Earlier this week, just a few days before the release of Dilexi te, I read a talk delivered by financier and major Catholic donor Frank Hanna III, given at the Napa Institute summer conference this past July. Nothing could possibly present a sharper contrast to the vision of Catholicism presented by the Holy Father in Dilexi te.
For Hanna,
- “profit is the benefit that results from a mixture of God’s Providence and the work done by a human being” – with no cognizance taken of inherited privilege, unjust social structures or resort to ruthless practices. This description would be better suited to a farmer’s fields or a craftsman’s bench than to Wall Street or the halls of power. Dilexi te has an entire subsection (90-98) entitled “Structures of sin that create poverty and extreme inequality.”
- “there is a plenitude of inequality throughout the world that God gave us. We might even go so far as to say that God gave us inequality” and that inequality “works… for a greater good that cannot be achieved were it not there” – without distinguishing inequalities belonging to nature from those which are the product of human laws or customs which, in a fallen world, can never be assumed to be God-given and are often demonstrably structures of sin. Hanna further declares a divinely ordained inequality (not difference) between men and women (with a concession to a “complementarity” that seems less like St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body than like Fundamentalist Protestant Complementarianism.)
- “the market economy, and the pursuit of profit… are teeming with fault. But as I have mentioned, the world is teeming with fault. Because human nature is teeming with fault.” Yet the measure of the market economy is profit; the measure of profit, in turn, is monetary – and within what the positive law permits, money serves to conceal any fault attached to how it is acquired. Thus, profit and conscience are often at cross-purposes. Meanwhile, as the pope writes in Dilexi te,
There is no shortage of theories attempting to justify the present state of affairs or to explain that economic thinking requires us to wait for invisible market forces to resolve everything. Nevertheless, the dignity of every human person must be respected today, not tomorrow, and the extreme poverty of all those to whom this dignity is denied should constantly weigh upon our consciences.(92)
- “if wealth is not increased, there will be greater envy over its fixed supply.” Hanna seems to believe that the key pitfall associated with inequality is envy – which pales in comparison to the sin and crime of abject destitution met with indifference. Hanna’s response to this is rather mixed: he rightly admonishes the wealthy to credit divine Providence for their good fortune, rather than claiming to have done everything themselves, yet he thereby tacitly attributes the wretchedness of the destitute to the same divine Providence – reducing them to mere props for the benevolence of the successful and fortunate. The cries of the harvesters are reduced to meek murmurs of gratitude for the voluntary offerings of their benefactors.
- “If you look around the free economies of the world, the laborer has actually raised his standard of living at a much greater rate of improvement than the owner. There was a much larger discrepancy in their respective daily lives 100 years ago than there is today.” To whatever extent that this is true in the Global North (which is limited; in his recent interview with Elise Ann Allen, Pope Leo noted the suggestion that Elon Musk may soon become the world’s first trillionaire – which would involve Mr. Musk achieving a net worth somewhat over five million times that of the median American household), due credit must be given to trade unionism, state-sponsored technological developments, and anti-trust and anti-monopolistic legal work. More importantly, though, the widening disparity between the richest and the poorest worldwide deprives the latter of the precarious dignity of subsistence, tethering them to the factories, the industrial waste, and the extractive economies of the former – as a thought experiment, consider what would have become of medieval Europe if it had had to share the planet with the kind of technologically dominant “free economy” that Hanna lauds. Pope Leo quotes Pope Francis’s words from Fratelli Tutti: “The claim that the modern world has reduced poverty is made by measuring poverty with criteria from the past that do not correspond to present-day realities.”(13) Apologists for the status quo are eager to absolutize material gains over and against past societies, while relativizing material inequities among present ones – yet inequalities between past and present are material for scholarly speculation, while present-day geographic inequalities constitute a call to action.
- “God wants us to take risks!!! For profit! Risk is a function of uncertainty, and God insists in this world He created on us having uncertainty. We cannot store up the manna that falls on the earth. We must pray for our daily bread every day. That is how He designed it! He wanted uncertainty.” Yet for billions in the world, risk and uncertainty are not a choice and have less to do with profit than with the stern task of survival. Even for the wealthiest, mere economic considerations pale in the face of the illness, injury, and death that can come for any of us at any time, however capacious our grain silos. It is forgetfulness of this vulnerability that underlies both the disorders Hanna deplores and the ones he excuses or promotes.
Even within the limits of his own presumptions, Hanna falls short – castigating the wealthy for small-souledness, lack of trust in Providence, and quenching the entrepreneurial spirit by limiting their progeny to ensure their security – yet would it not show far more confidence (and be more entrepreneurial) to dispense with inherited wealth largely or even altogether, in order that more people might share in the culture of opportunity and profit unavailable to those immersed in the struggle for survival?
In short, Hanna is imagining a culture of faith conformed to his own experience – the male breadwinner who plunges himself headlong into the “free market,” avails himself of all the opportunities within his grasp, fathers a large family, and donates amply to the Church. Such, he reasons, is lay life.[1]
A cursory examination of Scripture yields numerous passages – the parable of the workers in the marketplace in Matthew 20[2], the account of the rich young man in the Synoptics, the voluntary communism of the early Christians in Acts 4, the condemnations running through the Book of Amos in the Old Testament and the Letter of James in the New, among many others – which present a radically different picture. And while many commentators seem to have missed the point, Dilexi te offers something more again, calling the world to pay heed to “the source of wisdom that is the experience of the poor.” (102)
From the very beginnings of the document, the Holy Father tells us to look for Christ in the poor:
Love for the Lord, then, is one with love for the poor. The same Jesus who tells us, “The poor you will always have with you” (Mt 26:11), also promises the disciples: “I am with you always” (Mt 28:20). We likewise think of his saying: “Just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me” (Mt 25:40). This is not a matter of mere human kindness but a revelation: contact with those who are lowly and powerless is a fundamental way of encountering the Lord of history. In the poor, he continues to speak to us. (5)
By the same token, our times and our technologies offer previously unknown avenues of abuse and indifference, layering the poverty of Christ with new levels of indignity: “the old forms of poverty that we have become aware of and are trying to combat are being joined by new ones, sometimes more subtle and dangerous.” (10) One might consider, for instance, the offshoring of millions of tons of potentially toxic waste to the Global South, or the corrupting effects of the unprecedented gulf between the richest and poorest in today’s world, which makes available to the elites of poor countries lives of luxury unimaginable to kings and rulers of past centuries, in exchange for selling the birthrights of their brothers and sisters.
To be sure, Dilexi te specifically addresses the earthly poverty into which our Lord chose to be born, in his human nature. Yet Leo consistently cites the deeper truth of poverty:
Lives can actually be turned around by the realization that the poor have much to teach us about the Gospel and its demands. By their silent witness, they make us confront the precariousness of our existence. The elderly, for example, by their physical frailty, remind us of our own fragility, even as we attempt to conceal it behind our apparent prosperity and outward appearance. The poor, too, remind us how baseless is the attitude of aggressive arrogance with which we frequently confront life’s difficulties. They remind us how uncertain and empty our seemingly safe and secure lives may be. (109)
In this we see yet another refutation of the paradigm handed down by the Enlightenment, liberal or neoliberal as one may be pleased to call it, that identifies human existence with independence and free rational agency. However much these goods pertain to fulfilling our vocations and missions on Earth, they remain privileges that some of us enjoy, over some part of our lives. Illness, infirmity, and death are deeper realities which will come to us all.
Another point in which Leo is following on the work of Francis is in his rejection of excusing ourselves from our proper place among the poor and defenseless by utilitarian sleight-of-hand:
At times, pseudo-scientific data are invoked to support the claim that a free market economy will automatically solve the problem of poverty. Or even that we should opt for pastoral work with the so-called elite, since, rather than wasting time on the poor, it would be better to care for the rich, the influential and professionals, so that with their help real solutions can be found and the Church can feel protected. It is easy to perceive the worldliness behind these positions, which would lead us to view reality through superficial lenses, lacking any light from above, and to cultivate relationships that bring us security and a position of privilege. (114)
Resort to a Catholic version of “effective altruism” should be fairly well excluded; the enduring scandal of the relation of the Church to wealth and power though the centuries of a bygone Christendom should have been enough in itself to refute such a course of action.
Perhaps a cogent way to summarize the difference between Hanna’s approach and that of the Holy Father is to see that what Hanna proposes is a Christianizing, as comprehensive in scope as its resources can accomplish but fundamentally no more than surface-level, of an intrinsically pagan cosmos, while Pope Leo clearly sees, hidden beneath structures of sin, elements of a divine order which remain attainable to fallen man – in short, the city of man versus the City of God. In this, may we take courage from this vision of our Augustinian pope.
Image: Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated
[1] Sadly, Hanna’s own career demonstrates that even – perhaps especially – for those who can access such a lifestyle, this gleaming façade of success and largess can entail a deeper entanglement with darkness. As WPI contributor Dawn Eden Goldstein has shown, Hanna’s fortune derives in great part from the subprime credit card company he co-founded – a business model based on lending money at interest to the poor, a practice criticized by Scripture and recent Church proclamations alike. Hanna’s company, moreover, paid $114 million in damages (in a settlement, with no admission of wrongdoing) in response to allegations that their products had misled borrowers and charged exorbitant fees. As Dilexi te states: “The illusion of happiness derived from a comfortable life pushes many people towards a vision of life centered on the accumulation of wealth and social success at all costs, even at the expense of others and by taking advantage of unjust social ideals and political-economic systems that favor the strongest.” (11)
[2] Compare this, from Hanna’s address:
Biologically, when a litter of kittens is born, there may be more kittens than the mother can feed. And so the kittens struggle against one another for food from their mother. And sometimes, one of them dies for lack of nourishment, or goes through the rest of life as the “runt of the litter.”
with this from Scripture:
When it was evening the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Summon the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and ending with the first.’ When those who had started about five o’clock came, each received the usual daily wage.
Give us this day our daily bread: the day laborers in the marketplace earned for a day’s work enough to feed themselves and their families. Partial wages would have meant hunger such that, like the unfortunate kittens in Mr. Hanna’s example, the smaller and weaker of the laborer’s children could over time be stunted, or even die. As Pope Leo writes in Dilexi te: “The poor are not there by chance or by blind and cruel fate. Nor, for most of them, is poverty a choice. Yet, there are those who still presume to make this claim, thus revealing their own blindness and cruelty.” The cruelty of these remarks from Hanna coming as the world was starting to reckon with the starvation of children in Gaza is hard to reconcile with any conception of Christian charity.
Dr. Paul Chu is currently a philosophy instructor for CTState, the Connecticut Community College, and has previously taught philosophy in college, university, and seminary settings. He also served as a staff writer and editor for various national publications. He is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport dedicated to honoring the beauty and holiness of God through artistic and intellectual creativity founded in prayer, especially Eucharistic contemplation. He contributes regularly to https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/.
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