From the Narthex

Ed. Note: This May, the Narthex logged its 1,000th blog entry. We extend our hearty thanks to all the NOR bloggers past and present who have helped us reach this milestone. Here’s to the next 1,000 posts!

That “Poor Church for the Poor”

By John M. Grondelski

Two Catholic pundits from opposite ends of the political spectrum have managed to reach the same conclusion: The Catholic Church’s being a “poor Church” really stinks for the really poor.

Writing in the left-leaning French newspaper La Croix (March 27), Massimo Faggioli of Villanova University bemoans the many harms he imagines Trump 2.0 poses for the Church. Faggioli’s list includes cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Perhaps the world can survive without Sesame Street Baghdad or Gaelic transgender opera, but the shuttering of USAID will have other financial ripple effects. Faggioli opines that the USAID cutbacks “could have indirect consequences on the Vatican’s already strained financial situation.” Well, Pope Francis extolled a “poor Church for the poor” throughout his pontificate, a trope repeated by the Jesuit network throughout the Vatican. Gentlemen, I ask: Where, then, are your resources? Because the U.S. taxpayer is not your default financial cosigner.

The other side of these callow paeans to Sister Poverty is expressed by Gaetano Masciullo at the Italian website La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana (March 26). Masciullo’s claims merit much more attention. He argues that the “progressive Left” urges the Church to be poor so she can concentrate and control the disbursement of assets through the nanny state (and its international “development” schemes). He argues that this mentality is contrary to how the Church has operated throughout her history, when she had a healthy recognition of the need for her own resources and their responsible acquisition and multiplication. She couldn’t, for example, have built the great cathedrals everybody still visits (in contrast to the tacky Our Lady of Pizza Huts, which they don’t) without money. But Masciullo is not about building pretty churches. He insists that the Church must have her own ample resources so as to be her own counterweight to secular funders and to construct “an alternate economic ecosystem” within which genuinely Catholic institutions cannot just survive but thrive. He writes:

Looking to the future, Catholics must think big and must not be afraid to do so. Funding individual projects is good but more can be done: a long-term strategy is needed to create an alternative economic ecosystem capable of supporting schools, universities, newspapers, television [channels], publishing houses and digital platforms. A new class of Catholic entrepreneurs is needed who are willing to use their influence to defend the perennial values ​​of true Western civilization, the one built with the beams of Greek anthropology, Roman law and the Catholic faith. (emphasis added)