In the seventeenth century, there was a great flowering of religious congregations dedicated to the corporal works of mercy (visiting the sick, educating small children, taking care of the homeless, giving out material things, etc). The greatest expression of this was the great St. Vincent de Paul in Paris. Reflecting on that, I came to the conclusion that there must have been a lot of poor people in that century that needed to be taken care of. The wonderful generosity of the French saints in meeting this challenge was truly noble and praiseworthy of the Catholic Church in that period. Yet, I ask myself, where did all the poverty come from, all of a sudden, in that epoch?
The discovery of the Americas, the routes to the East Indies, and the development of navigational technology all helped to pour wealth into the European nations. Many families became rich and prosperous as a result of this (while at the same time, created masses of poor people). It is too bad that there were no great holy intellectuals in the economic field and science. If we had had a "St. Thomas Aquinas of Christian economics", maybe all that social disorder resulting in material oppression could have been averted. However, no such intellectual appeared, and the best that the Church could do was to tap up the holes (through her charity practicing saints) left by the economic mess of Europe. The only intellectual answer to poverty in those centuries was Calvinism and later on, the French Revolution.
St. Antoninus of Florence had written a small economic treatise, but it did not get too far. He was more worried about the problem of usury rather than trying to build a philosophical system.
Anthony Mellace
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