Poverty Is a Path to Heaven

“Lady Poverty,” as St. Francis called her, is the choice bride of the holiest of saints. In fact, all Christians must aspire to a form of poverty in accordance with our state in life. For religious, it is the first of the three religious vows, and for good reason.

Yet material poverty is not forcefully imposed upon or even advised for the entire Church. It’s a heavy burden. Poverty is suffering, and most people do not suffer well. Therefore, Our Lord has seen fit to give each of us what we can handle. But He commands each of us to observe spiritual poverty, which is, detachment from the things of the world, so that we are freer to do God’s will and wholly reliant on His providence. Whether we have no home or we live in a mansion, the calling is the same: do not get too attached to your things, and remember that you are ultimately reliant on God, not yourself.

Material poverty makes the attainment of spiritual poverty more achievable because it’s easy to forget that every good thing comes from the hand of God when you always have on hand the resources to accomplish your ends. The materially poor have no resources, and so they are keenly aware of this distinction. They live it out from day to day. It is a rare person living on the street who does not invoke the name of God when asking for or receiving alms.

As many saints will attest, material poverty is the training ground for spiritual poverty. And spiritual poverty is training for martyrdom. St. Maximilian Kolbe perhaps knew this best of all. When he volunteered to starve to death for another prisoner in Auschwitz, it was not a random act of charity that anyone could have or would have done. Instead, it was an extraordinary act of supernatural love, the blooming of the seed of poverty that St. Maximilian planted and watered every day of his life. 

St. Maximilian is an illustrative model of both material and spiritual poverty. Materially, he and his brothers were dirt poor. They built their monastic buildings quickly and cheaply, and they slept on wooden plank floors, ate subsistence diets, and eschewed warm winter coats. St. Maximilian’s material poverty made it necessary to cultivate a deep spiritual poverty. He was often without any method to pay for his grand plans, and his superiors rarely stepped in to fund them. So, the saint did what any good Franciscan would do: he entrusted it all to Mary and the saints. And his projects were always funded. The continuous refrain of those who knew him was that it “always seemed to work out.” 

It makes sense to think of the material and spiritual poverty in which St. Maximilian was steeped as training for his later crosses. Materially, by sleeping on floors and eating meals of plain rice as a Conventual Franciscan, he developed the strength to—more than once—give up his meager portion to other prisoners in the concentration camp under starvation conditions. And by giving up his meals in the camp, he developed the strength to lay down his life in the starvation bunker for another prisoner. Spiritually, by depending on divine providence in all things, he was able to give hope to his fellow prisoners. Indeed, his cell of martyrdom was described as sounding like a church, with hymns and prayers echoing out and filling the other prisoners with amazement.

This end result was not an accident. It was not random. It was what he spent years training himself to do. It was the flower of material poverty blooming into spiritual poverty, which is wealth in God alone.

The poverty of others presents us with another challenge. How do we help alleviate the suffering of others while understanding that whatever actions we take will not be enough?

First, we have to recognize that poverty is a perpetual reality of human society that no system, no matter how well-designed, can ever entirely eradicate. Both the Old and New Testaments tell us this: “There will not be wanting poor in the land of thy habitation: therefore I command thee to open thy hand to thy needy and poor brother, that liveth in the land” (Deuteronomy 15:11). “For the poor you have always with you: but me you have not always” (Matthew 26:11). 

On one hand, our Lord tells us in each of the above passages that the poor are not a sickness to be rid of or a problem to be fixed; rather, they will be with us always. Consider also the flip side—Our Lord, in Deuteronomy, commands us to open our hands to the needy, and so loving our neighbor is also obedience to God; in Matthew, He asks us to give our best to God, so as to not make the poor into an idol or an excuse for withholding from the Lord what He is due. The poverty of others thus simultaneously proclaims and clarifies the two great commandments of Christ: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind…Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matthew 22:37-40). 

The prevailing ideologies of our time get this entirely backward. They assert that poverty is not a fact of life but always either a moral failure on the part of the poor person or a systemic failure on the part of society. We need to affirm the sliver of truth in each: 1) those who are able to work should, and 2) the failure to address mental health and drug addiction is a collective abdication of responsibility to the poor. But we cannot affirm the core of these ideologies: the idea that the poor are a problem to be rid of. If that’s our starting point, we end up not loving the poor but, perhaps ironically, hating them.

Material poverty can be a hard thing to love when seen in others. But the poor are not going anywhere. We can’t legislate or pep-talk every poor person out of poverty. This is why the Catholic response to poverty is to see Christ in the poor and to give. In a sense, we detach ourselves from our money and become just a little closer to the material poor, training ourselves in the virtue of spiritual poverty. The goal is not to have nothing but—like the material poor—to know that you have nothing without God. Such trust in Him frees us from inordinate attachment to created things and leads to our sanctity. It is certainly a path to Heaven.