It's a poor world, after all.

The church has something to say about the dilemmas of development.

JESUS SAID THE POOR WE WILL ALWAYS HAVE WITH US. Some people have found this observation heartening. He also said some things about rich people and a camel and a needle or something; I'll ask my investment counselor if he can remember the precise wording.

The U.N. recently issued a reminder of its own about the status of the poor--the annual Human Development Report (HDR). This year the HDR tracked two disquieting trends: the concentration of global wealth into fewer and fewer hands and a parallel concentration of the world's information resources--from Internet databases to patents on bacterial life forms--into fewer and fewer minds.

Increasingly global "elites" are forming a transnational club beyond national allegiance, bending their respective domestic sociopolitical cultures to reflect the political and social requisites of the global free market. While one fourth of the earth scrapes by on less than $1 a day, this hyperwealthy minority enjoys a level of opulence and indulgence that should be increasingly repugnant but that more often is transformed and celebrated by global media.

Last year the top fifth of the world's wealthiest controlled 86 percent of the planet's gross domestic product. The bottom fifth in contrast could lay claim to less than 1 percent of the earth's GDP. The net worth of the 200 wealthiest people on earth increased in just four years between 1994 and 1998 from $440 billion to over $1 trillion--more than the combined income of 41 percent of the planet's inhabitants.

The top three wealthiest people had mutual assets that exceeded the combined gross national products of the world's 48 "least developed countries." These figures represent the stunning climax of a long-term process of wealth concentration now two centuries in the making, a trend accelerating so quickly that in the last 10 years the rate of global wealth disparity has more than doubled.

Inevitably, when so few have so much, the many have little. Here is the HDR's snapshot of Planet Earth on the verge of the third millennium: More than 25 percent of the 4.5 billion people in the developing world still do not have a life expectancy beyond 40 or access to even the most basic of human needs--education, health care, clean water--and over 840 million people worldwide are malnourished.

Subtitled "Globalization with a human face," the 1999 HDR sounds an alarm about the course taken by globalization, but it does not fundamentally challenge the phenomenon, approaching it as a process to be reformed, not a vast historical experiment worth questioning altogether. This may be a hard sell in regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa, which has little to show for its foray into globalization except broad poverty, social dislocation, Coca-Cola, and an AIDS crisis the wealthier world seems resolved to ignore. Citizens of such "less developed" countries rightly suspect that it may not pay off in the long run to play by the free-market rules when the winning side doubles as its own referee.

The report does, however, remind the proponents of global economic and political integration that the process of globalization is not just about privatizing state industries or opening markets. Too much attention, the report argues, has been focused on the purely economic physical and theoretical underpinnings of globalization, not on the actual people who have to live with its actual consequences.

If the UN sincerely hopes to put a human face on globalization, it might want to revisit a document published in 1967 in a little place we like to call the Vatican. In Populorum progressio, Pope Paul VI struggled mightily with the idea of "development"--then as now, a word too often restricted merely to economic measures of growth.

Catholic social teaching offers a profound alternative to the celebration of poverty and human exploitation currently passed off on many poor nations as "development." Deeply skeptical of neoliberalism, Paul speaks of authentic development as a process as much spiritual as material and reminds political master planners that economies are built to serve people, not the other way around.

Meanwhile, for those of us in the "developed" world, where the majority of the world's vast wealth is now hoarded when it is not consumed, Paul has a final reminder: "The hungry nations of the world cry out to the peoples blessed with abundance. And the Church, cut to the quick by this cry, asks each and every man to hear his brother's plea and answer it lovingly."

By KEVIN CLARKE, managing editor of online products at Claretian Publications in Chicago.