(CNS) -- The following appeared in the Aug. 26 issue of The Catholic Northwest Progress, newspaper of the Archdiocese of Seattle. It was written by Stephen M. Kent, executive editor.

While both U.S. presidential candidates talk about improving the lot of middle-class Americans, neither one has yet to devote much attention to those 35 million Americans who live below the poverty line.

"Nobody’s talking about upward mobility for the poorest people, about people at the bottom of the job market," said Jesuit Father Thomas Massaro, professor of moral theology and author of "Catholic Social Teaching and U.S. Welfare Reform." "They’re not a visible population," he said in an interview with Catholic News Service. "They’re not well organized."

At about the same time, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that the income gap between the richest Americans and those at the middle and bottom of the pay scale has widened.

In 1973, the wealthiest 20 percent of households accounted for 44 percent of total income in the United States. Their share increased to 50 percent in 2002, while the bottom 2 percent dropped from 4.2 percent to 3.5 percent.

The Catholic Campaign for Human Development’s Poverty USA project says the number of Americans living below the poverty level has increased by 3 million since 2000. In 2004, the poverty level for a three-person household is an annual income of $15,670, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

This creates an overarching socio-economic question — one that presents a great challenge to the Christian citizen, for it goes to the very core of what it means to be a Christian.

The poor were at the heart of the ministry of Jesus, Jesuit Father Thomas Rausch writes in his book, "Who Is Jesus?" In the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures, justice for the poor is always a promise and sign of the messianic age. The centrality of the beatitudes to the preaching of Jesus points to the place the poor occupied in his ministry, Father Rausch writes. "He implicitly called for a transformation of their social situation, for he made it clear that our own share in God’s kingdom was dependent on our efforts to succor the last and the least."

In other words, Christians are bound to hear the cry of the poor and to work to alleviate the plight of the poor.

A political campaign that focuses on who deserved which medal or who took an easy route through military service more than three decades ago ill serves citizens in meeting their responsibility. The nation deserves a national political campaign that extends to a deeper level: our responsibility to the poor.

The problem with the widening gap between rich and poor is not that there are "two Americas," but that the top end is increasingly unable to empathize with the plight of the poor. This virtually assures that the needs of the poor will not be at the forefront of the national debate.

The poor may not be well organized, as Father Massaro notes. But they do have a powerful spokesman, one who said, "Blessed are the poor."