inside america

The Virtue
of Poverty

In a time of financial and moral crisis, what answers does the Church have to offer? According to the law of love, the key is in becoming even poorer than we already are, drawing from examples in our history, which is rich with accompaniment for our difficult way

The current discussions about the economic crisis provide a good opportunity to read (or re-read) Pope John Paul II’s play, “Our God’s Brother,” written when he was a young man in Communist Poland. It tells the story of Adam Hilary Bernard Chmielowski, a Polish patriot and artist born in 1845, who died on Christmas Day of 1916, was beatified in Poland by Pope John Paul on June 22, 1923, and canonized in Rome on November 12, 1989. On a certain day, Adam seeks refuge from the weather in what he thought was an abandoned building, only to find it full of poor people living in sub-human conditions. This shock inaugurates in him a search for how best to respond to this unbearable injustice, especially as a man of deep faith. The play revolves around the question, “What does faith make possible in response to such a situation of economic and political injustice?”
Although the main character of the play is thus a historical person, most of the others are fictional. In a certain way, they represent different answers to the question with which Adam interiorly struggles in order to arrive at his own response.
The different characters represent the various ideologies seeking to convince Adam of the reasonability of their views: capitalism, Marxism, socialism, charitable work, promotion of essential values, etc. At the end, Adam has exposed the fallacy in each one of these ideologies. The position that most tempts Adam is expressed by a character named “The Other.” The Other supports the way of fomenting a revolution that will destroy the unjust social structures causing the problem. For this reason, it is necessary to reject all other ways that might reduce the poor’s anger leading to revolution. The Other calls it “creative anger.”
At one point, Adam is struck by the words of his confessor who tells him, “Let yourself be molded by love.” A character representing “Intelligence” criticizes Adam for seeking ways beyond the limits of knowledge, and Adam replies, “I know one Force that surpasses me. It surpasses me infinitely in love…. This shames and humiliates me, but it also guides me, lets me develop…. I am simply overjoyed at the thought that someone as helpless as I, clumsy and lame, can rid himself of undeniable intelligence, can possess something that bypasses it, something that exposes it, unmasks it, betrays it…. I have freed myself from the tyranny of intelligence.” (Adam is clearly not commenting on stupidity. Instead, he is describing how his faith allows him to recognize ideology, reject it, and go beyond it. It is a matter of what Pope Benedict XVI has called the “broadening of reason.”)
At the end, facing the revolutionary character, Adam tells him, “Man’s poverty is deeper than the resources of all goods. All those goods that man can aspire to by the force of his anger…. I believe that man is to aspire to all goods. To all, to the greatest of them too. But here anger fails. Here Charity is essential. I want only to rouse this anger in the right way. It is one thing to cultivate a just anger, make it ripen and reveal itself as a creative power, and another to exploit this anger, use it as a raw material, and abuse it.” The Stranger replies, “The poor will not follow you.” Adam replies, “No, I will follow them.”
Adam Chmielowski embraced the way of poverty (“I have chosen the greater freedom,” he says). He became Brother Albert, founder of the Congregation of Albertine Brothers and Sisters, who to this day serve the poor. He was followed, after all. I believe this play helps us understand what Father Giussani calls the “virtue of poverty,” and the contribution it makes to a society that values it.