This is a plea for solidarity.

That’s different from a plea for money, I promise. (Although, show me someone who isn’t currently suppressing a primal urge to shout, “Help, we need more money!” and I’ll show you someone who is not only in the top income percentile, but also someone who has been asleep for the past 18 months.) Instead, it is a plea to residents of this Commonwealth, and Catholic residents in particular, to recognize and express their interdependence and common bond with their brothers and sisters in Massachusetts. Let me tell you where this plea is coming from.

I have been preparing this week for a program that will have aired on NECN by the time you read this. It is the first in a series called “Bending the Curve,” put on by The Boston Foundation and NECN to bring attention to the seeming disappearance of the middle class and the growing income and opportunity disparities between the haves and have-nots in Boston. Here’s a run-down of some of the data The Boston Foundation recently reported about the trends behind those disparities:

Massachusetts ranked 4th in the nation in household inequality in 2007.

Of the 50 largest cities in the U.S., Boston ranked 8th in inequality last year.

Greater Boston’s cost of living rose 34 percent between 1999 and 2008, with household energy costs alone increasing by 134 percent.

The minimum self-sufficient income for a four-person family in our area is $62,095, but Boston’s median household income most recently was measured at $48,729.

These poverty statistics show that the U.S., Massachusetts and Boston itself are off the equal opportunity track.

The education statistics are much worse. Increasingly, our public schools serve minority children. Indeed, 85 percent of the students in the Boston Public Schools are minorities. Those children will make up as much as 40 percent of our workforce when they become working age. And yet, currently, only 19 percent of adult African Americans and roughly 38 percent of adult Latinos in Boston hold a bachelor’s degree or higher. With the Boston Public Schools class of 2000 experiencing a 22 percent dropout rate, and only 60 percent of African Americans and 50 percent of Latinos finishing high school in four years, the prognosis for the next generation of local minority children to receive higher education degrees and be prepared for upper-income jobs is poor. That means the prognosis for a workforce that can support a high-skills economy in the future is weak, too.