Christian Mission and Poverty

Chapter 4: Holy Poverty

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To what dangers and sufferings people will submit themselves on land and sea to acquire great wealth, to return to their own city with pleasures and honors! Yet they neither try nor care to acquire the virtues or to suffer the least bit of pain to have them, though these are the riches of the soul. They are totally immersed [in their wealth], and their heart and affection, which ought to be serving me, they have set on wealth, loading their conscience with all sorts of unlawful gains. See to what wretchedness they have come, what it is they serve: not firm and stable things but changeable things, so that today they are rich, tomorrow poor. Now they are high up, now low. Now they are feared and respected by the world because of their wealth, and now they are ridiculed for having lost it. They are treated with reproach and shame and no compassion, because they were loved and made themselves loved for their riches and not for their virtue. If they had made themselves loved and been loved for their virtue, they would have lost neither respect nor love, because they would have lost only their temporal possessions but not the riches of virtue. Oh, what a heavy weight these are to their conscience! They are so heavy that they can neither run along this road of pilgrimage nor pass through the narrow gate. Thus my Truth said in the holy Gospel that it is more impossible for a rich person to enter eternal life than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle . . . They cannot pass through the gate because it is narrow and low. Only if they throw their load to the ground and restrain their affection for the world and bow their head in humility will they be able to pass through. And there is no other gate but this that leads to eternal life.