It is that time of the year again, when we ponder the gospel story about Jesus' encounter with the rich man and the Lord's warnings about material possessions being an obstacle to the kingdom of heaven. We know the story, as told in Mark 10:17-31: Jesus challenges the rich man to give what he has to the poor and to come follow Him.
But the rich man balks at surrendering his worldly security and turns from Jesus and "goes away sad." Then comes the cymbal clash we have heard since we were children, the warning that it is easier for a "camel to pass through the eye of a needle" than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
Let's not get into the discussion about whether Jesus was talking about a narrow gate in Jerusalem known at the time as "the eye of the needle," one that camels were able to pass through only by squirming around a bit, rather than a literal sewing needle. Whatever Jesus' metaphor, His point is clear: preoccupation with the accumulation and enjoyment of material things can cause us to lose our souls. Over the years I have noticed that this is one teaching that unites liberal and conservative homilists. Whether you are at a Mass for members of the Catholic Worker movement or for devotees of the Latin Mass, you will hear the same message: stop chasing money and worldly possessions; blessed are the poor; give until it hurts; lay up your treasure in heaven.
I am on board. Jesus' call to care for the least of our brethren is too clear, and repeated too often, for us to ignore. Doing that would make one a right-wing cafeteria Catholic. We must give generously to the poor. We need the sermons about the eye of the needle and Dives and Lazarus to keep us on track in our spiritual development. What good does it do a man to gain the world and lose his immortal soul?
Am I protesting too much? I guess. I admit something is bugging me. I won't get into the fact that every time I see someone being received into an order of papal knights or honored at a testimonial dinner by a local bishop, he is a multi-millionaire who has donated a relatively small portion of his fortune to a Church-run charity. Those people have been generous with their great wealth. There is no reason to assume that their donation was motivated by a yearning for public honors, any more than that the donor to a university would not have written the check if the new student center was not going to be named after him. But the fact remains that if these honorees had not spent much of their lives pursuing wealth, they would not have been able to make the generous donations that earn them accolades from the Church.
I am aware that those who give sermons urging us to give generously to the poor and the downtrodden cover this issue by pointing out that a poor person giving $5 may be making a greater sacrifice than a billionaire donating $50 million. All I am asking is that clerical homilists practice a little of what they preach about being "judgmental" when they scold us about being "too concerned" about money. There may be parishes on the East Side of Manhattan or in Malibu where the average parishioner has so much money to spare that he does not have to spend a lot of time pondering how he will take care of the family responsibilities that the Church expects mothers and fathers to fulfill. But they are not the norm.
Far from it. Consider the folks in the pew at a typical modern parish. Most of them will have housing costs that cannot be met without working long hours and carefully budgeting their funds. It does not matter if they are not concerned about keeping up with the proverbial Joneses. Even if they were willing to live in an apartment where a Catholic Worker or Jesuit Elder Corps volunteer resides in one of our major cities, they would find it hard to pay the rent on a blue-collar worker's salary, to say nothing of coming up with the down payment and mortgage payments for a small raised ranch in a less-than-fashionable suburb. Married couples have to spend a great deal of time juggling funds – thinking about money – to do the right thing for their families. The lilies of the field lesson goes only so far.
On top of that, these couples will have to come up with the tuition payments at their parish elementary school, diocesan high school and Catholic college, schools likely to be administered by members of the clergy fond of warning about the dangers of material possessions. The tuition at most Catholic high schools these days is well over $5,000 per year. The cost of sending a son or daughter to Boston College or Notre Dame is over $30,000 per year. That takes a lot of material possessions. Parents of three or four children cannot contemplate sending them to these schools without working long hours and spending what may seem an exorbitant amount of time poring over stock tables or conferring with financial advisors. Are we supposed to forget about money and send our kids to public schools? I haven't heard that homily.
It would be easier to take sermons about giving what we have to the poor and laying up treasure in heaven if Catholic educators had come up with an educational system within the reach of working-class couples with few assets. Such a system does not exist. I am not faulting the Church for that. Maybe it is impossible to set up a system like that.
The same is true of a working couple's retirement needs. Do the homilists who warn us about being concerned with material things have a list of low-cost Catholic nursing homes available for us if we take their advice and reach old age without having acquired considerable assets? Does following the Church's teachings about giving generously to the poor require that we place ourselves in a situation where our children must go through great hardships to care for us when we reach old age? Is the elderly Catholic who reaches old age without any assets and is forced to rely on Medicaid more virtuous than one who has saved and invested to pay for his own care? How so?
What would be the equation for that? That it is better to have the taxpayers and bureaucrats spend the time required to come up with the funds needed to provide for us in our old age than to make the financial plans during our working years to take care of ourselves? Why is that a more moral choice? It is hard for me to see why it is less virtuous to accept these financial responsibilities than to avoid them.
Those who preach about the dangers of materialism will counter that I am overstating their position. They will stress that their objective is only to warn us about becoming excessively concerned about wealth and worldly success and that they are not saying there is anything immoral about being frugal and prudent with our finances. OK.
But I can't help but wonder why, in this day and age, where homilists seldom scold the congregation about divorce, contraception, abortion, and pre- and extra-marital sex, we still get fire and brimstone about the dangers of earning money and investing it wisely. I can't help but wonder how much those sermons are shaped by the secular liberal spirit of our age more than by the teachings of the Church — especially by the socialistic presumptions about work and wealth that imbue that spirit.
