Several decades ago, I worked for an organization called the Committee for Boston Public Housing (CBPH). My work involved listening to tenants in pubic housing and assisting them to pursue both their needs and their dreams, to collectively speak truth to power, and to work together with one another to demand dignity, rights, and decent and safe housing conditions. Needless to say (sadly), the Department of Housing and Urban Development, now under the leadership of Dr. Ben Carson, no longer funds what were then called Resident Initiative Grants, and CBPH, like so many other similar groups, no longer exists.
While I was an employee of CBPH, during one rally, a woman named Dotty, who lived in public housing, addressed the crowd and gathered media, and made this simple yet profound and memorable declaration:
“Do you all know why people are poor?!” [pause for murmuring to die down] “It’s because we don’t have money!”
It’s that basic. People are poor because they don’t have money. One can debate the question of why they don’t have money, and there are as many answers as there are people (rich or poor or in between). Yet whatever the reasons (excessive medical bills, heartless capitalism, a drunk and dissolute lifestyle, lack of education, laziness, predatory lending practices, bad luck, mental health issues, unlivable working wages, too many children, insufficient support services, learned helplessness, enforced helplessness, greed, addiction, racism–I’m sure I could go on for pages listing reasons why particular individuals or families are in poverty)–still, it boils down to this: People are poor because they don’t have money.
Today’s saint was a Portuguese queen named Elizabeth, who lived in the late 1200s and early 1300s. She was one of those insufferably pious-from-childhood saint-types (she couldn’t bear to hear any music but psalms of praise, she didn’t engage in a single idle moment of laughter lest it distract from her prayers, all her companions were of the edifying variety)… BUT she never once regarded her interior sanctity as having an existence apart from caring for those with less. For Elizabeth, there was NO Christian option that included piety without care for the poor. These were not only intertwined for her spiritually–they were inseparable: all part of her daily walk with God.
One thing that Elizabeth realized–and made a point of leaving her castle regularly (one might almost say “religiously”) to attend to–was the plight of poor young women, many of whom were runaways and who lived on the city streets. Elizabeth recognized that many of these women would turn to prostitution to provide for themselves in the short term and that, for these girls, there more than likely would be no such thing as “the long term.” Elizabeth also knew that the difference for many (not all, but many) of these girls was something that she herself had: no, not “Christian morals” and “righteousness before God” but, in fact, MONEY. Elizabeth had money, these girls did not, and Elizabeth knew that if she could help these girls get on their feet financially, many of them could actually lead lives with good long-term prospects.
Butler describes this all very, very primly and with an unwarranted moralizing:
She [Elizabeth] was very liberal in furnishing fortunes [did you see that–not a quarter here, or maybe a dollar there, but FORTUNES!] to poor young women, that they might marry according to their condition, and not be exposed to the danger of losing their virtue.
Elizabeth did not go to these young women and invite them to come to church. She did not go to them and tell them the Good News of Jesus Christ. She did not go to them and lecture them about chastity or even present herself as a model of virtue to emulate (after all, how many queens could Portugal sustain at any given time?!). Elizabeth did not blame them for their condition or threaten hell-fire if they did turn to lives of prostitution. No–she simply bestowed fortunes on them, with the hope that this would open up possibilities for them to live meaningful lives of their own choosing. Butler’s assumption is that this meant such young women could preserve their virginity and marry into “decent families.” There is no evidence that (1) these young women had this kind of chastity when Elizabeth found them, or (2) that Elizabeth gave them fortunes with conditions attached (ideas like “you may have food stamps, but don’t spent them on anything anyone would actually enjoy eating!”).
No, Elizabeth knew that what made these young street girls poor was . . . they did not have money! And she knew that she could do something about that, at least in her own corner of the world.