Blessed are the poor

At the end of 2013 the billionaire businessman and philanthropist Ken Langone told New York’s Archbishop Timothy Dolan that “Pope Francis may be hurting fundraising projects for the Roman Catholic Church with his controversial criticism of capitalism.” Langone is the founder of Home Depot, a man who worked his way up from humble beginnings, and is leading an initiative to raise $180 million to give New York City’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral a necessary facelift. He allegedly told the cardinal that one specific seven-figure donor was already considering withdrawing his offer after the Pope’s critical comments about capitalism.

This is pretty ironic stuff in that Home Depot had been a long-time moral and financial supporter of gay marriage and radical pro-gay organizations, leading to the American Family Association operating a boycott of the company. In September the AFA announced that Home Depot had halted its gay marriage advocacy and the boycott was lifted, but it’s not entirely sure if this is so or if it is, why it took so very long.

Be that as it may, Langone is a good man and his concerns are entirely understandable. But I also have to think that he’s been badly advised or even misled. As is too often the case the Pope’s words were somewhat lost in translation and, with all due respect, should perhaps have been more tangibly constructed. Yet he was, thank God, speaking and writing of economic injustice, arguing that capitalism is not some holy means of lifting the poor out of their suffering and that when such an economic system polarizes society and widens the financial gap to an obscene degree it has to be questioned.

But it’s vital that we understand that the alternative to unbridled capitalism is not socialism but Catholicism. The Catholic writers who have inspired me most are G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, and in their embrace of the economic and social theory of distributism they saw that a third way, a quintessentially Catholic way, is what would and should distinguish us from capitalism and socialism. Please, please read Chesterton. “Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists,” or, “No society can survive the socialist fallacy that there is an absolutely unlimited number of inspired officials and an absolutely unlimited amount of money to pay them.”

If we put either conservatism or liberalism or socialism above our Catholicism we are serving a master other than God. We are truly revolutionary, arguably the only genuine revolutionaries left. The struggle to defend marriage, the poor, morality, the marginalized, family, the rejected, is entirely consistent and contains no contradictions. As Mother Teresa said, there is none so poor as an unborn baby. The child in the womb is literally and metaphorically naked and yet so many of those who claim to fight poverty turn their heads away from or actively participate in the mass slaughter of the most impoverished.

Similarly poor are children denied by design a mother or a father, as society promotes same-sex adoptions and the use of weird science to create babies for couples who deny the reality that marriage is a child-centred institution. Those who do not know God are poor, those who drown in decadence are poor, as are the abandoned refugee, the homeless schizophrenic, the hungry child, the African villager without clean water. All are poor.

Who are we to distinguish between these beloved of God? Not Pope Francis, and all he is doing, surely, is to remind us that while the unborn and the victims of contemporary social fashion must be championed, so must all who bleed and weep. Those who claim that the phrase “the Church of the poor” somehow changes historic Catholic teaching either do not understand the history of our Church or are deliberately trying to exploit the Holy Father. There are, tragically, ample examples of both.

Please Mr. Langone, think again. Not because of the money you might donate but because of the peace of your heart and soul. It’s tough to be poor, but it’s not always easy to be rich either. And by the way, I’ve always enjoyed my visits to Home Depot, but not as much as my visits to St Patrick’s in New York.

(Coren’s latest book is The Future of Catholicism. His web site is www.michaelcoren.com.)