DomainTom Holland's book is probably the best history of Christianity published to date. Aside from revealing the immense global influence of Christian cultural values, beyond the religious sphere, the reader may reach the last page with the feeling that there is nothing new under the sun. If we limit ourselves to the realm of the Catholic, or universal, Church, it is evident that it has never ceased to revolve around two fundamental issues: poverty and purity. Now, as the world plunges into a dizzying crisis, both issues are highly topical. And they demand clear positions. The question of priestly purity or impurity has resurfaced in recent decades, with the continuous denunciations of abuse and rape by members of the clergy. And the Doctors of the Church have continued to refer to an idea formulated in the fourth century to oppose the Donatists.
The North African bishop Donatus believed that the numerous members of the clergy who, during the persecution of Christians ordered by Emperor Diocletian, had committed apostasy (that is, had publicly renounced their faith) to save their lives, could not continue administering sacraments once Diocletian died and the persecution ended.
But Donatus's enemies, who ultimately prevailed, decided otherwise. The validity of the sacrament depended exclusively on ordination and the rite, without the priest's impiety being relevant. It was a corporatist solution: the Church had to protect its own. The successive cases of covered-up and tolerated pedophilia point to this formula, which under Popes Francis and Leo XIV seems to finally be called into question.
The doctrine on wealth and poverty presents a seemingly irresolvable theological problem. There is no doubt about Jesus's position: the parable of the rich man, the camel, and the eye of the needle; the "woe to the rich"; the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. The first Christians gave away their possessions and shared everything: about that, too, there is no doubt. But from the Edict of Milan (313 AD), with brief interruptions such as that of Julian, the rapid transformation of Christianity into the official religion of the Roman Empire normalized the figure of the wealthy Christian. Many bishops, including Donatus himself, opposed this relativization of one of the basic pillars of their faith. And they often used violence. Wealth, they claimed, was incompatible with salvation: the Gospels proved it. Augustine of Hippo, the Hobbes of Christianity, a great pessimist about the human condition, appealed to pragmatism: if his religion was to be truly universal, it had to include both the poorest and the richest. And he resorted to a flimsy but effective resource: the passage from Mark that he attributes to Jesus (all the phrases attributed to Jesus are supposed: see the monumental work A marginal Jew(From the work of Father John P. Meier, on the enigmatic historical Jesus) the following quote: "For you will always have the poor with you, and you can do good to them whenever you wish, but you will not always have me." Therein lay the proof, according to Augustine, that there would always be poor people. And, therefore, rich people. He won. status quo
After the emergence in the 16th century of Protestant sects, such as Calvinism, which interpreted wealth as a direct sign of divine blessing, Catholicism has played both sides. Today, there are Catholic groups that feel no qualms—quite the contrary—about their members becoming rich without limits (Opus Dei, Legionaries of Christ), and grassroots movements that advocate humility and poverty. The Vatican, both in its daily operations and through papal encyclicals, continues to favor the former.
The fact is that, relatively recently, global wealth has tended to concentrate in the hands of a few. Some of these hands (let's take Elon Musk or Donald Trump as examples) even proclaim themselves moralists and invoke "Christian values" to justify themselves and a "new order" dominated by magnates.
At some point, the Catholic hierarchy should take a stand on this phenomenon that obliterates any ethical principle, Christian or secular. But the Vatican has been floundering for centuries when it comes to the accumulation of wealth.
