Your life as a "fool for God," your life of love and joy—it makes me want to follow you. But I cannot understand why you demand such absolute poverty.
You were born to wealth and privilege. Your family, your education, groomed you to be, had you chosen it, a prosperous merchant, a cheerful poet, an illustrious patron, or a brilliant knight. Instead, you chose the strictest poverty and beggary.
You refused to own anything. You distrusted all wealth, every form of superiority, every kind of learning.
You called your followers "the Lesser Ones" and forbade them to be learned, to lead, or to possess. You swam against the current of your age. Yet there you were, a voluntary pauper, singing your joy, your peace—a soul that reflected the peace of Christ himself.
I know the poor are simple, dependent, humble, at the service of others. They are also vulnerable, despised, treated as fools. But I also know they are free.
But do you really expect us to imitate you today? Do you want us to abandon family, home, profession, possessions—to go begging in the streets without even a staff to lean on?
The Gospel itself stands against you. You cannot ignore that it holds up as an example the servant who increased his five talents a hundredfold, not the one who buried his money in the ground as quickly as he could.
Should we not fight against poverty? Is it not scandalous—at the end of the twentieth century, when we can walk on the moon and send rockets to Mars and Venus—that entire nations still starve, that whole populations languish in destitution? Social classes and ethnic groups are humiliated and oppressed. The elderly are neglected, the sick abandoned. And then there are all the moral miseries: depression, suicide, addiction.
Is it not our duty to struggle against every kind of suffering—collective or individual, material or spiritual or moral?
And if doing this means that nations, communities, and individuals must give up some of their goods to other nations, other communities, other individuals—is that not simple justice?
In our eyes, people of the twentieth century, poverty is not a virtue to practice but a plague to destroy. What was posed to you in terms of renunciation is posed to us in terms of struggle and social conflict.
This shift in perspective makes your demand for poverty almost repugnant.
Francis, what can you say to my questions?