Video Transcript: Christian Poverty in the Age of Prosperity (Robert Sirico)

Samuel Gregg:    

Father Sirico, today, is going to be talking on the theme of Christian Poverty in an Age of Prosperity. It's always very difficult to introduce Father Sirico to Grand Rapids audiences because most of you are extremely familiar with him. I've known Father Sirico now for 12 enjoyable years. In fact, 10 years ago today, I started working at the Acton Institute, so that's 25% of my life. So not any considerable amount of time.

Father Sirico, as you know, is the president and co-founder of the Acton Institute. He writes extensively in the form of monographs and newspaper articles including pieces in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, International Review, etc. He has been very involved for a very long time in trying to make sure that religious leaders of all faiths and confessions come to a better understanding of the free society, the moral foundations of that society, in particular, the working of entrepreneurship, free enterprise, and the market economy. So he's been involved in that for an extremely long period of time.

What I suspect a lot of people don't know is that that's only one of Father Sirico's three full-time jobs. He is also a full-time parish priest in the Diocese of Kalamazoo to the south of Grand Rapids where he is in charge of St. Mary's parish, which is a quite large parish in a city parish in Kalamazoo. So he's a full-time minister so to speak.

He's also very involved in the Catholic Information Center which is located in downtown Kalamazoo where people from all Christian confessions can find a great deal of literature relating to the Christian faith and its place in the modern world today. Without any further ado, I would like to ask Father Sirico to address us on the theme of Christian Poverty in the Age of Prosperity. Thank you, Father.

Father Sirico:     

Thank you. It's good to be here at home. I have to confess to you that I view these lectures that I do here as you are my guinea pigs. Because what I do is work with a theme that I haven't taken out on the road yet. The truth be told, I did this seminar that I'm going to attempt to present here in a slightly different form at Acton University. At that, they were a group of basically theology students who were involved in the discussion.

This presentation, today, is going to be a little different than perhaps you have - and what we usually present at the Acton Institute - in a sense that I want to get deeper into the consequences of our ideas by which I mean, this is not red meat. I know you love red meat. You just throw it and everybody kind of goes crazy for it. It's not a political subject at all. It's a much more spiritual discussion that I want to propose today.

Note carefully the theme that I have proposed - Christian Poverty in an Age of Prosperity. And what I want to do is unpack what I mean about Christian poverty and the context in which we're living in this world. In the Christian understanding of things - and I think this undergirds a lot of the assumption of many Christians. In fact, we experience it all the time at the Acton Institute. I personally experience it. How can you as a priest, how can you as a religious institution, how can you as Christians defend a society that is predicated on capitalism?

Now, there are all these stereotypes of capitalists and greed and all the rest of that. And hopefully, a lot of literature and our lectures have addressed those various questions. But really what they're talking about is something that's part of Christianity that cannot be ignored. That is the priority on the spiritual. And that is a good instinct. That is a good insight. That is what Christ calls us to undeniably, that we are to have a vulnerability to the point. One answer we can give to that is if you want to be concerned for the poor, you have to be concerned about a system of economic productivity because if you want the poor to have bread, you have to know how to make bread. That's one level, the economic level that we respond to that.

But I think there is a spiritual reality that's even deeper than I want to drill down into a little bit today. A lot of this comes out of my personal pastoral work, lots and lots of conversations that I've had over the years at the Acton Institute in various debates. But also, truth be told, it comes out of my prayer, out of my spiritual life, out of my meditation on the Word of God, and on my reflection on the lives of holy men and women. So when we talk about poverty, when we talk about wealth, when we talk about the attachment to things, which is fundamentally idolatry, we may begin in the academic world, but we very soon get caught up in a kind of mystical spiritual sense of our relationship, the contemplation of God in himself. And that's why I say, this lecture is a little different than a lot of the kinds of lectures that we very often offer.

There's a whole lot in between that needs to be clarified, and I assure you that at the end of our discussion today, I will not have answered all of the questions. But perhaps I raise some good questions for us to go down more deeply into these things. I found a number of different books. Being a Catholic, I've drawn from the Catholic tradition, but I also find some very rich resources in the Protestant tradition and would welcome, as I'm talking, if you know of books that fit in this general theme that I'm offering to explore with you, that you'd let us know what those resources are. We might have missed them.

I found Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI’s book, on Jesus of Nazareth, which is the first volume of what's going to be, I think, three volumes of biblical commentary on the life of Christ. There are sections in that first book. The second volume's coming out, I think, in the spring. But for the one that's out now, the sections on Luke and spiritual poverty are very helpful. Father Thomas Dubay, who just recently died, a master director of spirituality, his book Blessed are You Poor, is a very helpful book - not, I would say, unblemished, which I'll talk about. This is a concentrated study and offers one of the most systematic discussions of the question of the Christian's relationship to the material world in terms of wealth and poverty and attachment and the like. St. Francis de Sales, which is a remarkably modern book for having been written in the early part of the 17th century. These are very good books.

Also, there is a book-- I've forgotten the author of it-- but the name of the book is called Thrift. It was written in the 19th century. It's a largely Victorian Protestant book. It talks about very sensible relationships to how we treat what we own. This is kind of a Protestant work ethic book that's a classic articulation of that, the sensibility of conserving it. One of the frustrations that I have today is that the conservation movement has morphed into its own religion, into this kind of radical environmentalist movement that simultaneously is radically materialistic, because everything and the most important things are the material world. And radically dualistic - that is that it hates. It's a highly spiritualized thing. Both of these things at the same time. There's this contradiction running through the modern environmentalist movement.

But what I found in Thrift was a sensible Christian approach to why we should conserve things and why that's good for us spiritually. What emerges from that is wonderful, civic decency that's evident on every page of that book and its spirituality in relationship to Thrift.

There are some tensions that are defined that I think must be dealt with. Let me start with the biblical world view, with the cosmology of the Old Testament. This I have mentioned before in other lectures because it provides a theological basis of what we do at the Acton Institute, but more broadly in free market societies and the moral defense of the free economy. And that is to say that the material world in Genesis is created good. The Jewish view of the physical world, which is then incorporated into Christianity is that the physical world is good because it emanates from a good God.

This is not the gnostic view. The Gnostic view is much more akin to— Gnosticism is an early heresy that said there was this hostile relationship between the physical and the spiritual, that the physical is empathetical to the spiritual. As you read, the early gnostics, you find that they have the same kinds of contradictions that I've defined and outlined in modern environmentalism. That is, they have both this radical attachment to the material world at the same time they denounce the material world.

So you have these movements in early Christianity - Docetism, Gnosticism - that want to separate. I call these proto radical environmentalists. Manicheans - if you've read any of St. Augustine, you'll remember that Augustine had been a Manichean and converts to Christianity, then becomes one of the most articulate denouncers of Manicheanism. And the Manichees were so radical, they'd say, "We can't pick fruit because we would hear the fruit crying if we were to pick it. We have to wait for the fruit to drop from a tree, then we can eat it."

It's very weird ideas, but no weirder than any display of left-wing demonstrations, which I had the fun of encountering earlier this weekend. But that's another story.

In the Old Testament and the New Testament, we have these warnings about wealth. The superficial way in which people speak about that or exegete that or attempt to exegete it or interpret it is that wealth is evil. I am very interested in finding me any single passage every time-- in my prayer, we read the Psalms every day. In the course of one month, any priest or nun who reads the breviary - this is the set of the Psalm that we read - we go through the Psalms, all 150 Psalms every month. So month after month after month, you're going through these Psalms plus Isaiah and Jeremiah and these other texts. These things that come out about warning about wealth, there is no text in the bible that condemns wealth in itself.

Every time it's mentioned, it's mentioned in a qualified way - what you're doing with your wealth, how you have obtained your wealth, how you use your wealth to help the vulnerable, all of these kinds of things. But wealth itself, the material world itself is not condemned. It's what you do with it. There are cautions throughout the scripture repeatedly. Of course, the famous one is about the rich man and Lazarus. So I've already taken your question that you were going to ask at the Q & A. Or the rich man getting through the eye of the needle. But these are not condemnations of wealth itself.

St. Augustine said with regard to the rich man and Lazarus, he said the Lazarus did not get to heaven because he was poor, but because he was humble. The rich man was not sent to hell because he was rich, but because he was proud.

Likewise, the camel and the eye of the needle, "It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to get into the Kingdom of heaven." Isn't that a very obvious example of the condemnation of the rich? Is it? How does that passage end? "With man, it is impossible. With God all things are possible."

I know there have been exuberant homilists who have perpetuated urban legends that Jesus was speaking about an opening in the wall of Jerusalem. Have you heard this one? What you had to do is if you got in late at night, you'd have to unload all your goods from the camel and then get the camel in through that and then be able to bring your goods and maybe have to leave some of your goods outside. That's wonderful except there was no eye of the needle in that way. It was not that. That was built in the Middle Ages and it was in reference to that text. It wasn't because Jesus had known it and was articulating it. A lot of people get confused about that. What Jesus is saying is, "This is incredible. This is impossible." It's a great example of rabbinic hyperbole. He's taking a needle and how would you get a camel through the eye of a needle. Only by God's grace could that happen. I don't know of anyone else who can get into heaven except by that same means. That's the point.

There are qualifications. The church's, historical, and the biblical view is not based on the intrinsic evil of the material world. I think a lot of people who speak about spirituality-- I'm speaking now to a very great extent to my own tradition-- do so with this kind of underlying assumption that the thing itself is wrong. I know theologically, they can't defend that. And the best of them know that as well. But this kind of becomes part of the fabric, part of the backdrop. And there is an inordinate emphasis that we give up material goods so as to help the poor. Now, this is a basic economic mistake.

It's true that if I give up half of my income or 90% of my income that 90% of my income could be used to help the poor. But is that the way in which the poor can be benefitted? Marginally, yes. But in terms of six billion people on the planet? Many, the majority of whom would be considered poor, this does not help. You may have heard that Bill Gates has put out a challenge to other high-income people to pledge-- I think it's half of their income-- to the poor. Recently, the man who is considered the richest man in the world, Carlos Slim, who is a Mexican businessman was asked if he was going to adopt this pledge. He said, "No."

I said, "No?" And this is a religious man. "What do you mean no, you're not going to adopt this pledge?"

He said, "Let me show you the article I was reading," where he's in this radio interview. This is a transcript of it. He had what his stock is worth, and he said, "Look at this. If I sell all this stock, this is how much money I would be able to give away. Now, you multiply that for the world's poor, how would that help them? And who will buy it?"

"Then all that money will go into that and then how will they manage it?" Because if I let go of all of this, the genius of course in wealth production is not just that you have it but that you can manage it and that you can create it.

He said, "Then what ends up happening is all of the people who are employed and all of the families who depend upon the income that is generated by this business are left without. Then you end up having more poor people."

I think Carlos Slim outlined in a very unromantic but a very sensible - and I would suggest - very Christian way that the main obligation to the poor is met through jobs, through exchange, that the main way in which the poor rise from poverty is through enterprise, through having the ability to take a part of what they create and save it and conserve it and build it and then enable their children not only to have that wealth but that know-how, that that's the normal way.

What I'm saying to you is that the challenge in the Gospel about our detaching from an obsession with material things is not so much directed at the poor. Now, grant you that in the biblical world, which is a world formed by the economic realities of the pre-industrial age, that where wealth was more static, people took part of their wealth and gave it to people who didn't have it. But let's consider in that world who had money.

Who had money in that world? It was kings, aristocrats, courts, people who had armies, could conquer cities, and expropriate things. And then all of their hangers-on and all of the bureaucrats who could then tax and extort money out of people who were working. That was the dominant economic model. The economic productivity of the merchant class was considerably less as a percentage of those economies than what we have today. What's interesting in the biblical world is that while it speaks of the rich, it usually speaks of the rich and the haughty, usually thinking of them in terms of either tax collectors-- this is why it was such a scandal for Jesus to be so loving to tax collectors. Because these were people who were exploiting their neighbors, their own countrymen. And the rulers. But the use of the merchant, at least in Jesus' teaching, was an image, a metaphor for the Kingdom of God. Think about those who were entrusted with talents or the merchant who is seeking the pearl of great price. All of these merchant images that are used to demonstrate the productivity and the fruitfulness of the Kingdom of God. This is something to be considered.

Those with political connections were the ones who were condemned - those who were haughty and arrogant. Merchants are repeatedly mentioned as models of what to do - as analogs as I've said - to the reign of God. And the man who is entrusted with talents is the man who must be productive with his talents. So it is not the economic reality that is condemned in these passages, but arrogance or a complete disregard for those who are vulnerable.

Now, throughout Christian history, God's people have had an ambiguous relationship with the material world. On the one hand, there are all these warnings. On the other hand, there are repeated examples of the way in which God mediates his relationship to the world through the world and through the material world. The 10 Commandments were not just verbal. They were inscribed on stone.

Have you ever read the details of the building of the Temple, all of the attention to the details and the physical construct of the Temple - the wood that's to be used, the design of the cherubim, the gold that would be overlaid, the physical outline of the whole Temple precincts and the Holy and the Holy of Holies and the court of the Gentiles, the arc of the covenant.

Even Jesus' miracles had a physical dimension to them. When he encounters the blind man, he takes dirt and spits and makes a paste and puts it on his eyes. Our Lord didn't have to do that. He could have just said, "You are healed." But this physical contact, this material contact has some meaning. And I think what it reminds us of is what our end is, that our physical bodies are not irrelevant to who we are as spiritual beings, that we are not spirits inside of flesh but we are spirits and flesh. And in the end, what the church as always said is that we believe in the Resurrection of the body so that this material world that is alienated from God by sin is precisely what is to be redeemed. We could go through baptism, Holy Communion, the whole theology of the body as it's been called, the matter, the stuff of the Sacraments, the congeal union in marriage itself, the Holy sanctification of sex of the congeal act, of the physical act that makes marriage the spiritual reality that it is.

The Christian religion is an earthy religion. We cannot live as disembodied spiritual beings without a relationship to the material world. There is no fear of the material. There is an embrace of the world of the culture, of the incarnation through the incarnation of Christ. Our relationship to this material world is qualified. We are not materialists. It is limited. Even though Solomon is praised for his possessions, we see God's disdain when people who have abilities and resources and possessions are preoccupied with the sacrifice of them to God. How many times is it said, "No, it's not just sacrifices that I want. I own the cattle of 1,000 hills," God says. "It's not this physical thing. It is your heart that I want."

One way we test the heart is how we deal with physical things. This ambiguity is precisely the ambiguity of the human person who is this composite of the physical and the transcendent.

The preoccupation with just the material is what is an obstacle to our relationship to God. It's not that the material world is bad. I want to underscore that time and time again because that is what the enemies of the free and prosperous society say. It's not that the material world is bad. It is, after all, the most obvious thing we encounter. When we encounter a human being, we don't first encounter their soul. We first encounter their body. It takes a little bit more to understand where their soul is, where their spirit is. When we encounter the world, the first thing we encounter is the material. And it's precisely because the material is the most obvious that we can settle and think that it is the only thing.

That, I suggest to you, is what the tension is here. It's not a simplistic rejection of all things physical. The rich man and Lazarus I alluded to already, and I said that the rich man goes to Hades and Lazarus goes to the bosom of Abraham, what was the rich man's sin? I already alluded to St. Augustine who said it was pride. There's something else in that. There's nothing in that passage that says that the rich man did anything directly bad to the poor man. He didn't step on him. He didn't arrest him. He didn't beat him. He simply didn't see him. This is the challenge - to be able to see the vulnerability that is around us in the midst of our prosperity which is why I entitled this lecture Christian Poverty in an Age of Prosperity.

It's easy to speak about detachment from things and this kind of spiritual poverty that is spoken about in Luke in an age where everybody was poor, where almost everybody lived on the margins. The world is changing. The world is richer now than it's ever been in all of human history. There's virtually not a spot in this world, except maybe North Korea and Cuba, that is poorer now than it was 50 years ago. So that when we encounter people, more and more-- and I suggest this is what's going to happen unless there's some major catastrophe between now and the next century-- more and more people are going to be more and more prosperous.

One of the dangers of that prosperity is the danger of discarding human vulnerability or ignoring it or just being blind to it. We get so caught up in what is most obvious, in the glimmer and the maintenance and the entertainment and the leisure that becomes lethargy rather than leisure that really vivifies us. There is a kind of leisure that disintegrates us. Have you ever experienced that? Here are two examples. This is personal. I can sit for an hour and watch television. Not that there aren't good television shows on. I'm talking about those times where you're doing this [flipping channels] for an hour. I know that the women don't understand this. This is a man thing. I understand this. There have been studies done that it's the men who do this. We can get into that another time.

But you can do that and you sit there for an hour, and you get up and you're exhausted. You feel depleted. You could take the same couch, the same body and sit there for an hour with the Good Book and read it and get up and feel edified, feel more than what you were before. What's the difference? It's not physical. It's something that goes on inside of us. This is the difference between lethargy and leisure.

Josef Pieper has a whole book on this subject which is, again, something else. There's so much more than I'd love to cram into this - the whole meditation on the Sabbath and the rest that's required. The Sabbath is all part of this kind of spirituality, that the rest that's required of the Sabbath is not a command to be lazy. It's a command to sit back and reverence what you were able to create in the other six days. This is the whole notion so that this is part of the tension that I'm talking about. Nothing can ultimately be our highest possession if it is merely physical. That's the point.

Now, here's the bad news for all of us. We are all rich. Most of us say, "No. I'm not." Even very wealthy people. I've seen a room full of very wealthy people and everybody thinks that they're not rich because there's somebody else who has something more. They can have $50 million, but the other guy who has $100 million, that's rich.

If you go to the $100 million, he says, "No. I'm not Gates." It kind of gets passed on so that none of us think of ourselves-- anytime people quote that - even these left-wing activists who show up in their SUVs think of themselves as poor.

I heard something about this woman who was at this demonstration against all of these millionaires. She was on television decrying all of this and then I spoke to somebody. She said, "Well, it's very funny because the compound she lives in is the compound we live in." The starting price on a home is $20 million in this place. Who is she to be talking about them? It's this kind of game that people play in their own heads. If we're really believers, we have to be honest with ourselves.

So the bad news is that we are the rich. We are rich because we have access to so many resources. We have access to incredible healthcare. We have access to homes, to indoor plumbing. We have access to transport. We have access to communications. We have access to books. Anyone of us now carries with us these little devices in which we have more reading and music ability than any of the aristocrats of the 19th century could have had. I can carry my whole music library from our home on a plane with me if I remember to recharge the battery on the thing.

I was in church the other day, and there was a young man. In our church, it's called the Stations of the Cross. It's kind of the passion of Christ. If you saw the Passion of Christ, the movie, this is kind of what it is in most Catholic churches. He was there. Usually, you have a little prayer book and there's a little meditation and a little scripture on each of the things. But this guy was there with his iPhone. And he was saying his prayers with his iPhone. He had all of the prayers on his iPhone. I know a priest who prays - his prayer book is all on his phone. So I said, "When you're done, you do this [cross self with a phone in hand], right?"

Just consider how wealthy that is, that this little device I'm holding in my hand contains more computer power than what it took to put a man on the moon in 1969. We are astoundingly rich. And this is the challenge. So how do we negotiate our way through this and still accept the call of the Gospel to detach? Does it mean just completely, radically rejecting everything? I think we ought not to minimize the demand of the scriptures. I think we ought to embrace them.

I was, a while back, asked to give a retreat to a family of astoundingly wealthy people. And I began the retreat by reading the passage about the rich man and the eye of the needle. I think for a moment they looked at one another and wondered, "Did we get the right guy?"

When I was done reading, I said, "I want to tell you why I read this passage. The first is for the younger generation of this family." This is several generations. I said, "You're going to get hit with hostile questions and you need to understand what it is that the Gospel demands of you. You need to understand that internally." What I'm saying about them, I'm saying about each of us. Let's forget the zeros at the end of our bank accounts. We're all wealthy.

So the first thing is the younger generation has to understand this. And the second thing I said to them is, "I'm not letting you off the hook. In fact, I want to put you on a bigger hook, because that's what Christ does. He does not ask for us to give him 10% and we can do everything we want with the other 90%. He wants it all."

I heard this story of a man who came from Africa. It was in a church in the United States, and the collection plate was passed. When it was passed to him, he took the collection plate and put it down on the floor and stepped in it. He said, "I'm giving my all to Jesus." That's a beautiful metaphor. I've always thought of that image though if it was in my church, I would immediately have had the ushers take the man.

The point is that that is what Christ asks of us. I can't give you a checklist. I wish I could provide you a little checklist - this is how you'll know if you're detached. What I can say is that the bigger hook that we're all invited to be hung on can only come to our awareness by prayer, by our spending time before God. I mean by that not just studying. Study is important. I mean that not by just rote prayers that we would have. But I mean that by contemplation, that usually we can prime the pump a little bit with some scripture, with some image, maybe the life of a particularly holy person, then we meditate on that.

This is important, not just once, but on a regular ongoing basis - that as we pray and then we become accountable to God so that we're contemplating him for himself. Then we are presenting our accountability to him by the admission of our failures in what we discover from this prayer. Then our repentance of that. And our going forth to correct that in very concrete, sensible ways so that each day we ask God, "What have I done today that I have ought not to have done. And what have I left undone today that I ought to have done every day,” that take you 60 seconds to do that at the end of the day? “What have I done today that ought not to have done? And what have I left undone that I ought to have done." Then make a resolution to repair that in the next day or two or three. All of this forms a broader perspective. In other words, it enables us to see the poor man under our lavish tables.

When Christ says to his disciples, "Come and follow me. Sell all that you have," he means that. Does he mean that literally? If it was evil to own material goods, would he have said, sell your goods. He wouldn't have asked you to go into commerce. When he says, "Sell your goods," what does our Lord say basically? He's saying, "Get the best price you can for them."

It doesn't just give it away. You do give it away, but you sell it because there's a value in this and other people will buy it. So it's something deeper. What we need to do is resist the seduction to believing only in the importance of the things we see.

This is particularly true with regard to other human beings. There's so much more to be said. There's what else is to be talked about is the way in which the Prosperity Gospel movement. Is there a repudiation of really the values of the Gospel itself? It's kind of a Gnostic form. It says that "We will know that God has blessed us if we have lots of money." And it's among the most simplistic-- I have called it stages to do here in Grand Rapids. But I've called it the prosperity Gospel is Calvinism on steroids. It just kind of exaggerates. It takes the truth of the goodness of the material world of prosperity and exalts it to this high level of spirituality.

Then the inverse of that is liberation theology, which has really kind of been the backdrop of everything I've been criticizing and saying that the material world is not good, that the sign of God's blessing is not that you're poor. It's neither. What the Gospel calls us to do is to have a far more, deep knowledge of who God is and God's love for us and what he calls us to.

So I want to close with a quotation that I have-- there's so much more I've left out. I should have done this lecture in two parts. I just want to close with a quotation that I have cited before from C.S. Lewis. It talks about our neighbor. He says that our neighbor is the most sacred thing that presents itself to our senses next to the Blessed Sacrament itself. That's what C.S. Lewis says. We've never met a mere mortal. Everyone with whom we ever come in contact is either an immortal horror or an everlasting splendor. But we have never met a mere mortal.

So when I speak about Christian poverty, I'm saying that each of us is called to have a certain detachment. No matter how prosperous we are, a certain detachment, so that we handle things lightly, that we do not become obsessed or clutch. Yet we handle them with responsibility and with a sense of stewardship. Because we all live in the age of prosperity and we can't give up our vocation to be Christian, to be believers, to really be servants of Almighty God simply because of our prosperity.

I'll stop there and open it up for discussion. Thank you very much.