After these things, Jesus went over the sea of Galilee, which is that of Tiberius . . . (St John 6, 1).

Let us think of these five barley loaves and two fishes. As you know our blessed Lord and Apostles had nothing. You will remember when our blessed Lord began to preach the redemption of the world he took care to begin at the beginning, the first thing necessary—‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’. Religious life begins too with that poverty. Until that is right we have not begun right. We are in a sense not bound to pay more than other people (ten Commandments)—but we are more bound. For instance I might be bound to pay £50 to someone from whom I had stolen it. I might say, ‘Well I am such a wicked person that I will take a vow to pay it back’. I should not be bound to pay £60 because I’d taken a vow to pay, but I am more bound to pay the £50. Because I am bound in justice and also by vow. A great number of people can’t see that.

All the world is bound in justice to poverty, chastity and obedience. Not by vow, of course. Now if we, being bound more, commit a sin against poverty, chastity or obedience, we also commit a sacrilege, so that we are obliged because we have taken a vow. The primary thing is the poverty of our state. Now this is a very important thing, very simple.

Poverty is an essential attribute of the good landsman. That is a truth that may easily be misunderstood, but it is a truth nevertheless.

It may be well to begin by dispelling some misconceptions. First of all it must be made clear that poverty is neither a synonym for destitution nor for financial failure. Poverty is a positive way of living that implies sufficiency, but rejects the accumulation of superfluities. It is indeed more than that. It is the inevitable result of the practice of charity, since Catholic teaching insists that ownership is not absolute, but must be limited by the needs of others. In this wider meaning of universal application obviously the landsman takes his place beside every other kind of worker. Charity is incumbent upon every human being, and is not the special perquisite of any particular kind of man. The landsman like everyone else may practise charity imperfectly or not at all, but, if he be a good landsman, he will at all events have created conditions for himself compatible with the practice of that greatest of the virtues—in a word he will be poor.

But there is another misconception that must be cleared away. Given freedom and the absence of unfair handicaps beyond his control, the good landsman will in one sense be rich. Not only will he enjoy food better in quality and more unrestricted in quantity than those who are out of touch with the land, but his production will always be in excess of his own needs.

Marxist revolution, Bebel tells us, differs from all its predecessors in this, that it does not seek for new forms of religion, but denies religion altogether. ‘The first word of religion,’ wrote Friedrich Engels, ‘is a lie’. ‘The idea of God’, said Marx, ‘must be destroyed; it is the keystone of perverted civilisation’. ‘It is useless’, adds Bax, ‘blinking the fact that the Christian doctrine is more revolting to the higher moral sense of today than the Saturnalia of the cult of Proserpina could have been to the conscience of the early Christians’; and elsewhere: ‘In what sense socialism is not religion will now be clear. It utterly despises “the other world”, with all its stage properties—that is, the present objects of religion’.

The only claim, in short, that the Revolution of Karl Marx has ever made to religious recognition is that it ‘brings religion from Heaven to earth’. But its major prophets have never been so rash as to promise the translation of Heaven itself to earth. On the contrary the convert to Marx’s materialist dialectic has been heard to put it to the latter’s credit that it has no dope to offer the faithful, no pie whether in the shy or on earth. Herein lies the appeal of the revolution to asceticism. And we cannot deny that the revolution has had an abundance of witnesses, in men and women singularly devoid of self-gratification. The old inevitable gibe about communists foregathering at the sea-side like lords’ and having cars, as other men,

Readers of Labour, Life and Poverty by the Polish economist F. Zweig (Gollancz, 1948) will have met a strange aspect of working class lives. They will have met workers earning £5 per week and spending over 30s. of it on their own cigarettes, or men spending 30s. a week on drink. The general picture of the London worker described in this book is of a class saved from pauperism by council houses and social services only to return to pauperism by their spending habits.

But how can it be otherwise? Our desires in these days are determined by so many factors that have one thing in common and that is that we should have more. The heroes on the films are never without a cigarette, never without a drink; they have no need to work, even when their ‘work’ is part of the background of the film. Money never restricts them, their women have beautiful clothes and their apartments are the last word in luxury. Our popular reading material follows the same line and helps to create, a desire for more and more. Our advertisers do the same. New desires are very often created and they have, in fact, become enshrined in American economics as part of an explaining away of depressions.

So we workers want more money and when we get it we want more still so that we can ape these ideals held up to us by those who want our money. The whole idea of an ever increasing standard of life is promoted by those who benefit materially by our constant strivings to possess more and more money.

The technical achievements and elaboration since the sixteenth century do not comprise the whole of modern capitalism. Capitalism has been much more than that; it has been an outlook on life with its own peculiar orientation and values. To endeavour to understand capitalism as a socio-economic form, therefore, it will be of help to look at the type of character which played a fundamental rôle in the capitalistic development. There is a vast literature on the relation between capitalism and Calvinism, especially in its Puritan form. The general question does not concern us here. What we shall consider is the Puritan character as it appeared in the middle seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this way it will be possible for us to discern more clearly the temper from which the modern technical innovations sprung or by which they were exploited. The spirit that lies behind these new methods in many ways involves an asceticism as rigid and as austere as the older medieval one: but the goal is different, the ascesis is intramundane, while the reward is no longer invisible but very near and very tangible.

When one examines the Puritan mentality at this period, that character with its intense energies and limited horizon, it reveals those features that have made possible the organisation of industry and wealth which has caught millions of human beings in its meshes during the course of the modern era; meshes more unbreakable than steel because they were spun of the fibre of emotionless hearts and held together by the unyielding rigidity of relentless human wills; meshes cast by men conscious of a purpose to be achieved and self-righteous in the pursuit of that purpose.

The morning of April 16th, 1209, witnessed in the square of St George in Assisi (now called the Piazza Santa Chiara) an incident most rare and strange in the history of men. Warned and expectant of good things, a great crowd of beggars and outcasts had assembled, and to them presently came two men bearing between them a deep, heavily-weighted sack filled to the top with money. With that large indiscriminateness that often accompanies Catholic charity they began to hand out right and left the contents of the sack. The method of distribution would have horrified a modern humanitarian. There was no personal interviewing or questioning, no assessment of alms-qualification, no means test. A careless and bountiful profusion characterised this very medieval gesture; and when the last coin had been given away and the last beggar satisfied, it was probably the literal truth that the only completely destitute persons in that crowded square were the two prodigal benefactors.

The sack had contained in money the total worldly possessions of Bernard a Quintavalle, a very rich merchant of Assisi. Some little time before, he had gone one day with Francis to a small nearby church to pray and to seek God’s will in his regard and, opening the book of the Gospels which lay upon the altar, they had immediately come upon the words: ‘If thou wilt be perfect, sell all thou hast and give to the poor and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come follow me.’

And it came to pass that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom. The rich man died also, and was buried in hell…

Of all conceptions which we can shape of the world—the world as profane, perverse, corrupt, and condemned by God—the truest, I think, is that offered by the Beloved Disciple when he tells us that All that is in the world is the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life. Lust of the eyes, rousing in man an inward distaste for what he has, and making him crave and seek after what he lacks; pride of life, exalting a man above himself, instilling contempt for others, and causing forgetfulness of God; lust of the flesh, enslaving a man to his senses and luring astray his reason through the enticements of voluptuousness. These, St Augustine says, are the three plagues which have overspread the world and tainted the healthiest parts of it. Lust of the eyes the desire to have—the root of all evils and specially of injustice. Pride of life, a foe of charity which leads men even to godlessness. Lust of the flesh, the source and spring of impure pleasures and scandalous excesses. My brothers in Christ, it is my conviction that riches as misused by the world feed every one of these wretched lusts, and that the most general and natural cause of men’s injustice and pride and sensuality is that they are either rich or enamoured of riches.