Tell me, whence are you rich? From whom have you received? From your grandfather, you say; from your father. Are you able to show, ascending in the order of generation, that that possession is just throughout the whole series of preceding generations? Its beginning and root grew necessarily out of injustice. Why? Because God did not make this man rich and that man poor from the beginning. Nor, when He created the world, did He allot much treasure to one man, and forbid another to seek any. He gave the same earth to be cultivated by all. Since, therefore, His bounty is common, how comes it that you have so many fields, and your neighbor not even a clod of earth?... The idea we should have of the rich and covetous—they are truly as robbers, who, standing in the public highway, despoil the passers.
By St. Augustine
(Latin; 354-430)
The superfluities of the rich are the necessaries of the poor. They who possess superfluities, possess the goods of others.
By St. Gregory the Great
(Latin; 540-604)
They must be admonished who do not seek another’s goods, yet do not give of their own, that they may know that the earth from which they have received is common to all men, and therefore its products are given in common to all. They, therefore, wrongly think they are innocent who claim for themselves the common gift of God. When they do not give what they have received, they assist in the death of neighbors, because daily almost as many of the poor perish as have been deprived of means which the rich have kept to themselves. When we give necessaries to the needy we do not bestow upon them our goods; we return to them their own; we pay a debt of justice rather than fulfil a work of mercy.
The Annexing of Christianity[U]
(From “The Call of the Carpenter”)
By Bouck White