Timothy Reichert’s “Christian Ownership Maximalism” is an original article (linked below) in the December 2025 issue of First Things. It deserves wide readership, thorough debate, and I’d argue adoption in Catholic circles. Christendom as we have known it — whether the religiously suffused culture of medieval Europe or the ethnic ghettos of early twentieth-century America, where incense and kielbasa wafted in a neighborhood’s Sunday air — are gone. Some, including the head of the Italian bishops’ conference, think this is a good thing (see here). I do not.

Some, like Rod Dreher, propose reconstruction of those ghettoes on more explicitly Catholic terms. His “Benedict option” suggests Catholics retreat to “intentional communities” where a faithful remnant might hope to live faithfully without being noticed.

Reichert knows Christendom is gone. He knows, as Fr. Robert McTeigue SJ, has pointed out (here), that what replaces it is not a simple substitution of old forms. Reichert’s question is: What do we put in its place?

Aaron Renn speaks of a contemporary “negative world,” the modern society that penalizes the faithful for being too Christian and/or too explicit about it. His Life in the Negative World (here) grapples with those problems. The book has something of a Protestant following; it deserves Catholic attention.

Reichert, however, seems to sketch out the most sensible solution I’ve heard to date: Christians need to own things. We need to become an ownership class.

Our modern world revolves around economic considerations. Economic power usually means influence. But not all economic power is created equal: ownership is in many ways the apex of economic power. People who own things decide. 

If Christians are to shape this world for the good, they have to make decisions. I know that a certain circle of Catholics will either laugh or be scandalized by this statement, but here goes: We have to call the shots.

This is not warmed over Max Weber, the Protestant Work Ethic for culture warriors. It’s not about proving by our blessings and bounty that we are among the elect. It’s about using our Christianity in the world to make that world better, which, in the process, also protects us. It’s what Vatican II said the vocation of lay people is: to be the leaven that causes society to rise, to be the lamp that illumines its way forward, doing those things in the structures of modernity to shape (and not just be shaped by) the signs of the times.   (I’d also suggest Catholic maximalist ownership would also be the best catalyst for “declericalization” and synodality, because lay Catholics owning and advancing Catholic projects are unlikely to yield to the idea of handing over either title or decision-making to the bishop as a corporation sole to await his guidance).  Such ownership is an intentional engagement with modernity, not an ”inverted pneumatology” (see here) whereby we try to “discern” some “Spirit” teaching retrograde Christians out of that modernity, but one where Christians — using modernity itself — reshape it to Christian, indeed, Catholic ends.

I cannot do justice to the points Reichert’s essay makes. You have to read it for yourself. And I do not pretend Reichert’s essay is exhaustive. It’s the first word of the conversation that is going to require a lot of talking, but it is a new point of departure for a dialogue we desperately need.

That said, let me indicate three points worth pondering:

A difference in what kind of wealth you have. As Reichert points out, a person with a million dollars of consumer goods is not an exact match to a person with a million dollar factory. The goods are in some sense inelastic and likely to diminish; the factory is an asset that will multiply its value and, more importantly, control the goods others hold that makes its owner an independent agent in ways the consumer goods owner is not. In other words, the latter is dependent on him, which means he gets to steer the economy. In many ways he sets the expectations, the demands, the tastes of that society.

A difference between Christian and non-Christian owners. Reichert insists there is a qualitative distinction between a Christian and non-Christian owner. An intentional Christian owner can use his wealth not just to do well but to do good. The usual economically laissez-faire businessman will probably use his wealth to multiply his bottom line, not necessarily mindful of whether that bigger bottom line comes from an uplifting product or a degrading one. The presence of a critical mass of intentionally Christian owners can have a transformative effect on socio-economic priorities in ways that pious but poor Christians can only dream of. And since those pious but poor Christians also live in that society, soaking up its values and anti-values by cultural osmosis, changes in socio-economic priorities are more than just “a nice thing to have.”

A transformed notion of property. Property exists. Property is good. Property is indeed a human right, as Rerum Novarum and other Church teachings have made clear. The question is: how do we approach property? Do we treat it as an absolute personal right, to be disposed of at the owner’s whim as long as he does not run afoul of the law? Or, as Christians, do we see it as something we also steward, something that serves people and human flourishing and so should be used in that service? These are two fundamentally different conceptions of ownership and property that would have radically different effects on society.

Reichert sums up this last point up well: “We have lost almost all the ground we once controlled, literally as well as figuratively. In just a few decades, Christians ceded control of institutions they founded and ran for centuries: hospital systems, universities, publishing houses, and culture-related industries. Being surrounded has taught us that economic power matters.” It matters because those institutions are increasingly deployed against us.

Let’s consider concrete real estate property. The Catholic bishops of the United States seem to have convinced themselves that the Holy Spirit is “renewing the face of the earth” by bargain basement selloffs of old church properties. Again, not all ownership is created equal: A church today would never acquire the sheer physical space — the literal city blocks that once upon a time Rust Belt parishes had — for the money for which it once bought that property. Yes, His Grace will get a check for the sale, likely to largely go into diocesan operating expenses, i.e., be spent and gone. Meanwhile, somebody else will own our former property, which is likely to continue appreciating in value and making him wealthier. When that infrastructure we already own could be repurposed for mission purposes (and don’t tell me we don’t need mission), the bishops’ self-congratulatory “stewardship” seems a bit empty.

Earlier this year I cited with approval arguments made by Italian author Gaetano Masciullo that the Church could do no greater disservice to the poor than to be a “poor Church.” Wealth as a tool for apostolate enables the Church to carry out her mission independently, i.e., without depending on others’ “charity” or largesse. Case in point: the USCCB insists its immigration activities were driven by Christian charity, not lucrative governmental grants. Let’s assume that position arguendo. The fact that the Church had to cut back its immigrant outreach significantly because of federal cutbacks seems to make the case for Masciullo’s position: If the Church had her own assets that produce income for mission, she wouldn’t have had to depend on Uncle Sam to enable her charity.

Masciullo calls for a “Catholic ecosystem.” What he means is an economically robust financial policy in the Church that, as I wrote earlier, makes her “capable of supporting schools, universities, newspapers, television stations, publishing houses, and digital platforms. We need a new class of Catholic entrepreneurs willing to use their influence to defend the perennial values ​​of true Western civilization, built on the foundations of Greek anthropology, Roman law, and the Catholic faith.”

A Catholic “ecosystem” is not just a “nice thing to have.” It’s a necessity. Catholic social thought makes clear human beings are naturally social: They flourish not just as individuals inserted in communities but also as communal creatures. The former is the anthropology of modern capitalist societies, formed on the gases of the Reformation through Protestant-influenced thinkers like Locke and Smith. It is not Catholic anthropology. And it’s that individualization that is no small part responsible for our modern ills.

I often hear praise about how Poland has clung to its Catholicism for so long (even aware that Polish Catholicism is under major stress). I’d argue it’s precisely because Catholicism has been part of the “societal air.” It wasn’t just for little kids and old ladies but for everybody. That didn’t mean every Pole had to convert to Catholicism, but it did mean every Pole lived within a cultural ethos whose values were shaped by Catholicism.

Giles Fraser has made the alternative apparent to me. Asking why French Catholics in Québec have so thoroughly succumbed to secularism, Fraser argued that Catholicism ceased to be part of the atmospheric gases that took normal Catholic practice as, well, normal. If going to Mass is “normal,” one might not necessarily be devout, but he was socially supported in going to Mass. But if the atmospheric mix changes — if religion becomes an individual “hobby” or “sport” — well, some people go swimming on Sunday, some take the kids to their soccer games, and some go to church.

We need Catholic ecosystems. And, like it or not, they cost money.

I will be blunt: I am tired of papal paeans to poverty and warmed over “liberation theology” that was bad thinking when first voiced and which has not improved with age. Unlike comfortable clerics, the poor do not romanticize their poverty. They want to stop being, not remain, poor. And, admit it or not, dynamic capitalized economies have lifted millions out of poverty. No other alternative has proven either capable or produced such outcomes. A “poor Church for the poor” is the worst thing we can do to the poor.

Yes, I think Weber and the Protestant Work Ethic distorted Christian economic thinking. But abusus non tollit usum: Catholic social thought has the insights to produce models that work, can lift people out of poverty, and can transform socio-economic priorities in a Christian spirit. That — not dreams of a mythical “golden age” of apostolic socialism — is what a Church truly seeking to love the poor needs to do amidst the signs of the times in which we live.

[Reichert’s First Things article is here.]