Solomon Jones welcomes the pope and his message about poverty

I AM NOT Catholic, but I understand the significance of the upcoming papal visit. In short, the presence of Pope Francis, a man who has placed poverty at the center of his papacy, will put the world's eyes squarely on our city.

The world will see the brick tower of Independence Hall standing tall against a cloud-speckled sky. The world will view the architecture of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and be moved by the classical strains of the Philadelphia Orchestra. The world will see the opulence of City Hall, with William Penn gazing down on the city for which he prayed.

But beneath all of that, if the world dares to look closer, they will see the poverty that the pope has so often spoken against.

Philadelphia has the highest poverty rate of any big city in America, yet skyscrapers gleam against our ever-expanding skyline. Homeless men and women sleep in City Hall's shadow, even as we give decadelong tax abatements to the wealthy. Our education system crumbles before our eyes, yet we give prisons priority over people.

If the pope wants to understand how poverty can thrive in the midst of affluence, then Philadelphia is a vibrant illustration.

We are gentrifying more quickly than any other city in America. Development is coming to neighborhoods that languished for decades while poverty and disinvestment reigned. Property in Philadelphia is now a commodity to be desired, with market forces driving up prices in places like Northern Liberties, Fishtown and areas in North and West Philadelphia.

We have, in many ways, reached the point at which government assistance is no longer needed to spur development. I hope the pope will see that during his visit, and call for us to eliminate the 10-year tax abatement for new properties, and hand those taxes to the schools.

But, more than that, I hope the pope will look closely at the years of educational disinvestment that have led to the closing of dozens of schools in poor communities. I hope he will see that these schools - these community institutions - were so much more than just buildings. They were links to the past; tangible reminders of an educational lineage that linked father to son, and mother to daughter, and adults to the neighborhoods that molded them.

I hope that the pope will look at the destruction of that educational lineage and declare that we must rebuild schools as community institutions. Not for the benefit of the rich, but for the uplifting of the poor.

Finally, I hope that the pope will look at the complexities of our city's prison system, which holds nearly 8,000 people at a time. I hope he will recognize that three out of four people housed in our municipal prisons are there awaiting trial; that many of them languish in cells only because of their inability to pay bail. I hope he will see that failing schools lead to filling prisons, as high-school dropouts are the ones who most often occupy those cells.

I hope the pope will commit to setting the captives free. And in doing so, I hope he will go well beyond the impoverished, because poverty, in many ways, is making all of us poor.

Yes, it's true that gentrification is pushing the economically disadvantaged into poorer neighborhoods. Yes, it's true that educational disinvestment is creating poorer schools. Yes, it's true that poor schools are filling our prisons. But there is a larger truth than that. Simply put, we are all at fault.

We are at fault because we step over the homeless on the way to pristine offices, and ignore the poverty on the cusp of affluent neighborhoods, and pretend that it's everyone's problem but ours.

Perhaps, if the pope can come here and see the truths we've ignored for so long, the rest of us will finally open our eyes.