Outsourcing Our Duty to the Poor

[00:00:00] Foreign the podcast I wanted to give some thoughts about some recent discussions and debates about the poor, particularly our Catholic duty to help the poor obligations towards the poor. I'm seeing a lot of confusion out there and I just wanted to talk about this some more. This isn't going to be, this is not going to be an in depth study of exactly what the church teaches about our obligations to poor. But just some thoughts I've had kind of running around in my brain based upon what I've been seeing out there. [00:00:43] And this really is coming up right now because of the Trump administration's decision to eliminate a lot of federal aid, particularly aid to the poor, or at least what's called aid for the poor. Obviously, US Aid is a big factor in this. Also shutting down immigration, deporting immigrants who are often poor as part of this. And what you'll see is online at least you'll see progressive Catholics who make it very clear that they believe any type of shutting down of government aid to the poor violates the Catholic principles of helping the poor. I mean, often what will happen, somebody like a Father James Martin will link to a story about shutting down USAID or shutting down some government program for the poor, and he will just simply quote Jesus saying something about helping the poor or somewhere from the Bible, and he'll just leave it at that. The implication obviously being that if you support shutting down these programs, you're violating your Catholic duty towards the poor. [00:01:49] So there's lots of confusion out there about this. And I saw one tweet in particular that that just is pretty outlandish, frankly, in what it says. It's from Madoc Cairns. I'm not sure if I'm if that's a real name, if I'm pronouncing it incorrectly, and I apologize if I am. But anyway, this person said suspect U.S. catholics would collectively benefit from having it beaten into them. That the church teaches us that God loves the poor more. [00:02:20] God loves homeless people more than those with homes, loves poor migrants more than rich citizens, loves poor Africans over rich Europeans. So according to this madoc, God loves the poor more. So if you are poor by definition, according to this person, God loves you. And note that this tweet got over a ousand likes, over 100,000 views and over a thousand likes. So obviously a lot of people agree with him about that. [00:02:56] But to be honest, that's false. And frankly, it's heretical. It's heretical to say that God loves the poor just by the virtue of them being poor more than he loves the rich. Now, I'm not an egalitarian, and I don't think that. I'm not saying God doesn't love that. God loves each person equally. I don't think that's true either. Think it's clear God does have a special love for certain people. Like I do believe God loves the Blessed Virgin Mary more than he loves me. Now, he loves me fully. He loves me far more than I deserve. But I don't think it's heretical to say God loves certain people more than others. It's very modern to act like that's not possible. But I think it is. [00:03:45] But that doesn't mean he loves a certain class of people more than he loves another class of people by virtue of the fact of how much their material possessions are. [00:03:58] If that were true. Think about for a moment. That means if we helped lift somebody out of poverty, we're actually making it so God loves them less. [00:04:10] So if a person is born into poverty, for example, and they work hard and they overcome many obstacles and they get to a point where they are materially prosperous, maybe just their middle class, maybe they become rich, does that mean God started loving them less based on their success? [00:04:32] That's, of course, ludicrous. It's obviously false when you put it that way, because. But that's exactly what that person was saying when he says that God loves poor Africans more than love. He loves rich Europeans, that he loves a poor migrant more than a rich citizen, that he loves the poor more than the rich. That is simply not the case. [00:04:54] This is something you see among many progressive Catholics. I don't even know if that person. Yeah, I guess that person was Catholic since they talked about the Church. [00:05:01] But like this. They fetish. They fetishize. I'm probably mispronouncing that word, the poor, meaning they act as if the poor, by virtue of being poor, are automatically more holy than anybody else. They make it as if they are a special class of citizens deserving of more respect and treated as if they are more special and more holy than anybody else. [00:05:33] And it really is a unfortunate way of looking at the poor. Now, I want to make it clear that I do think God has a special place in his heart for the poor. I think this is clear from the sacred Scriptures, the teaching of the Church, that God does have a special place in his heart for the poor. But this isn't because, like, he has some exaltation of material poverty. It's because he always loves the underdog. I mean, to put it kind of crassly. [00:06:07] He has compassion on those who have been treated unjustly. He has compassion on those who have less benefits, less advantages in this world. There's no question about that. And he asks us, he demands of us that we too have that compassion. [00:06:26] If we see somebody who is in poverty, who is struggling to make ends meet, like we meet a single mom who's doing everything she can to take care of her kids, but she just can't even put food on the plate or lives in a terrible place, that should bring us to compassion. Absolutely it should. And God has compassion on that person. [00:06:53] Doesn't mean he loves them more because they are poor. It means he has greater compassion on those who deserve more compassion. This is just simply obviously common sense. So we definitely should have compassion upon the poor. [00:07:08] We should recognize a special place they have in God's heart. Saying they have a special place in their heart isn't the same thing as saying God unilaterally loves poor people more than he loves rich people. [00:07:20] Because again, that just is nonsensical and it's actually heretical. [00:07:25] Another thing I think that we're missing when we talk about God's love for the poor, but also when we talk about the poor in general, is there are two distinct types of poverty. The Church has always taught this. The Church has always made this clear that there's two distinct types of poverty. There's material poverty, there's spiritual poverty. Both are types of poverty, and both must be addressed when we talk about serving the poor. [00:08:01] In fact, we see in the two different examples of the Beatitudes in Matthew and Luke. In one case, it says, blessed are the poor. The other says, blessed are the poor in Spirit, making it clear that there is a poverty of Spirit that matters very much. In fact, the Church has also always taught that spiritual poverty is far, far worse than material poverty. And often spiritual poverty has no relationship to material poverty. [00:08:28] One can be spiritually rich and materially poor. One could be materially rich and spiritually poor. [00:08:35] This is just the reality. Both are very are types of poverty. And spiritual poverty is worse than material poverty. In fact, material poverty is no sin in and of itself. Now, if you were. If you had a good job, for example, and you wasted all your money on gambling or drugs or something like that, then your material poverty is a sin. Not the fact that you're materially poor, but what got you there, being irresponsible, not being prudent, that was a sin. [00:09:08] But material poverty is not a sin. Spiritual poverty typically is. Typically, at least, sins lead to spiritual poverty. [00:09:19] I would also say that material riches often leads to spiritual poverty. [00:09:27] Our Lord himself says, easier for a rich man to go through an eye and needle than to get into heaven. Riches, material riches definitely can hold us back from spiritual riches, from obtaining the kingdom of God. This is the real danger of the modern world, especially in America, where we're all materially rich. [00:09:49] I mean, I know there are some exceptions, but the fact is, often your typical poor person in America has riches, material riches, far beyond what a material poor person maybe 200 years ago had. They might have a big screen TV, a cable subscription, a cell phone, you know, all these things. A place to live, you know, might not be a nice place to live, but, you know, that person might still be classified as poor, but they actually have material riches compared to a lot of previous generations. But it is very true that material poverty can help lead us to God and material riches can help lead us away from God. Now, it's not a one to one relationship where if you're materially poor, you're spiritually rich, if you're spiritually poor, you're materially rich, or something like that. But there's no question the relationship is. There is a somewhat of a counter relationship between the two. There can be. [00:10:47] And why is that? Because material riches leads to attachments to this world. Attachments to this world lead to a detachment from God. You read any spiritual book, they'll tell you, in fact, I'm right now going through a divine intimacy, which is a great daily devotional. And they just talked about earlier this week about poverty, about the spirit of poverty. And they were talking about, you know, talking about the vow poverty, first of all. But how? And it was even saying, though people don't have vow poverty who have family obligations like that, they have to meet those family obligations, but they have to be careful because it's very easy to get attached to our material possessions. This is just a reality that we all have to face. We all have to struggle with. The more material goods you have, the more attached you become to them, and therefore the more detached you become to God. [00:11:42] And so we really have to fight that in modern America with our riches, we have to fight that. We have to work to be detached, Possible you can be rich, materially rich, and be detached. It's hard. It's harder than if you're materially poor, but it is possible. [00:11:57] And so material riches in and of themselves are not sins. How you use them, how you are attached to them, those things can be sins. But just the fact of having material riches is not. And material poverty can help us, like I said, to spiritual richness, because it will force us to be more dependent upon God. Anybody who's worked with the poor, they can see often they have a whole different attitude towards God than the rich have because they're completely dependent upon him for their daily bread, for everything. [00:12:30] When you get rich, as you become dependent upon yourself, you feel like, okay, I've got it made, I'm okay. I don't have to worry about, like where my next meal is coming from or anything like that. [00:12:42] I don't have to be as dependent, directly dependent upon God. At least I feel that way. So the truth is we all, all should have a spirit of poverty. [00:12:54] Have a spirit of poverty. This is a requirement for all Catholics to have a spirit of poverty. No excessive attachment to earthly things. [00:13:04] It's okay to save for the future. Don't get me wrong, as a father and a husband, I'm obligated to be prudent with the stewardship of the riches that God gives me so that I can support my family now and in the future. Now that can be abused, that can get overindulged. But the fact is I have that obligation. If I didn't do that, I would be going against my state of life that God has given me. I'd be going against what God wants me to do. [00:13:35] And when it comes to our goods, there is the ordo Amoris, as J.D. vance talked about. We have a greater obligation to those close to us. So I do have an obligation to save money in order to take care of my family. [00:13:52] And that comes above often my obligations to strangers, to those very far away from me. [00:14:00] So there's often talk in the Church about preferential option for the poor. You see this in the catechism. You see this in the social commentary, social doctrine of the Church. [00:14:11] And there's lots of scriptural passages talking about we need to care for the poor. But what do we mean when we talk about preferential option for the poor? I personally think that this is something that is ill defined often and too often abused. Too often abuse this idea because again, it treats the poor as if they are some class of citizen. That's better, that is greater. I mean, let's read Leviticus 19:15. It says, Talking about justice and injustice in the land. It says, you shall do no injustice in judgment. [00:14:48] You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor. It says, you shall not be partial to the Poor, meaning that the poor don't have some automatic get out of jail free card. [00:15:09] If, for example, a judge is determining if a poor person committed a crime or something, he doesn't say, well, they're poor, so I'm going to let them off. No, you have to have an impartial righteousness in judgment of the poor and the great. The poor should be judged equally with the rich. What our preference for the poor really means is it's due to the fact that the poor have less advantages than the rich and therefore we need to help lift them up and overcome those advantages. We wouldn't have a preference for the rich because they already have the advantages of this life. Therefore we need to have a preference for the poor in helping them because they do not have these advantages. It's kind of silly, the idea of somebody who is born into a rich family, he is well educated, shown all the ways in which you succeed in this world, that somehow we should give him a preference over somebody who is born in poverty, does not understand how we maybe how to interview for a job or educated for a lot of different lines of work, a lot of different careers. Obviously we want to help the poor person more than give a preference to him more than the rich person. That's ultimately what it means when we say talking about a preferential option for the poor. We are obligated to help the poor. This is non negotiable, again, in keeping with our state of life and with good stewardship. [00:16:36] This is just again, we use our reason. We use our reason when we talk about these things. And it tells me, I don't, for example, allow my own children to go hungry if in order to help a stranger now I very much should help potentially even a stranger in ways that might hurt me. I'm not talking about like the fact that if you have like, you know, you know, lots of money saved up that you shouldn't dig deep to help the poor. What I'm saying though is if it means that your own obligations in life are harmed, we don't have an obligation then to help somebody else. [00:17:17] So how do we best help them? Again, what are our specific practical obligations? The first thing we should bring up again is the government programs. Do government programs help the poor? I think this is the key point that conservatives often make that just simply goes over the heads or is ignored by progressives, is I would argue that government programs by their very nature in this country I'm talking about by their very nature, are detached from spiritual help. They have to be by Law, basically. [00:17:53] And therefore they do not help the poor fully. Because this is something I talked about in a previous podcast, and that is when we help somebody, we have to help the whole person. [00:18:09] Trying to detach spiritual help from material help or material help from spiritual help ultimately harms the person we're trying to help. [00:18:18] If I go up to a homeless man and I start telling him he needs Jesus and things like that, but I refuse to help him materially to give him something to eat, I'm not really helping him. In fact, I'm harming my witness to the Gospel. [00:18:35] Likewise, if I give that man something to eat and I refuse to talk to him about Jesus, I refuse to help him spiritually, find out where he is spiritually, something like that. That also is not helping him, is hurting him in many ways. [00:18:53] So these government programs that are by definition legally detached from spiritual help, they are not something that as Catholics, we really should support because they're not helping the whole person. They don't have a holistic way of helping the poor. They often also lead to dependencies that a person becomes dependent upon government aid and then does not work to actually help themselves. I'm going to talk about that in a minute. [00:19:25] And the other problem with government programs is they often outsource our feelings of needing to help the poor ourselves, where it's like, well, they're taken care of by this program, by that program. I don't need to do anything. [00:19:43] I'd be willing to bet that our donations to the poor to help the poor have gone down. The greater government has gotten involved because we basically feel like, well, it's our taxes. So I'm helping the poor from that way. But again, like I'm saying, it's not helping the poor ultimately, and it's not the same as charity. That's not charity. If you're simply forced to give money to help the poor, it's not justice either to put a gun to one person's head, say, give me your money, and I'm going to give it to this other person. That's not justice. That's essentially what taxes are doing. [00:20:18] And so if we. And the other thing I would say when it comes to government help for the poor is we're really avoiding one of the big elephants in the room, which is that many actions of the government are harming the poor in wages large and small. And I'm speaking particularly now about government involvement in our money inflation. This harms the poor more than anybody. The rich don't mind inflation because they can Handle it. In fact, they usually get the money first, the new money first, so they can spend it before the prices go up. The cotillion effect. [00:21:01] The poor are the most harmed by government inflationary policies. And so the money printing we do harms the poor more than anybody else, doesn't help them. Why don't we speak against that? Why doesn't the church. Why don't church leaders talk against things like money printing, about inflation via fiat currency? You never hear them talk against that, but that's what's harming the poor. [00:21:28] Likewise with just the government interventions into the economy, which in almost every case harm the very people they're claiming to help. I mean, a great example I might have brought up in the podcast before is like, for example, over regulation by the government. For example, how we regulate, like, hairdressers. Like, you can't have a hair salon without getting tons of licensing requirements. So if you're a poor woman who can very good at helping, you know, maybe styling hair and doing those type, that type of work, and you want to just do it out of your house to make some money to help yourself, to help your family, you can't do it because it's illegal, because you didn't get the proper licensing. You have to spend a lot of money to get that licensing in order to cut somebody's hair, for money at least. [00:22:19] And of course, the poor don't have that money to get that licensing. So here's another example of where the poor harm through government intervention. [00:22:27] So don't tell me, progressive Catholics, that I have to support all these government programs, aid the poor, all these government interventions that are supposed to help the poor, because I know they harm the poor. I know they don't help the poor. They harm the poor. It's you progressive Catholics who need to stop supporting them if you really care for the poor. I question if you really do care for the poor by your support of these programs. [00:22:52] But what about, like, practical advice for us as Catholics, outside of, like, government programs, things like that? What am I supposed to do? I actually think this is a challenge today because so many programs are for the poor, are detached, or are connected to the government in some way. And so you're basically not necessarily helping people by helping them out, by donating to them, by volunteering with them. [00:23:15] I also think that certain. I think we need to really look carefully at programs. I two different programs I have volunteered for in the past here, here in Cincinnati. One is a local soup kitchen, and one is a program called CityLink. And what CityLink does is it trains people, lower income people to be able to get jobs and helps them to get lasting and real meaningful employment. So, for example, they will do interview training, mock interviews, that's what I helped with. They will help them have clothes for interviews and for nice jobs. They will do actual training in certain jobs, like in cooking or other jobs where they can get jobs at restaurants and things like that, you know, nice jobs. So it's a program for that. [00:24:05] Now, the more I've thought about it over time, I'm so much more supportive of an organization like CityLink because it's really helping lift people out of poverty. It's not just simply giving them a handout, it's giving them the hand up, as they say. It's really saying, okay, we're going to help you help yourself. We're going to really help you lift yourself out of poverty, give you a permanent solution. [00:24:27] The soup kitchen, which like I said, I volunteer for. I'm not, and I'm not against the soup kitchen, but at the same time I will say there's something to it that troubles me, that with the soup kitchen, basically it's every day people know they can just go for a free meal. And so there's no incentive to actually try to lift themselves out of poverty so that they can pay for their own meals because they know they have this free meal. And there's been studies that shown this stuff does really, that really does have that impact. [00:24:59] And if, for example, I wanted to have a restaurant in which I made things relatively low, very inexpensive, as inexpensive as possible, I can't to help poor have a good meal, I can't really do that because I will be priced out, so to speak, by the soup kitchen which does it for free. [00:25:17] I think these are things as good Catholic stewards we need to look at. And I personally think we should be more apt to help. Programs are really helping people lift themselves out of poverty, giving them skills so that they can advance and support themselves and support their families. I think this is essential. I think this is the real place we should be looking for. So wherever it does that in your community, like the CityLink, the thing I'm talking about, it's not Catholic run, it's actually a kind of mega church, Protestant church that founded it and helps run it. But it does good work. It really does good work. And they don't forget the spiritual. They do Bible studies and like that. I know there's some problems, the Bible studies being done by Protestants, stuff like that, but they at least Acknowledge the spiritual life necessary for the people they help. And as a Catholic, I can help them as well. They're not going to stop me from helping them in a Catholic way. [00:26:13] And this also comes to us like, like what do we do when we're downtown and urban area or something and we're asked, you know, somebody comes up to us for money. This is always a big thing. And I've always said, I'm not saying it's wrong to give somebody money in that situation. It, I'm not, I don't think, I don't think that. However, I also don't think it's wrong to not give money in that situation, even if you have money, because ultimately you have to judge for yourself and you don't have very much information in this case to judge whether or not this person is going to use the money in a way that helps them or that hurts them again spiritually just as much as materially. If they're going to use the money to go buy alcohol, for example, or drugs, does that really help them materially or spiritually? No, it does not. If you have a good reason to believe that, then you're not obligated to give money. That person. I think we really in our, in our donate, I think we should try to do everything we can to actually ourselves help the poor. In some ways, volunteers, like, it's hard actually. I found, like I've always wanted my kids to be involved and volunteer at different places that help the poor, but they almost never allow kids to volunteer. This is a real frustration. Mine like, no, you have to be at least 18. I'm like, well, I mean, I can't, you know, I want my 12 year old to be working at the soup kitchen or whatever the case may be. I want my 12 year old to be helping the poor directly. No, you can't do it until you're 18. A lot of places do that. I'm sure it's for legal reasons and insurance reasons, things like that, but it really does make it difficult to help the poor in with a organization to volunteer for the poor. And often I found I call up these organizations to help the poor to volunteer and they don't need any volunteers. They've already, they're already all booked up. They got plenty of people. But that should remind us that there's other ways we help the poor beyond just for example, a soup kitchen or a food pantry or something like that for life work. Being in front of an abortion clinic, which by the way, abortion clinics are almost always in Poor areas, always in non white neighborhoods. And there's a reason for that. Learn, you know, learn the history of Planned Parenthood and Margaret Sanger. You'll know why. [00:28:20] But the women who are going there are clearly spiritually poor. If they're going to have an abortion, they're often materially poor as well. And so if you're a sidewalk counselor in front of an abortion clinic, you are directly helping the poor. You are doing your duty as a Catholic to help the poor. So if you're praying in front of an abortion clinic, you're doing that as well. So we have to realize poverty is not restricted to just simply somebody who doesn't have enough money for a meal. It's much broader than that. We have an obligation to help all the poor. And so what we need to determine as Catholics is where in your state of life was the best way you can help the poor. [00:28:57] There are corporal and spiritual works of mercy. [00:29:00] They are not to be separated in the sense of like you do corporal or you only do spiritual. They're always a whole. [00:29:08] And what we need to do is, as Catholics, look at, in my state of life, am I a stay at home mom? Am I working at a job that puts me at the office 60 hours a week, Do I have small kids? Am I a student? Whatever the case may be, we look at our state of life and we say, how can I best live out and practice the corporal and spiritual works of mercy? It might be that maybe once a week, once a month, you pray at the abortion clinic or you sidewalk counselor there. It might be volunteer at the soup kitchen. It might be that you volunteer at a place that helps people, you know, learn how to interview for jobs or whatever the case may be. There's lots of different ways we have this broader view of poverty, a more holistic Catholic view of poverty. We don't, you know, idealize the poor, but instead we look at, okay, how are people poor in our society today? It might be in the richest neighborhood in your city that you have the most spiritually poor people. How can you help them? If you teach catechism at your parish, that can be helping the spiritually poor. Often there's so many different ways in which we can help the poor. And I will say the helping the poor is a matter of justice and it's a matter of charity. It's a matter of justice in that just we're obligated to do it. But it's also a matter of charity that we go beyond just the minimum. The minimum what is required of us out of justice, but we go beyond that. So I think we all need to have a real examination of conscience and how we help the poor. I think we need to get out of the kind of modern categories that we're talking about where, oh, you have to support this government program to help the poor, or you have to do exactly this to help the poor. No, let's look holistically at the materially and spiritually poor and ask ourselves, how can I as a spiritually, as a materially rich? Because if you're American, you probably are materially rich and a spiritually rich. I hope you are at least striving to be spiritually rich if you have the sacraments, if you're, if you're praying, if you're going to confession, things like that. I hope you should be. How can we then help those who are materially and spiritually poor? So don't, don't, don't listen to the crazy progressive Catholics who are saying idiocy about the poor, that God loves the poor because they're poor more than the rich, or that we have to support program X if you really love the poor. Otherwise you're not a good Catholic. Don't listen to that. That's just, that's just nonsense. Instead, ask yourself, in my state of life, what do I need to do to help the materially and spiritually poor? Okay, I'm going to wrap it up there. Hopefully this was helpful for some people to understand their duties and obligations towards the poor. Until next time, everybody. God love.