The Poor Are Holy, Indeed

When I came across Mark Bauerlein’s recent Crisis article, which argues against the holiness of the poor—or, at least, their inherent holiness—my first thought was not that it was correct in some respects and completely off base in others, though I believe that to be true. Instead, I rolled up my sleeves, rubbed my hands together, and said out loud “another day, another opportunity to defend Lady Poverty.”

First, what Mr. Bauerlein gets right: people living below the poverty line in America are not necessarily any holier than the rest of us just because their lives involve more suffering. But a definition of poverty that treats the poverty line as the basis for whether someone is poor is, for lack of a better term, impoverished.

If you live in the United States and have an apartment with a thermostat, enough food, running water, and an iPhone, you’re in many respects richer than most human beings who’ve ever lived. Now, in other respects, you’re much poorer. Even the poorest and most illiterate of medieval serfs could not be evicted from their land, didn’t have to work on the many holy days throughout the year, and had food that was more nutritious than ours and air and water free of poison; they had an abundance of relatives living in close proximity; and they lived in a high-trust society with broad agreement on moral and religious questions, a society that produced objectively high quality, timeless art, music, and architecture. How many of us could boast of such wealth today? As C.S. Lewis so brilliantly noted in That Hideous Strength more than 80 years ago, a modern man lives “neither like a rich man nor a poor one; neither like a lord nor a hermit.”

This makes defining poverty doubly hard. On one hand, maybe no one is poor. On the other, maybe everyone is. Pope Benedict XVI raised concerns about “affective, moral and spiritual poverty” that affects prosperous nations like ours, and this can shed considerable light on what ails modern man. As fruitful as such discussion could be (and probably should be, in a later article), dividing the wheat from the chaff on what constitutes poverty among housed and fed Americans would be unproductive here, as it will be a definitional fight with some difficult lines to draw. This distracts too much from the real question, which is whether the poor are holy.

So, putting aside the tougher question, there is one class of Americans that everyone, without exception, can agree are poor by any metric or definition: people who are homeless or so destitute that they’re willing to beg for money on the street.

I have some experience with homeless people that can shed some light on poverty and where holiness can be found within it. When my wife and I lived in D.C., we volunteered for our parish’s homeless ministry. My wife introduced me to it, and having already volunteered for years, she gave me a preparatory pep talk, providing key insights that later held up under my own experiences.

There are, as she had it, three reasons that someone could be homeless. First, because of addiction. Anyone who’s been to a major city in the past decade can tell you that this is true. When you see people slumped over on the street, the truth of this screams out at you. Second, because of mental health. This can be as mild as a woman who speaks in nonsense words or as severe as a man who screams profanities at passing pedestrians. Regardless, it is easy to verify.

For both of these first two categories, there’s one obvious cause and solution. Our elected leaders have failed addicts and mentally ill people by choosing to let them live on the street instead of getting them help. They need to be off the street, institutionalized to some degree, and treated, point-blank; there’s no way around it. I’m not saying that you can’t find holiness in these people—on the contrary, I would argue that you definitely can. What I am saying is that addicts and the mentally ill are not dealing primarily with poverty but only secondarily. They’re not who we’re talking about today.

The third reason that my wife gave for homelessness is one that will surprise you if you’ve never had the chance to spend significant time with homeless people but will come as no surprise if you’ve done some homeless ministry work. The third reason for homelessness is choice. “Choice” doesn’t mean that someone loves being homeless, that it’s their first choice, or even that the circumstances that have placed them out on the street are necessarily a choice. Rather, they’ve weighed the possibility of getting help or moving into a shelter and, for one reason or another—often good reasons, they’ve decided against it.

I can already hear the chorus of Protestants and Boomers yelling at their computer screens about how people who remain on the street by choice don’t deserve our money, that they should stop being lazy, etc., etc. To those folks, I see your point and raise you this: I don’t care what you think. Because it’s within this third category that I have seen glimmers of what the Church Fathers, Pope John Paul II, Pope Francis, Pope Benedict, and Pope Leo characterize as the holiness of the poor.

This holiness manifests in two significant ways. First, I have never—and I mean never—given anything to a homeless person without seeing or hearing them refer to God in some respect. This could be on a cardboard sign or in their thanks. “God bless you” is always on the lips of the poor man or woman who has been given alms. By contrast (and to Mr. Bauerlein’s point) when was the last time you heard a fast-food worker living around the poverty line end your order with a “God bless”? I’m willing to bet rarely if ever—and probably a lot less in any sort of business meeting, sale, or other interaction with the wealthy. Yet, the homeless say it, and you can tell in their eyes that they mean it. They believe in God, and they know that God Himself is at work when someone gives them money or food.

Another way is in their humility. Again, this is anathema to the “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” mindset, for those who see begging as audacious laziness. If you think begging on the street is a sign of pride or entitlement, I would encourage you to spend a morning volunteering at a soup kitchen or other ministry. You will go in looking for a bunch of loafers and find instead a shocking and forthright humility.

I say “shocking” because it is shocking, objectively, to meet someone who in their first breath will ask you for what they need directly, without pretense, and without apology. You don’t see that sort of straightforwardness in society, basically, ever. People typically have tact. But that’s because they have pride and shame. The only times when someone is ever that direct when asking another person for help is to a parent or to God Himself in prayer.

Why do we ask our parents or God for things in such a direct way—and why do the homeless do it to us? Sometimes it may be because we feel they, or He, owe things to us. And that is pride. But for many of us, I suspect, it’s because we understand our role in the interaction.

We are the child in need, and we aren’t pretending that this is some sort of arm’s-length negotiation among people who purport to be on equal footing. There is a massive power differential between parents and children, between the beggar and the one begged from, between man and God. If we truly understand our relationship to God, we understand that we are both children and beggars before Him—not because He owes us, but because we depend on Him, we need Him, and we know we are not Him. As Jesus revealed to St. Catherine of Siena, “If you know these two things, you will be blessed and the Enemy will never deceive you. I am He who is; and you are she who is not.”

To paraphrase Fr. Mike Schmitz, golly, what a gift, to know that the poor look to us like a child to a parent, like a sinner to God. And what a reciprocal gift it is that they who ask come in humility and in the name of God. You can see, then, why almsgiving is such a foundational spiritual activity. Everyone is made holier from it.

This is not to say that the poor are perfect, that suffering always makes someone holy (as I wrote in my previous defense of poverty, often it does not, which is why poverty is not given to or mandated for everyone); nor am I arguing for the inherent sanctity of people who live in crappy apartment buildings—I’ll take Mr. Bauerlein’s word on that. Instead, I’m arguing that popes and saints are speaking of a real phenomenon, which is that people who have little, who know that everything they’re given comes from God, and who approach every interaction with humility are holy.

I’ll end on this: it’s easy to be disenchanted with a series of popes who speak in platitudes. I’m just as frustrated as everyone else when the Holy Father comes out with a document that reads like he went in with something to say and the meaning was subsequently wordsmithed out by a committee. But at the same time, I think it’s on us as Catholics to not automatically assume that teachings which make us uncomfortable are made up or part of a Liberation Theology agenda.

The Church has much to teach us about poverty; and if we look closely, we will see that she has spoken very consistently about it through the ages, long before our current political moment. And just as true is the adage that not every papal document is about American Catholics. It’s striking how magisterial documents concerning poverty speak about starvation, disease, war—things that are totally foreign to our American experience of poverty. It’s not only possible but, indeed, probable that the popes of the last 30 years were not talking about American apartment renters when they spoke about poverty. (Perhaps they should, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

If you’re still not convinced, I encourage you to go out and meet some of the poor of whom I have spoken—I promise, they exist. You may find that they’re exactly who the Church has told us they are.