the relative poverty in the United States fly under the radar: people living shorter lives with no health care, facing financial insecurity from corporate decisions, and having their human potential halted by social and racial barriers.

Bobby in Eastern Kentucky testified that he worked 30 years as a nurse’s aide. Scratched on the right arm by a resident at a nursing home, he developed methicillin-resistant stapholococcus aureus (MRSA) and, later, high blood pressure.

Without insurance, he could not get proper health care which compounded his problems. He eventually had a stoke and is now legally blind. Forced to declare bankruptcy, he lost his house. His family survives on Social Security Disability and food stamps, but he remains constantly behind on his rent and heavily in debt.

The subtlety of poverty in Appalachia extends to the environmental degradation that comes with mountaintop removal and irresponsible strip mining. Outside Hazard, Ky., Jeff Combs showed the United Nations delegation a four-foot crack in his home’s chimney caused by blasting for coal a mile away.

Legally, a coal company can detonate 40,000 pounds of dynamite in one blast, but mining companies routinely receive waivers for larger shots. The result: Plates rattle and picture frames fall off walls; cracks appear in chimneys and foundations. Jeff lives in the fear that some night the pillars supporting his house will shift, sending the house with him and his retired mother and father down the mountainside.

The United Nations defines poverty as a denial of a life in dignity. Because everyone has a right to live in dignity, poverty equates to an abuse of human rights.

Poverty has three dimensions. With “income poverty,” a person can’t buy the essentials of life: food, clothing, shelter. On a second level, with “human development poverty,” a person can’t access education, health care, and the basic social services that allow a person to feel spiritually alive. Third, with racism, sexism and other forms of “social exclusion,” a person can’t participate fully in society.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations on Dec. 10, 1948, implies that poverty is an abuse of human rights: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services...” (Article 25).

The Church teaches that “human rights arise from the dignity of being made in the image and likeness of God.” Whether absolute or relative, poverty cannot be eradicated by mere charity, because it remains an abuse of human rights that call for new structures of justice.