Two pundits from opposite ends of the political spectrum manage to reach the same conclusion: being a “poor Church” really stinks for the really poor.

Writing in the left-leaning La Croix, Massimo Faggioli of Villanova University bemoans the many harms he imagines Trump 2.0 poses for the Church (see here). They include economic consequences. Faggioli’s list includes USAID cuts. Perhaps the world can survive without Sesame Street Baghdad or Gaelic transgender opera. But shuttering USAID will have other financial ripple effects: Faggioli opines that USAID cutbacks “could have indirect consequences on the Vatican’s already strained financial situation.” Well, Pope Francis has been extolling 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 Bussola Nuova Quotidiana (see here). Masciullo’s claims merit much more attention. Masciullo argues that the “progressive Left” urges the Church to be poor so that it can concentrate and control the disbursement of assets through the nanny state (and its international “development” schemes). He argues this mentality is contrary to Church history, which always had a healthy recognition of the need for its own resources and their responsible acquisition and multiplication. You couldn’t, for example, build 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 needs to have its own ample resources to be its own counterweight to secular funders and to construct “an alternate economic ecosystem” within which genuinely Catholic institutions can not 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, televisions, 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)

Masciullo is onto something. In an increasingly secular world where the “liberal” state aims to suffocate real pluralism in the name of its “democratic values,” Church institutions must be self-sufficient and self-sustaining. The fact that the Catholic bishops of the United States — shepherds of a demographic that has largely economically “made it” in America — claim they must close parishes that genuinely poor immigrants opened with nickels and dimes, is telling. As is the fact that they cannot provide free Catholic education, at least at the elementary level. And whether or not one agrees with their “refugee” efforts, the fact that the bishops look like just another interested litigant in suing the Trump Administration to preserve funding streams for “their charity” speaks volumes. But hey, that’s what happens when you extol being a “poor” Church (and have to spend resources on defending against buggering priests/coverup clerics).

Being able to do these things for real people would mean far more than all the “conversations in spirit” and endless dialogical yabbering about how the Church should “witness” to the world.

Yes, I want to see a Church — and I don’t think this is a pipe dream — that can support its churches, schools, presses, media ministry, and public presence itself, without constantly running around with skullcap in hand. Recall the second element of Masciullo’s argument: a “new class of Catholic entrepreneurs is needed.” These would not just produce the resources and hand them over to ecclesiastics to blow on their “poor Church for the poor” pipe dreams, but would actually also have a hand — even the decisive hand — in their disbursement. These would recognize that money is not a bad thing. (Ever wonder why fewer parishes carry the offertory collection to the altar?) These entrepreneurs would recognize — like two of the three servants in Matthew 25:14-30) — that resources also need to be invested to be multiplied, not buried or poured down rabbit or sink holes.

Achieving this means discarding romantic illusions borne of poor economic thinking that imagines resources (including money) as a zero sum game, like the poor sugar-plum vision of MGM’s 1968 film Shoes of the Fisherman, where a naïve Pope Kirill promises to sell off everything the Church has to alleviate hunger in the socialist world. (My guess is if there had been such a pope in 1968, the Church today would be impoverished and the socialist world would still be starving). Illusions of liberation theology and “the struggle for faith [that includes] the struggle for justice” (Jesuit Generation Congregation 32) are reasons why the faith is in retreat and institutions of “the Jesuit tradition” don’t have Jesuits even in core areas like theology and philosophy because the men who ought to be senior professors today “discerned” running South Bronx soup kitchens in the 1980s was more “vital.”

The consequences of such thinking aren’t limited to the economic. It’s generally conceded most cardinals who voted in the 2013 conclave wanted a pope to bring fiscal and personnel reform to the Curial administration, not to “make a mess” of doctrine, morals, and discipline. But if one doesn’t have to focus on the hard tasks of providing for and protecting the integrity of the resources necessary for ecclesiastical mission, one can talk about “the poor Church for the poor” and go do all sorts of things until one day needing to establish a special commission to look for some of those rich guys to “go fund me” and my projects. One can endlessly invoke the Good Samaritan while overlooking that even he had to pay the innkeeper. When “love of neighbor” turns into the action of buying him a coat to keep warm (James 2:15-17), $30 or even $30 million will still only go so far. You will have to make choices how you allocate those coats, maybe even by a prudential ordo amoris. You might even want to keep some of that money to invest, so that you can buy some coats in the future, because “the poor you will have always” (Mt 26:11).

Much mistaken thinking goes back to a puerile reading of Acts 4:32-35 that imagines the early Church as a gathering of proto-socialists around the “Comrade Apostles.” (I already addressed this illusion here.) But it’s that false imagery, coupled with a quasi-gnostic approach to the “evil” of money and how it’s made, that continues to handicap the Church from carrying out its mission… because it’s “too poor.”