When you give alms, do you touch the hand of the one to whom you give alms, or do you toss the coin?”

Francis and the Idea of Christian Poverty

by Oskari Juurikkala

To provide a synthesis of Pope Francis’s thinking on the economy is both difficult and easy. It is difficult, because he has never offered extensive and systematic reflections on such questions; his pronouncements are found here and there, inseparable from a broader moral and spiritual message.

At the same time, he has said quite a few things about economic questions, and he is deeply interested in economic values and outcomes. Of course, he views them not as isolated technical questions, but as something that also touches upon a Christian pastor of souls. That is what makes my task relatively easy.

Francis’s thinking can only be understood within the context of his moral and spiritual principles. These, in turn, are inseparable from his simple and straightforward personality. I will leave it to others to study specific texts in detail; I will simply summarize the Pope’s message around the notion of Christian poverty. Perhaps we could almost say that Francis is a prophet of Christian poverty, and his papal name is no accident in this respect.

What I mean by this is two-fold, insofar as the Christian understanding of poverty necessarily entails two different dimensions. First, there is the attitude towards the poor. We might also call it the social and charitable dimension, which highlights the calling to exercise not only justice but also efficacious charity towards those in need. This has always been a fundamental dimension of Christian ethics, and we find it insisted upon in Evangelii Gaudium.

Concerning the principles cherished by liberal economists, the papal document does also acknowledge the value of private property and of the “noble vocation” of entrepreneurship, as long as they are seen in a broader framework and inspired by ethical values. Evangelii Gaudium repeatedly rejects the idea of an “absolute autonomy” of the marketplace not governed by laws and morals. It is critical not only of those who use the markets for selfish purposes, but also of those economists that tend to look at poverty as a secondary problem that should be resolved almost automatically as a side-product of economic growth. In a much-cited passage, he laments: “How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” What troubles the Pope is not the stock market itself, but the tendency to direct our attention to it in a way that turns it into a new idol, and to show practical indifference towards the plight of so many human persons.

There is, however, another dimension in Francis’s message, which I will argue is fundamental for understanding his thinking as a whole. When it is ignored, the social dimension cannot be fully understood. This second dimension is the more interior and spiritual dimension, namely poverty as a Christian virtue. 

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