St. Josemaría’s Love for the Poor
By Martin Schlag
Few themes raise as much passion
as that of socio-economic poverty and the material misery in which individuals
and large swaths of the population find themselves. Revolutions, protests, and
class struggles have been and are still today social convulsions grounded in
conditions of indigence: the human sense of justice rebels against the gravely
unequal distribution of the goods of the earth and even more so a Christian
heart, imbued with the spirit of justice and charity proclaimed and lived
exemplarily by Jesus of Nazareth.
Likewise, poverty, in its
ascetical and spiritual aspect, as a personal and collective virtue, has raised
enduring controversies even within the ecclesial community; for instance,
within the Franciscans of the 13th century. Perennial tensions arise on the
question of poverty: How to live it? In what measure is an absolute lack of
possessions necessary in order to live “evangelical” poverty and identify in
this way with Jesus Christ? And in what measure is a Christian obliged to give
alms to the poor? Only from surplus? Or even from what is necessary? What is
necessary?
All these questions are not just
academic; they get into the daily life of each Christian, conscious that, at
the final judgement, Christ will judge us according to our works of love and
mercy.
It can be categorically affirmed
that St. Josemaría lived and taught a “preferential but not exclusive option
for the poor,” a phrase coined in 1968 that has since become one of the basic
principle of Catholic social teaching. Yet demonstrating this affirmation
presents a complex challenge. The Founder of Opus Dei never used the term
itself due to its immediate co-option by the Marxist interpreters of liberation
theology (the term was only rehabilitated after his death when St. John Paul II
used it at Puebla in 1979), so showing the correlation of his own words with
the term “preferential option for the poor” we must correctly interpret his
words without making the author say things he didn’t or, on the contrary, failing
to discover his richness of content when dressed in unfamiliar clothing.
Christocentric Love for the Poor
In order to orient our
exploration, let’s clarify that the concept we want to examine here is that of
the love of the poor in the socio-economic sense, i.e., the poor understood as
a social group, distinct from the powerful and owners of goods. Therefore, this
article does not deal with detachment, except that it is impossible to speak of
love for the poor according to the mind of St. Josemaría without mentioning the
virtue of poverty, because both values, love for the poor and poverty, spring
from the same source: the desire of the Christian to imitate Christ, our Lord,
to the point of becoming one with Jesus, our model. In other words, the source,
motive and propelling force of love for the poor is the love for Christ. First comes love for the Lord and, later,
love for the poor. Certainly, when one
