A Hispanic woman and her two children were standing at the
exit of our parking lot on the driveway median, mooching from the parishioners
as they were driving out. Our pastor, Fr. George, is a lovely man, very good-humored
and self-effacing. But you don’t want to be within fifty feet of him when he
needs to delegate something, because he’s likely to grab the first unwitting
soul available. He was discussing the issue with Bret, the Grand Knight of our
Knights of Columbus council, when I stepped out of the church and went over to
greet them.
“Ah, hello, Tony!” Fr. George exclaimed. As he reached out
to give me a perfunctory handshake, he continued to speak to Bret: “Here we
are, then; Tony can do this!” Herding me away from Bret and the building, he
pointed out the beggars to me. “Go over there and tell them they cannot stand
there; it’s illegal and dangerous. Make sure they leave.”
Moving the family on was fairly simple: I simply put my most
pleasant face on and requested that they leave. And as I was walking back, one
of the children, who unseen by me before had gone up to the church and was now
walking back to the family, asked me, “Sir, do you think we’d be able to talk
to someone at the church tomorrow at nine o’clock?” Yes, I agreed, someone
should certainly be there.
Nevertheless, the irony of bustling poor people away from
Christ’s church rather than bringing them in was too obvious. I can hear Jesus
say, “I was hungry, and you gave me the bum’s rush” (cf. Matthew 25:42).
Observe, please, that I’m not calling into question whether
it should have been my job to kick the indigents to another curb. Nor am I
exactly criticizing Fr. George’s response. Here’s why:
Like other cities, Denton, Texas has laws and rules
restricting begging. Every year, on Black Friday and Saturday, our Knights
council collects money from passers-by on a major arterial; each Knight who
participates has to fill out three different forms, one of which is a liability
waiver, and submit Xerox copies of his identification to be legally authorized
to beg. And while we’ve been doing this collection for over ten years,
occasionally we’re still accosted by cops who look at our permits suspiciously,
certain we’re pulling something over on them.
Even without such laws, any business or organization that
owns property takes a liability risk when people use said property to solicit
from cars’ occupants. The operating presumption seems to be that people are
responsible for their own compliance with the law, but not for their own safety
while breaking the law. Churches are tax-exempt but not liability-exempt, even
when they do what most people expect them to do. And the Catholic Church,
strictly speaking, isn’t in the business or the habit of indiscriminate
lawbreaking, even in a good cause; we’re called to be subject to governing
authorities, who are in their way servants of God (cf. Romans 13:1-7), and to “give
to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” (Luke 20:25).
And yet, the irony remains.
The most clunky and useless phrase ever introduced to the
lexicon of American Catholicism is the post-Vatican II slogan, “preferential
option for the poor”. In over twenty years of admittedly sporadic
self-catechesis, I have yet to discern substantive content in this awkward
jumble. We don’t have an “option” or a “preference” for the poor — we have positive duties to feed the hungry,
clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, welcome the stranger, and give comfort
to the sick and imprisoned: “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the
least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40). Nor can we ask whether
the beggar is “deserving”: “charity to
the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who
require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for
them” (G. K. Chesterton, “Paganism
and Mr. Lowes Dickinson”, Heretics XII).
The beggar on the corner, accosting us as we go through our
daily routines, is at once an individual challenge and an individual opportunity
to live our Christian vocations. The fact that we have outreach ministries to
fulfill these obligations as a community
doesn’t relieve us of our individual
obligation to do what we can. We can create soup kitchens and homeless
shelters, but the poor can’t always get to them. To turn down a beggar on the
grounds that “I pay plenty of good money for Church-run programs, so if they
can’t be bothered to take advantage of them, it’s no fault of mine,” is not
much better than to say, with Ebenezer Scrooge, “Are there no prisons? And the
Union workhouses? They are still in operation? … I help to support the
establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off
must go there. If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease
the surplus population” (Charles Dickens, A
Christmas Carol).
Time was when beggars would collect directly outside the
doors of the church, knowing that congregants, fresh from being reminded of the
corporal
works of mercy (cf. Catechism of the
Catholic Church 2447), would
give to the beggars outside what they hadn’t already surrendered for the upkeep
of the church itself. What changed? Why, instead of shooing the beggars away
like so many pesky dogs, do we not bring them inside the doors? What demon of
respectability has got us more concerned with avoiding potential lawsuits than
with alleviating human misery?
There are those who would say that charity as such merely
prolongs poverty, that the poor would be better off if we directed our money to
investments in job producers. From my perspective, only a foolish physician
suspends treatment of the symptoms in the optimistic expectation that a cure
for the disease is right around the corner. Do we really have that much more
faith in free-market capitalism than we do in the teachings of the Church?
The Catechism
recalls to our memory the thundering pronouncement of St. John Chrysostom: “Not
to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them
of life. The goods we possess are not ours, but theirs” (Homily on Lazarus, 2:5). As well, it recalls to us the words of
Scripture, as God tells the Israelites, “For the poor will never
cease out of the land; therefore I command you, You shall open wide your hand
to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in the land” (Deuteronomy
15:11).
Now, there may have been more to this episode than meets the
eye; at least, Bret assured me of this in an email a couple of days later. And,
again, I’m sure there was a good reason for Fr. George’s action.
But I can’t shake the conviction that, on Divine Mercy
Sunday, we missed an opportunity to show mercy. God help us all.
