The Good Life from a Catholic Perspective: The Problem of
Consumption
by Monsignor Charles Murphy
“Christianity is not about feeding yourself. Christianity
begins with what people do with the leftovers.” —Professor
McKenna, whose field is social ethics, alluded to the biblical
miracle of the sharing of the loaves and the admonition that the
leftover fragments be gathered (Mt 14:20)
Faces fell. A certain religious
complacency was pierced, giving way to a degree of consciousness-raising.
It is startling to be told, in a culture as wasteful as ours,
that Christianity begins with what we do with our leftovers. Just
visit a typical school lunch program and see the mounds of garbage.
“Waste not, want not” means little to children brought
up to believe that if something does not meet your taste or adhere
to the current fashion, toss it.
A familiar statistic in this context begins to ring true: The
industrialized countries, with only one-fifth of the world’s
population, consume two-thirds of the world’s resources
and generate 75 percent of all the pollution and waste products.
The disparities between human beings who live in squalor and those
who have everything money can buy are glaring in a world brought
closer together through amazing advances in communication. This
great disparity denies social justice, leads to ecological tragedy,
and, most of all creates a misperception of what the good life
really is, which ultimately makes excessive consumption a religious
question.
What and how much we consume manifest our conception of who we
are and why we exist. The spiritual and cultural impoverishment
that are the natural by-products of consumerism are evident everywhere.
Money talks, but, as they say, “it has such a squeaky voice
and has so little to say.” How can our Catholic faith help
us to find a more satisfying life for ourselves and at the same
time make us more socially responsible in achieving it? I suggest
three ways: the cultivation of the natural virtue of temperance;
the gospel admonitions about the dangers of over-consumption and
the fundamental requirement of love of neighbor; and, finally,
the recent social teachings of the Church based upon both the
order of nature and the higher demands of gospel living. I will
also provide some indications of what the good life might be like
for us all.
More and more ethical theorists give credence to the role virtues
play in building character. Virtues are being seen and appreciated
anew because their cultivation can provide the inner strength
needed to live happily and successfully. Without these well-established
habits we are at the mercy of external stimuli, and we become
victims of our own disordered needs and passions. To be creative
and contributing members of society we need a structure that allows
us to use our gifts in a sustained way; the virtues provide such
a structure. They are a wisdom for living that was recognized
as far back as the ancient Greeks and beyond. The virtues are
honored in the Scriptures as part of a household code for living
on earth and were incorporated by the church fathers in their
syntheses of Christian life.
Among the four “cardinal,” or “hinge,”
virtues that humans find essential is the virtue of temperance;
with prudence, justice, and fortitude, temperance is regarded
as one of the hinges on which hangs the gate to a happy life.
In his classic study of the cardinal virtues, Josef Pieper is
quick to point out that the rich meaning of temperance is not
captured by the concept of moderation. Moderation is only a small
part of temperance, the negative part. According to St. Thomas
Aquinas, temperance gives order and balance to our life. It arises
from a serenity of spirit within oneself. This reasonable norm
allows us to walk gently upon the earth. Temperance teaches us
to cherish and enjoy the good things of life while respecting
natural limits. Temperance in fact does not diminish but actually
heightens the pleasure we take in living by freeing us from a
joyless compulsiveness and dependence. Temperance therefore means
a lot more than the so-called “temperance movement”
regarding the consumption of alcohol!
E.F. Schumacher, in his most influential book, Small is Beautiful:
Economics as if People Mattered, contrasts the consumerist
way of life which multiplies human wants with the simple life
whose aim is to achieve maximum well-being with the minimum use
of the earth’s resources. The “logic of production”
that demands more and more growth in consumption is a formula
for disaster, he argues. “Out of the whole Christian tradition,”
Schumacher concludes, “there is perhaps no body of teaching
which is more relevant and appropriate to the modern predicament
than the marvelously subtle and realistic doctrines of the Four
Cardinal Virtues” and in particular temperance that means
knowing when “enough is enough.”
When Pope John Paul II paid his first visit to the United States
in 1979, he delivered one of his most memorable homilies on the
subject of consumption. Speaking to a congregation gathered in
New York City at Yankee Stadium, the Holy Father said:
Christians will want to be in the vanguard in favoring ways of
life that decisively break with the frenzy of consumerism, exhausting
and joyless. It is not a question of slowing down progress, for
there is no human progress when everything conspires to give full
reign to the instincts of self-interest, sex and power. We must
find a simple way of living. For it is not right that the standard
of living of the rich countries would seek to maintain itself
by draining off a great part of the reserves of energy and raw
materials that are meant to serve the whole of humanity. For readiness
to create a greater and more equitable solidarity between peoples
is the first condition for peace. Catholics of the United States,
and all you citizens of the United States, you have such a tradition
of spiritual generosity, industry, simplicity and sacrifice that
you cannot fail to heed this call today for a new enthusiasm and
a fresh determination. It is in the joyful simplicity of a life
inspired by the Gospel and the Gospel’s spirit of fraternal
sharing that you will find the best remedy for sour criticism,
paralyzing doubt and the temptation to make money the principal
means and indeed the very measure of human advancement.
As the basis of his teaching, the Holy Father drew upon the parable
in St. Luke’s Gospel regarding Lazarus and the rich man.
The Lukan Gospel is particularly harsh regarding the hazards of
wealth. The parable may be read as another illustration of the
biblical saying that it is easier for a camel to pass through
the needle’s eye than for a rich person to enter God’s
kingdom (Lk 18:25). What is notable in the parable is that the
rich man is condemned because he is rich. Enclosed in his world
of wealth and self-sufficiency that wealth brings, he simply failed
to notice Lazarus begging at his gate, much less help him. Even
the natural world, symbolized by the dogs licking Lazarus’
sores, displayed more sympathy. The rich man’s incurable
spiritual condition continues into eternity; he continues to regard
Lazarus as a social inferior and begs Abraham to dispatch Lazarus
with a message of warning to his brothers. Abraham explains that
this is impossible: the “abyss” between Lazarus and
the rich man is “too great” (Lk 16:19ff).
St. Matthew tempers the first of Jesus’ beatitudes with
the qualifying “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Mt
5:3); in Luke Jesus boldly declares, “Blessed are you who
are poor, for the kingdom of God is yours” (Lk 6:20). Why
are the poor in such an advantageous position? It is because in
the Bible the poor ones have only Yahweh to look to for their
help; thus they are able to recognize the radical human dependency
that is the condition of every creature before God. Wealth, on
the other hand, creates the illusion of independence and self-sufficiency,
a dangerous posture.
Going beyond human virtues like temperance, the Gospel demands
a “higher righteousness.” Jesus tells the rich young
man who says he has observed all the commandments since childhood,
“There is still one thing left for you: sell all that you
have and distribute it to the poor, and you will have a treasure
in heaven. Then come, follow me” (Lk 18:22). Jesus demands
detachment from wealth and prescribes the just use of monetary
resources. As later church teaching highlights, he asks that our
preferential love go particularly to the poor. Included today
with the poor and the exploited must be the whole natural world.
When the Church fathers take up the same theme of personal consumption,
they not only have the spiritual dangers of wealth in mind but
also the idyllic common life that Luke describes in the Acts of
the Apostles. There all things were held in common and distributed
according to everyone’s need (Acts 2:44-45). In his 1967
encyclical letter on the development of peoples, Populorum
Progressio, Pope Paul VI drew upon St. Ambrose to emphasize
the universal purpose of all created things, a purpose not abrogated
when certain things become someone’s private property. St.
Ambrose wrote: You are not making a gift of your possessions to
the poor person. You are handing over to him what is his. For
what has been given in common for the use of all, you have abrogated
to yourself. The world is given to all, and not only to the rich.
St. Basil, in a much-quoted homily, once declared that the bread
we clutch in our hands belongs to the starving, the cloak we keep
locked up in our closet belongs to the naked, the shoes that we
are not using belong to the barefooted. In these ways in the post-biblical
age Christians strove to keep a religious perspective on their
use of material things.
Part of the background of Pope Paul IV’s encyclical Populorum
Progressio was a journey he made to India where he saw firsthand
its wretched poverty. In that encyclical he proposed a fundamental
human right to development, a right he saw as impeded by the phenomenon
of “overdevelopment” in some parts of the world. But
even as he advocated the cause of development, Pope Paul was careful
to give a distinctively Christian interpretation to what desirable
development might be: it is, he said, the right not to “have”
more but to “be” more.
Pope John Paul II built upon these insights when in 1991 he wrote
Centesimus Annus. Although the occasion for this encyclical
was the 100th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum
that started the whole modern phase of the Church’s social
teaching, John Paul focused on the new opportunities and dangers
accompanying the collapse of the communist ideology. With market
forces now unleashed across the world, he cautioned about consumer
attitudes and lifestyles that could be improper and also damaging
physically and spiritually. “It is not wrong to want to
live better,” he writes; “what is wrong is a style
of life which is presumed to be better when it is directed towards
‘having’ rather than ‘being’, and which
wants to have more, not in order to be more but in order to spend
life in enjoyment as an end in itself” (No. 36). “Equally
worrying,” he goes on, “is the ecological
question which accompanies the problem of consumerism and
which is closely connected to it. In his desire to have and to
enjoy rather than to be and to grow, man consumes the resources
of the earth and his own life in an excessive and disordered way”
(No. 37).
Consumer choices and consumer demands are moral and cultural
expressions of how we conceive of life. Is life all about working
and spending and working more to have more to spend? Could not
it rather all be about contemplation, what the pope calls a “disinterested,
unselfish and aesthetic attitude that is born of wonder in the
presence of being and of the beauty which enables one to see in
visible things the message of the invisible God who created them”
( No. 37)?
The question of defining more accurately what the good life is
has become especially acute. In her helpful book, The Overworked
American: The Unexpected Decline in Leisure, Juliet Schor
documents how American households find themselves locked into
an insidious cycle of work and spend. Households go into debt
to buy products they do not need and then work longer than they
want in order to keep up with the payments. She makes the telling
observation that “shopping is the chief cultural activity
in the United States.”
The good life should allow people to work at things that are
personally satisfying and expressive of themselves. In his encyclical
on the subject, Laborum Exercens, Pope John Paul calls
this the “subjective” value of work. The good life
should include also a certain leisure for, as Josef Pieper wrote,
leisure is the basis of human culture. There should be opportunities
to contribute to the common good as well as to pursue personal
happiness. There should be time for family and friends, for worship
and prayer. There also should be a certain asceticism to include
a rediscovery of the benefits of fasting.
Fasting is part of the Gospel. It helps us to focus on the nourishment
that can only come from God. It encourages good health and enhances
our enjoyment of the good things of life, freeing us from a certain
deadness in spirit. A reemphasis on fasting may not only put us
in touch again with a gospel ideal but also increase our ecological
awareness as we sparingly use scarce earthly resources. Fasting
in the modern world can have a strong social justice meaning.
Thomas Merton in his Thoughts in Solitude raises the specter
of the desertification of life on this planet. The desert, he
writes, once was a privileged place for the encounter with God
because there humanity could find nothing to exploit. “Yet
look at deserts today. What are they?” He says they have
become testing grounds for bombs as well as the locations for
glittering towns “through whose veins money runs like artificial
blood.” “The desert moves everywhere. Everywhere is
desert,” Merton concludes.
In her enlightening book, Ancient Futures, Learning from Ladakh,
Helena Norbert-Hodge offers hopeful patterns for future living
from the ancient ways of a once isolated Himalayan village. In
Ladakh she encountered a society “in which there is neither
waste nor pollution, a society in which crime is virtually non-existent,
communities are healthy and strong, and a teenage boy is never
embarrassed to be gentle or affectionate with his mother or grandmother.”
Perhaps we cannot save pockets of ancient wisdom like Ladakh
from modern influence. What we can do is discover “ancient
futures” in the abundant resources of Catholic social teaching
and make our own choices for living based upon its wisdom.
—
Monsignor Charles Murphy is pastor
of St. Pius X Church in Portland, Maine, and theological advisor
to the bishop of Portland. He was formerly the academic dean and
rector of the North American College in Vatican City and adjunct
professor of fundamental theology and social ethics at St. John’s
Seminary in Boston.
This article is a reproduction of a piece included in the Environmental
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