I. For some time, after listening to much of their rhetoric on the topic, the question has bothered me: Do Christians love poverty as such, as a positive good? Do they want people to be poor so that they can be loveable? Somewhere in my memory, I recall a similar question: If we love our neighbor because we are “commanded” to love him, do we really love him? Or are we just obeying the commandment? Will the person we say we love recognize that what is really going on is that we are gaining points for virtue for ourselves by making it seem like we love him by law? These are questions asked without guile.
Poverty is not just a Christian concern, but also a socialist and a liberal one, though both may have gotten the idea one way or another from Christians. Are the poor the moral basis that justifies the actions of the government or the philanthropists? In lieu of God, does concern for the poor become a substitute for God as the only visible way to prove that we are not just being selfish? In either case, the poor and “options” for them are but tools that rationalize self-centered lives that have no other reason for existing but their own self-esteem.
In the beginning, I would like to affirm that, in my opinion, it is not the purpose of Christianity to make men poor or to keep them that way, granted that riches or wealth can, if not ordered, be morally dangerous. They (“all those beautiful things”) can become, as Augustine reflected, a means to obtain whatever we want. Several Latin American economists have remarked that the reason evangelical Christians make such headway in Latin America is because they perceive the need for discipline, work, virtue, honesty, knowledge, enterprise, and other aspects of learning to become productive—of becoming “not poor.”
Catholics, by contrast, (shades of Max Weber’s famous thesis in Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism), seem content with the status quo and with a static distribution or redistribution of existing goods that pits one group against another. The Catholics are not concerned with creating more goods, more wealth. In an honorable and effective way they think in terms of distributing their own, someone else’s, or the state’s limited store of goods, not of producing more goods, of increasing the whole of what is available. Though this thesis about Catholics economically lagging behind was challenged by people like George O’Brien and Amintore Fanfani, they did so by pointing to those Catholics, usually German or northern Italian, who did understand growth and innovation as something that can be learned and put into practice.
No doubt, we can also distinguish between loving or helping the poor persons—real individuals in need here and now—and loving “poverty” as such, an abstraction. It would seem that our love of the poor, in some basic sense, ought to include not just our helping the poor in his immediate needs but mainly inciting his capacity to help himself. We want him not to need us to help him except in the sense that we all need an economic and social system that works for everyone. We want this system to be growing; we do not want a stagnant system which always produces the same or lesser amounts of available goods. We want and need people who do not think solely or mainly in terms of distributing existing goods, which they often conceive to have been ill-gotten simply because someone has more than others.
The poor man is not really much interested in our love of him or his poverty if we do not know how not to be poor. He does not want our love if it strikes him to be, on our part, an exercise in behalf of our private virtue and vanity—“See how I am concerned with the poor!” We do not, furthermore, need good will towards or “love” of poor wrapped around ways of politics or economics that would, if put into practice, only make things worse or more totalitarian for everyone, including the poor. Almost all modern tyranny has ridden to power on a claim, sometimes even a sincere claim, to help the poor. We cannot avoid asking where claims to help the poor actually lead, not just where they say they do. In that sense, claiming to “be on the side of” or to help the poor might well be something both of a Christian heresy and a failure of reason.
The “cause” of poverty elimination, even when sincerely (if not naively) intended, has become too much tied up with political and economic systems that seek complete control over citizens and economy in the name of the “common good” and “social justice.” We cannot just think of the poor or poverty without likewise thinking of freedom, virtue, reason, and experience.
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