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Illustration: 1909 painting The Worship of Mammon by Evelyn De Morgan
Pope Francis’ Cycle of Catechesis. Vices and Virtues. 5. Avarice
Paul VI Audience Hall – Wednesday, 24 January 2024
Reflection: 1 Timothy 6:8-10
As long as we have food and clothing, we shall be content with that. People who long to be rich are a prey to trial; they get trapped into all sorts of foolish and harmful ambitions which plunge people into ruin and destruction. The love of money is the root of all evils’ and there are some who, pursuing it, have wandered away from the faith and so given their souls any number of fatal wounds.
“The miser could have been a source of blessing for many”
Dear brothers and sisters,
We are continuing our catechesis on vices and virtues, and today we will talk about avarice, that form of attachment to money that keeps man from generosity.
It is not a sin that affects only people with large assets, but an across-the-board vice, which often has nothing to do with checking account balances. It is a disease of the heart, not of the wallet.
The analyses that the desert fathers made of this evil highlighted how avarice could take hold even of monks who, after renouncing huge inheritances, in the solitude of their cell had attached themselves to objects of little value. They did not lend them, they did not share them, and they were even less willing to give them away. An attachment to small things, taking away their freedom.
Those objects became for them a kind of fetish from which it was impossible to detach themselves.
A kind of regression to the stage of children clutching the toy, repeating, “It’s mine! It’s mine!”
In this claim lurks a sick relationship with reality, which can result in forms of compulsive hoarding or pathological accumulation.
To recover from this disease, the monks proposed a drastic, yet highly effective method: death meditation. However much a person accumulates goods in this world, of one thing we are absolutely certain: that in the coffin they will not fit. They are goods we cannot take with us!
Here the senselessness of this vice is revealed. The bond of possession we build with things is only apparent, because we are not the masters of the world: this earth that we love is in truth not ours, and we move about it as strangers and pilgrims (Lev 25:23 – The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with me).
These simple considerations give us insight into the folly of avarice, but also into its innermost reason.
It is an attempt to exorcise the fear of death: it seeks securities that actually crumble the very moment we grasp them. Remember the parable of the foolish man whose countryside had offered a bountiful harvest, so he lulls himself into thoughts of how to enlarge his storehouses to put in all the harvest.
The man had calculated everything, planned for the future.
He had not, however, considered the surest variable in life: death. The Gospel says “Foolish man,”this very night your life will be required of you. And what you have prepared, whose will it be?”(Luke 12:20).
In other cases, it is the thieves who render this service to us. Even in the Gospels they have a good number of appearances, and although their actions are censurable, they can become a salutary warning. Thus Jesus preaches in the Sermon on the Mount, “Do not store up treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume, and where thieves break in and steal; but store up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes, and where thieves do not break in and steal” (Mt. 6:19-20).
Also in the accounts of the desert fathers there is the story of some thief who surprises a monk in his sleep and steals the few possessions he kept in his cell. Upon awakening, not at all disturbed by the incident, the monk sets out on the thief’s trail and, once he finds him, instead of claiming the loot, he hands over the few remaining things to him, saying, “You forgot to take these!”
We, brothers and sisters, can be lords of the goods we possess, but often the opposite happens: they eventually own us. Some rich men are no longer free, they no longer even have time to rest, they have to look over their shoulders because the accumulation of possessions also demands their safekeeping.
They are always anxious because a wealth is built with much sweat, but it can disappear in a moment. They forget the Gospel preaching, which does not claim that riches in themselves are a sin, but they are certainly a liability. God is not poor: he is the Lord of everything. St. Paul writes “from being rich that he was, he became poor for your sake, that you might become rich through his poverty” (2 Cor. 8:9).
This is what the miser does not understand. He could have been a source of blessing for many, but instead he has slipped into the blind alley of wretchedness. The life of the miser is ugly.
I remember the case of a gentleman I met in the other diocese, a very rich man, and he had a sick mother. He was married. The brothers would take turns taking care of Mom, and Mom would take a yogurt, in the morning. This gentleman would give her half in the morning to give her the other half in the afternoon and save half a yogurt. This is avarice. This is attachment to things.
Then this gentleman died, and the comments of the people who went to the wake was this,
“But, you can see this man has nothing on him, he left everything.”
And then, making a little mockery, they would say, “No, no, they couldn’t close the coffin because he wanted to take everything with him.”
This kind of avarice, makes others laugh; – that in the end we have to give our body and soul to the Lord and we have to leave everything behind. Let us be careful!
And let us be generous, generous with everyone and generous with those who need us most. Thank you..
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Summary of the Holy Father’s words
Dear brothers and sisters: In our catechesis on the virtues and the vices, we now turn to greed, as an undue attachment to wealth, which hinders us from being generous with regard to others.
Greed is not simply a selfish hoarding of money or material objects, but a distorted relationship with reality and even a form of enslavement. The Desert Fathers saw greed as an attempt to avoid facing the reality of death, which is opposed to Jesus’ advice to accumulate treasures in heaven rather than earthly goods (cf. Mt 6:19-20). May our use of the world’s goods always be marked by evangelical freedom, responsibility and a spirit of generous solidarity, in imitation of Christ himself, who, though he was rich, became poor for our sakes, so that by his poverty, we might become rich (cf. 2 Cor 8:9).
