14 November 1988
To Each Confrere

My dear Confrere,

May the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ be with us forever!

More than once when I sat down to write a personal letter to you in Advent time, the thought came to me: "Why not write about poverty?" Who can ignore the fact that the Word of God, when He chose to be born of the Virgin Mary, could find no room in the inn at Bethlehem? Until now a host of reasons seemed to justify my not taking up the subject. Our vow of poverty, I reasoned, cannot be adequately treated in a short letter; conditions in provinces vary greatly; older Confreres see poverty differently from the young. I would venture to say that these were excuses rather than reasons. I suspect that the true motive for my reluctance to write to you on the topic of our vow of poverty has been a certain unease about my own manner of living this vow. It is so much easier to write or speak about the poor and the misery and injustice of their condition, than to write or speak about the reality of the vow of poverty as it impinges on my own life. The experience of being comfortably housed and well fed, along with the security that I will be cared for in old age, has a way of making the words personal poverty sound unreal as they fall from my lips or my pen.

Often, too, I have noticed that reflections on my manner of living my vow of poverty are prefaced by such considerations as: "You are not a religious. Your vow is special. It is taken for the purpose of mission. This is the twentieth, not the seventeenth century." "True", replies St. Vincent. "We are not religious; it has been considered necessary that we should not be religious. We are less worthy than religious although we live in community. However, it may be said that poverty, is the bond of Communities and especially of ours which has greater need of it than others." (Coste XI, Fr. ed., p. 223).

That greater need of personal poverty to which St. Vincent refers, must lie in the particular vocation which is ours in the Church. In a letter to Father Codoing, St. Vincent remarked: "We are not sufficiently virtuous to be able to carry the burden of abundance and that of apostolic virtue and I fear we may never be, and that the former may ruin the latter." (Coste II, Eng. ed., ltr. 718, pp. 517-518). There is a continual tension, often not fully recognized, between affluence and apostolic virtue in our lives. Expressing the idea in another way, one could say that there is an interior logic between the following of the poor Christ in my personal life and my proclamation of Him to the poor. Identification with the poor Christ in my personal life must precede the work of evangelizing the poor, if my preaching is to be fully authentic. For it is in the name of the poor Christ that I speak to and for the poor.

It is precisely to further identification with the poor Christ that we take a vow of poverty. To quote Pope Paul VI on evangelical and religious poverty: "It is on this point that your contemporaries challenge you with particular insistence." (Evang. Test. p16). Our Constitutions, Statutes and Provincial Norms set forth the detailed means for living according to the letter and spirit of our vow. Read them meditatively and you will find that they are at once a stimulus to apostolic virtue and a defense against the incursion of affluence in our lives. It is the inner sanctuaries of our hearts, however, that need most vigilance. "Be on your guard," said Our Lord, "against greed of every kind." (Lk 12:15). The Greek word for greed pleonexia is most expressive. It signifies a desire to have more. It is that more which needs attention. Securing more leisure time, more superfluities, more travel, more personal comforts can and often does mean less for the poor, as well as a distancing of myself from the person of the poor Christ. The slow, silent growth of affluence in my life can mean the slow death of genuine love for others and the slow extinction of that zeal which is the flame of the love of God in my heart. "We are not sufficiently virtuous to be able to carry the burden of abundance and that of apostolic virtue." (Coste II, Eng. ed., ltr. 718, pp. 517-518).

For many people in the Western world, the feast of Christmas is a feast of affluence, divorced from the event that gave it meaning originally in Bethlehem of Juda. Not so for us who believe that the poverty of Christ's birth and life is a mysterious but real manifestation of the "power of God and the wisdom of God." (l Cor 1:24). If we are to be effective apostolic agents and communicators to the poor of the power and wisdom of God, then we must enter personally into that experience of Christ Who, "though He was rich...yet became poor so that by His poverty you might become rich." (2 Cor 8:9). Without such an experience, our words and even our actions for the poor will be those of hollow men.

The prayer of Christ, Who lived and died a poor man, was that his joy would be in us. He Himself could rejoice in the beauty of the lilies of the field and in the contentment of the birds of the air. "Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious," (Phil 4:8) rejoiced the heart of the man Christ Jesus. May it be so for us. May your celebration of the feast of Christmas be a joyful one, and bring you a new measure of apostolic virtue. It is the wish and prayer of all of us here in the Curia.