25th Sunday 2022
Amos 8:4-7; 1Tim 2:1-8; Luke 16: 1-13
In 1996, in preparation for the following year’s General Election, the Bishops of England and Wales issued a document entitled “The Common Good”, to be distributed to all the parishes in those nations. It was a magnificent piece of work. It did not attempt to tell people for which party they should vote: instead, it set out some of the criteria on which they should base their choice.
These criteria were rooted, exactly as they should have been, in the Gospels and in Catholic Social Teaching. There was a move away from what had tended to be, and which still is in the United States, an almost exclusive emphasis on abortion, an emphasis which had proved misleading as, whatever party had been in power, the situation regarding abortion had remained unchanged.
Instead, there was a much broader reflection on, and call for, social justice, in which abortion continued to play a part, but in which there was a statement of, and indeed insistence on, an appropriate use of wealth, the rights of all people, and especially the poorest, both in this country and abroad, and a condemnation of what Pope Francis, almost two decades later, was to call “unbridled capitalism”, in the course of a denunciation which led to his being labelled a Marxist by elements in the USA. It should be pointed out that Francis was following in the footsteps of his predecessors, and that St.John Paul II, who was Pope in 1996, was equally determined in denouncing the excesses involved in the pursuit of money.
In this, the English bishops, and a long succession of Popes, were echoing Jesus’ demands in the Gospels. Today, we hear scathing comments from Our Lord about those who are slaves of money, accompanied by His, at first sight rather puzzling, parable of the dishonest steward, who is praised by his master because they are, in fact, two of a kind, the master as much of a rogue as the steward, both of them prisoners of money.
Our Lord Himself was very much in the tradition of the Jewish prophets. We have heard Amos, more than 700 years before Jesus, denouncing those who oppress the poor, cheating them and perpetuating their poverty. Thus we have an unbroken line from the prophets, through Our Lord, to twentieth and twenty first century bishops and Popes; and next week we shall learn what Our Lord meant by telling His disciples to use money to win them friends, as we shall hear the parable of the rich man, who should have used his money to befriend the poor man Lazarus.
1996’s document from the bishops was derided by the then editor of The Times, himself a Catholic and the father of a current cabinet minister, as being “economically illiterate”. Presumably, he would have considered Jesus to be economically illiterate too. Indeed, Our Lord seems to commend a degree of economic illiteracy to His followers, when He comments that “the children of this world are more astute when dealing with their own kind than are the children of light”. He is pointing out that money has an inbuilt tendency to corrupt its possessors, and that those who seek to acquire wealth will become less sympathetic to the needs of the poor.
Today, both this country and the world at large face massive financial crises, as people struggle with meteoric rises in the cost of living. Governments, including our own, have a responsibility to ensure that the basic needs of the poorest are met. The question is one, not of economic literacy, but of justice and compassion, just as was stated by the bishops a quarter of a century ago, as they sought to follow in the footsteps of Jesus and the prophets.
