The Church and the Wealth Problem

By Colman McCarthy

Form-letter appeals for money regularly come in my mail from religious orders explaining how they are doing the Lord’s work, and wouldn’t I like to contribute a few bucks. Or a lot of them. A recent request came from the abbot of a Trappist monastery, another from a superior of the Sacred Heart sisters, and a third from a Jesuit missionary in Africa.

That’s in the last week.

I send no money and throw out throw out the letters, along with the flotsam of unwanted Land’s End catalogues, real estate brochures, credit card hustles, campaign literature and supermarket flyers announcing buy-one-get-one-free specials for Cheetos.

Cold, heartless me not to help God’s true servants. Maybe. My problem is that I don’t like giving money to rich people. That Trappist monastery again. It sits in beatific quietude on hundreds of prime east coast acres, next to the highest income county in America. The Sacred Heart sisters run schools on land in some of America’s wealthiest real estate markets: Greenwich, Conn., Bethesda, Md., Princeton, N.J., Newton, Mass. Same for the Jesuits, including one college whose campus has an 18 hole golf course that salivating developers are offering millions for.

As much as I cherish their good deeds, one fact remains: these and other religious orders are land rich but revenue poor. If their incomes are as fretfully low as their fundraising letters suggest, why not sell the properties and cash in on the real estate market.

What then? Pool their money and use the wealth to support the aging and infirm religious—especially nuns who have long been the American church’s slave labor. It would be a return to the spirit of the early church, as in the Acts of the Apostles when Christian communism was taken seriously: “And all believers were together and had all things in common. And those who had possessions sold them and divided to each person according to need.”

Religious orders assuredly do have possessions. As the world’s second largest land-owner, after McDonald’s, the Church of Rome could instruct its American orders to begin selling their properties and stop hitting up the laity who are burdened with mortgages, college bills, health costs, layoffs and fragile pensions. And aren’t religious people, along with the rest of us, supposed to be detached from material possessions? That’s what I was told by a Jesuit retreat master who extolled the great virtue of detachment.

I cherish the work of the religious orders, but it’s reality time. Their numbers are low getting lower, novices are few and more members are in their 70s, 80s and 90s than 20s and 30s. Their time has passed, as it has passed or is passing for scores of icons and beacons once thought to be permanent: Marxism, Whigs, labor unions, Eastern Airlines, Dan Rather, June Cleaver, phonographs, tail fins, soda fountains and the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Is the decline and dying out of religious orders really that harsh a loss? Hardly. The nation’s energy and passion for idealism and altruism is strong, except it surfaces in different forms—not in vowed commitments to obey the rule of a saint or the commands of a pope but in joining the toil of thousands of public interest, human rights, social justice and peace organizations that are flourishing.

Life without the Trappists, the Sacred Hearts and Jesuits and the rest who have given much will be different but it won’t be worse. With the inflow of cash from property sales, and counsel from Charles Schwab, the orders can divide their loot and take proper care of their members without sending letters grubbing for money that just tick off opinionated grumps like me.