EPISTLES

Despite being published in 1966, Venerable Monsignor Aloysius Schwartz’s message in The Starved and the Silent still rings true today, almost six decades later.

I belong to a poor parish—not desperately poor, but certainly not a wealthy one. So when I read these words, I cannot help but see them from the perspective of someone who belongs to the poorer part of the Catholic Church. I know what it is like to belong to a community that has to make do with what it has, and that makes Monsignor Schwartz’s observations particularly difficult for me to dismiss.

Monsignor Schwartz wrote:

The poor of the world—at least eighty-five percent of them—are in Africa, Asia, and South America, while eighty-five percent of those commissioned by God to announce the Gospels to them—priests, brothers, and sisters—are elsewhere. They are mostly in America and Europe, where the land is fat and the people who dwell therein rich.

Can it really be said, then, that there is a massive, concerted, selective effort on the part of the Church today to seek out the poor of the world and to bring them the message of salvation?

Furthermore, since an army, albeit a spiritual one, marches on its stomach, can it be said also that there is a mounted program on the part of the Church today to support fully the Church’s divinely received, worldwide mission to the poverty-stricken? Once again, the evidence indicates that such is not the case. To give but one slim example: in a year when the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in the United States collects only $13,000,000 for support of the Church’s worldwide mission effort, dioceses such as New York and Brooklyn effortlessly raise $35,000,000 and $45,000,000, respectively, for their own local building programs. The rich churches get richer, and the poor churches continue to get the crumbs.

—Venerable Aloysius Schwartz, The Starved and the Silent: The dramatic encounter of an American priest with Christ’s poor in Korea, pp. 175–176.

Reading this today, I find his questions difficult to ignore. I am not suggesting that wealthy dioceses are doing something wrong simply because they have beautiful churches, schools, seminaries, or other institutions. These things can serve legitimate needs and can be worthy investments in the life of the Church. But I do think we should ask whether our priorities always reflect the needs of the universal Church, especially when some Catholic communities have so little.

From the beginning, the Church was never meant to be a collection of isolated communities looking only after themselves. The apostles understood this very clearly. When the Christians in Jerusalem were suffering, other Christian communities collected money to help them, and Paul repeatedly encouraged the Gentile Christians to contribute to the needs of the Christians in Jerusalem. It was an expression of the reality that the Church is one Body, even when its members live in different places and have very different material circumstances.

That apostolic example still challenges me today. I am not against beautiful churches or necessary building projects, and I certainly don’t think every wealthy parish should simply stop improving its facilities. But when Catholics in other parts of the world are still worshipping in tents or makeshift chapels, when some dioceses struggle to support priests and seminarians, and when Catholic families continue to live in severe poverty, I think it is reasonable to ask whether more of the Church’s resources could be directed toward them.

I don’t ask these questions because I belong to a wealthy parish. Quite the opposite. I belong to a parish that is itself not rich, and perhaps that is precisely why Monsignor Schwartz’s words resonate with me. When you are accustomed to seeing limited resources up close, it is difficult not to wonder what could be accomplished if the abundance found in one part of the Church could be shared more generously with another.

This is not simply about money. I know there are so many factors that intensify poverty in other parts of the world. It is about how we understand the Church. The Catholic Church is universal, and our fellow Catholics living thousands of miles away are not strangers or beneficiaries of some distant charity. They are our brothers and sisters in Christ. If one part of the Body has much while another part has very little, the abundance of one should naturally become a source of help for the other.

Perhaps that is why Monsignor Schwartz’s words remain so uncomfortable almost sixty years later. The problem is not that the Church has resources, nor that Catholics should build beautiful and worthy things for God. The question is whether we have become better at taking care of our own local needs than at remembering the needs of the rest of the Church.

After all, the apostles were already doing this 2,000 years ago. Perhaps the uncomfortable question for us today is whether we have forgotten something that the first Christians understood very well: that what one part of the Church has should never make us indifferent to what another part of the Church lacks.