Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Does Loving The Poor Mean Keeping Them Poor?
Does Loving The Poor Mean Keeping Them Poor?
Mar 18, 2025 1:21 PM

Fr. James V. Schall, S.J., in an essay for The Catholic World Report, offers some points worth pondering regarding Christianity and poverty. Entitled “Do Christians Love Poverty,” Schall insists that we must make the distinction between loving the poor – actual people – and loving “poverty” in some abstract way. For that to happen, we have to be holistic, realistic and concrete in our intentions and actions.

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.

Schall says that our “love” for the poor isn’t love if it does harm. If we insist on “loving the poor” but create conditions that increase poverty or make it difficult for a poor person to use his or her own abilities to make money, we aren’t loving anyone.

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.

Acknowledging that there are some people who will always need the care of others (the biblical admonition that the poor will always be with us), Schall clarifies that many of the poor in today’s world are poor only because they lack resources, rule of law, political structures, knowledge and/or experience in order to lift themselves from poverty. Our being able to help provide these things, working along side the poor, is the best example of loving them.

Finally, Schall calls for a shift in Christian social thought:

[S]ocial thought should shift the direction of its rhetoric in dealing with any issue concerning the poor. It should not primarily stress the Christian’s associating himself with the poor or looking like he is poor, as if the poor man wants everyone to be destitute and is delighted to see well-off folks joining them. The religious emphasis needs to be more oriented to teaching how not to be poor. It ought to realize that the first step in this change of emphasis is to rid itself of the idea that redistribution of existing goods is nothing but a revolutionary method that would really make everyone poor. Again, the purpose of Christianity is not to make everyone poor. It must learn to understand profit, markets, and innovation as the primary way to enable the poor, by their own efforts, to e not poor. The poor are not really helped by well-meaning souls who identify with them but who have only confused or detrimental ideas about wealth production. One final thought seems worth making. The only real resource in the world is the human brain. It is not oil, or material goods, or location. It is true that human intelligence is itself designed to know and deal with what exists in the world.

Read “Do Christians Love Poverty?” at The Catholic World Report.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Why Christians in Business Should Read Poetry
Writing for the Harvard Business Review, my friend (and coauthor) John Coleman argues that business professionals can benefit from reading poetry. While his article is not directed at people of faith, I think his claims are particularly relevant to Christians in the business world: Poetry can also help users develop a more acute sense of empathy. In the poem “Celestial Music,” for example, Louise Glück explores her feelings on heaven and mortality by seeing the issue through the eyes of...
How Should Christians View Property?
Étienne Cabet, a French philosopher and founder of a utopian socialist movement, once said: “Communism is Christianity.” The concept of property has existed longer than Western Civilization; trying to understand what property is and who can claim it has been an important issue for centuries. But, what is the Christian view of private property and ownership? Cabet, and others who believe that Christianity supports the concept munism or socialism, base their opinion on one particular passage of Scripture. In Acts:...
When I Grow Up
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” That’s mon question asked of children the world over. ChildFund International has put out their global survey of children for 2012, and that’s one of the questions they asked, with some intriguing results. When asked, “If you could grow up to be anything you wanted, what would you be?” there were some rather remarkable disparities between the answers of children in the developed and the developing world. Kids in the...
Economics is Too Important to be Left to Economists
I rather like Serene Jones’ piece in Huffington Post, “Economists and Innkeepers.” Jones got some things right. She knows that Christian Scripture teaches many economic lessons, like subsidiarity and stewardship (although she doesn’t use those terms.) She says, “Economic theory is replete with theological and moral assumptions about human nature and society” and that is correct. As Istituto Acton’s Kishore Jayabalan reminds us, Things like the rule of law, a tradition of equality for the law, which should cut down...
Should We Tax Volunteer Work for Charities?
During the debate about how to resolve the fiscal cliff crisis, lawmakers on both sides have considered reducing the charitable tax deduction. That strikes many people as the wrong approach (especially those of us who work for non-profits!) even though we may not be able to explain why it’s such a bad idea. Fortunately, John Carney has provided a superb explanation for why reducing or removing this deduction is counterproductive. For instance, changing the charitable deduction as Carney notes, has...
Conservation and Entrepreneurial Environmentalism
I found this profile of Mark Tercek, the former Goldman Sachs managing director who was tapped to head the Nature Conservancy, raises some profound issues concerning the relationship between economics and the environment: Tercek, 55, e to the Conservancy to fight financial brush fires. With the help of his board and the input of the Conservancy’s 600 scientists, he wants to remake the face of the American and global environmental movements. He has no quarrel with the current model—largely built...
Something Vastly More Powerful Than Evil
In his latest Forbes column, Rev. Robert A. Sirico explains why despite the tragedy in Newton we can speak of joy during this Christmas season: When we ask our bewilderedwhy? –we are not looking for data points.Even less should we offer glib responses in the face of this shattering loss – this modern-day slaughter of the innocents. We are, instead, seeking themeaningin the face of thismysterium iniquitatis.The meaning we seek is not so much the significance of evil as the...
Free Kindle Ebook: ‘A Field Guide to the Hero’s Journey’
Acton is offering a free Christmas gift: a free Kindle download of the new book, A Field Guide to the Hero’s Journey. The book, co-authored by Jeff Sandefer and Rev. Robert Sirico, has been called a “the modern ‘how-to’ for entrepreneurs working on plishing big things” by Andreas Widmer, and is a terrific book not only for adults but for young people. You can also listen to the authors discussing their collaboration on this book on this Radio Free Acton...
Social Engineering Makes For Poor Economic Policy
Writing over at The Atlantic, American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers shares the unsettling story of what a growing number of Swedish activist groups and political factions are attempting to do to “traditional” gender roles. Is it discriminatory and degrading for toy catalogs to show girls playing with tea sets and boys with Nerf guns? A Swedish regulatory group says yes. The Reklamombudsmannen (RO) has reprimanded Top-Toy, a licensee of Toys”R”Us and one of the largest panies in Northern...
Court: Justice Dept. Can’t Just Say ‘Trust Us, Changes Are Coming’
“There is no, ‘Trust us, changes ing’ clause in the Constitution,” wrote Judge Brian Cogan in his ruling issued two weeks ago against a Justice Department motion to dismiss the Archdiocese of New York’s lawsuit against the HHS mandate. “To the contrary, the Bill of Rights itself, and the First Amendment in particular, reflect a degree of skepticism towards governmental self-restraint and self-correction.” More federal judges ing to the same conclusion. Earlier this week a federal appeals court in Washington,...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved