IN THE LARGEST currency change that the world has ever seen, the euro was launched on New Year’s Day 2002 with great excitement and ceremony in 12 eurozone member countries. At the time, the shared currency was considered to be a vehicle for tying together separate states and cultures with numerous economic benefits, particularly to trade, employment, and tourism.
Now imagine a humble, 90-year-old Catholic priest, vibrant yet shrunken and bent with age. In Italian, he addresses a group about the euro in the celebratory year of its launch. In one hand he holds up an unconsecrated host; in the other, a one-euro coin. They are the same shape, and nearly the same size. But the coin is shiny silver and gold. The priest speaks simply and directly about how, despite their similar appearance and promise of life enrichment, the euro is deceptive. The dominance of finance and capitalism that it supports is a false idol, he says, which leads to addiction.
This story was recounted by a number of Italian press outlets at the time. It contributes to the mythos of this man who writes extensively about the Eucharist, which he believes, in contrast to the euro, creates a relationship not just with God but with our fellow human beings.
That priest is Arturo Paoli, now 102 years old and still quite active.
After spending most of his life overseas, Father Paoli returned to his native Italy in 2005 and lives in Lucca. Despite being a prominent activist, writer, and thinker in Catholic circles for nearly 70 years, he is largely unknown in the English-speaking world. (I am aware of only three of his 50 books having been translated into English: Freedom to be Free [1973], Meditations on Saint Luke [1977], and Gather Together in My Name [1987]. Of Paoli’s countless articles and public addresses, only rough web translations are available.)
In a way, this is not surprising. Since Paoli’s earliest years as a priest in the 1940s, he has worked on the ground for the disenfranchised; organizing, fighting for better living conditions, and caring directly for the most vulnerable. He played a behind-the-scenes role at the grassroots of the Latin American liberation theology movement. He never climbed in the Catholic hierarchy and was often ostracized by the Vatican.
In Being Generous: The Art of Right Living, authors Lucinda Vardey and John Dalla Costa cite Paoli as saying that money links us together in community, that money is a symbol of life and a symbol of justice, and that “when it circulates fairly, providing wages commensurate with effort, and making available equitably priced goods, money distributes justice.” They say that Paoli calls money “grace, by which he means that it is a means for individuals to exchange goodness.”
Money: False Idol or Vehicle of Grace?
HOW CAN MONEY be a false idol, mammon, the source of greed, and an instrument of oppression—while at the same time a means of “grace,” a binding agent for community, and a tool for justice?
In Freedom to be Free, Paoli writes extensively about capitalism and how it affects both rich and poor. Capitalism, he says, is inherently atheistic. It creates profound alienation and insecurity. For Paoli, this theme of security and insecurity “is very relevant today because capitalism makes [people] insecure. People who are hungry for calories are insecure about tomorrow. They continually ask themselves if there will be work tomorrow and health enough to work and sufficient money to continue to have what their family needs. People hungry for ideals suffer from the insecurity of futility. They see all things and themselves in the midst of losing substance. It is the anguish of nothingness.”
More recently, Paoli has added to his critique of capitalism by decrying globalization and its proliferation of injustice in our current economic systems. The globalized economic system does two harmful things, in Paoli’s view. First, it allows money to accumulate in the hands of a few, who hide behind the anonymous front of the banking world. He has spoken of capital as an independent actor, free to move about the world without a passport, reason, or concern for the condition of people. So the wealthy can be disconnected from the needs of people in their own communities. Second, money in this system creates an unquenchable, selfish desire for accumulation, where we become addicted to its false promises of our personal betterment.
Paoli is clear that poverty is caused by human beings. Human societies and policies are created by men and women. We are responsible for the society in which we live—and by extension for each other.
Life and Liberation
SHORTLY AFTER HIS 1940 ordination, Paoli experienced the atrocities of the Nazi military. He joined the resistance movement and worked to save the lives of Italian Jews, for which he was awarded the highest recognition available to a non-Jew by Israel and the gold medal for civil valor by the Italian government.
After the war, Paoli spent time in Argentina, and then at age 40 joined a Catholic order called the Little Brothers of the Gospel. On his return to Italy in 1957, Paoli began working with coal miners on the Italian island of Sardinia, which led him to found a solidarity organization to improve their living and working conditions. The Vatican, fearing his radicalism and political activity, pressured him to take work that was as far from Rome as possible. In 1959, Paoli left again for Argentina, where he once again found himself organizing manual laborers.
In 1969, Paoli became regional superior of the Latin American community of the Little Brothers and moved near Buenos Aires. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, was ordained that year in Buenos Aires, and the two priests reportedly knew each other.
In Buenos Aires, Paoli developed his ideas about what he called “committed theology,” which advocated solidarity with the poor and organizing to improve their living conditions. His thinking arose concurrently with the ideas of other South American religious leaders, who later launched the movement known as liberation theology.
Paoli moved from Buenos Aires in 1971 to a rural mining community, where he once again helped to create a miners’ union and worker cooperative. Paoli was publicaly accused of arms dealing by Argentina’s Peron dictatorship and named on a public assassination list. To escape threats on his life, Paoli moved to Venezuela and later to Brazil, where he again organized lay workers.
‘Do Not Become a “Mimic” of the Poor’
PAOLI WRITES ABOUT the rich and the poor as two distinct groups. The poor are those that live close to the ground and each other, with few creature comforts. Who are the rich—“the bourgeois,” as Paoli describes them? They are rich in possessions, yet inclined to a poverty of spirit. He writes, They are the “ones who don’t stand in line. The ones who make an appointment with the dentist, the lawyer, or the psychologist for a certain time.” These people can have a “bourgeois way of looking at Jesus. This is the ‘private’ Jesus—the one at your disposal.”
Christ does not have the bourgeois at his service, says Paoli, rather the opposite. “This bourgeois view gives the appearance of respecting the divinity of Christ, but ... it actually relegates him to a sphere that is several removes from the world of human beings, so that the majority of Christians do not know that Jesus was concerned with liberation, equality among persons, justice, or anything else of major importance for your daily life,” Paoli warns in Gather In My Name.
Paoli does not call people to literal poverty; instead, to discover God, each one must divest herself of what alienates her or seeks to rule her identity. This identification can prevent us from entering into deep human relationships with one other. Paoli calls this simply “making friends.”
He speaks of horizontal relationships, between equals, rather than vertical ones, between the rich and the poor: “‘Making friends’ means to look in one’s use of possessions for a horizontal relationship, because the vertical one, directed from the higher to the lower, necessarily provokes an aggressive response.” He adds, in Freedom to be Free, “The poor man can give alms to the poor, the rich man cannot. He would be causing harm.”
Paoli warns people who are not poor from being “mimics.” He says, “Someone who is not poor and is invited by this mysterious voice to leave everything ought not to think that he can become a poor man, because he would be playing a role and would be making a complete mistake. In this case poverty would not be this person; it would be a chosen companion, a suit of clothes he wears.”
Paoli recommends that one “give of oneself, to lose the self in order to grow and to rediscover the self.” Paoli warns that this is different from taking on a false mantle of poverty: “One cannot make oneself poor. [One] can only empty [oneself] to the roots of [his or her] being and therefore achieve that powerlessness, that interior poverty, which is then reflected externally as the love of essentiality, as a profound security that is not self-security. It is a rediscovery of things anchored in God, in Being, and therefore gives human hope a new dimension.”
Paoli adds, “When you’ve encountered Jesus, and entered into communication with him, you get rid of a mountain of concerns—how to dress, how to get a motorcycle, how to buy a record player. Everything is absorbed into one concern and one desire: that famous reign of God.”
A Fresh Breeze From the Vatican
UNTIL RECENTLY, the Vatican was critical of many core aspects of liberation theology. Catholic leaders were suspended, writing was censured, and people were even excommunicated for their more radical political stances rooted in concepts of liberation theology.
In September 2013, however, there was a private meeting in Rome between Pope Francis and liberation theologian Father Gustavo Gutiérrez. The Vatican is now also in the process of canonizing El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero. Taken together, these events signal a softening of the Vatican’s stance on liberation theology under Pope Francis, who is more familiar and comfortable with the language of liberation.
Early in 2014, Paoli was invited to the papal residence to join Pope Francis in a private and lengthy audience. It certainly seemed like a homecoming for Paoli, where the ideas he has developed over a lifetime now are embraced by the Vatican—and he is welcomed, still as a humble priest, by the pope himself.
PAOLI BELIEVES THAT money itself can be transformed through our own conversion to deeper “friendship.” We must be a friend to one another, Paoli writes, and not a friend of money: “Money must be the sacrament of friendship and not of division, the maker of peace and not of war.”
In this reframing, money can be the very instrument to heal what it has broken. “Money, which is a symbol of things in history, is an instrument of divisiveness and must become an instrument of fellowship, a vehicle of friendship rather than an instrument of war. This demands a community in production, in distribution, and in consumption,” he writes. In this, poverty itself is redefined: “There emerges a view of money as a symbol of union and not of division. A new view of poverty is also born, which is no longer the classical idea, synonymous with indigence, but rather the renunciation of personal interests in order to achieve a friendship that is understood as co-creation.”
Finally, Paoli comes back to the symbols of the coin and the host held high. If money can serve friendship rather than alienation, then it can be transformed to be the very vehicle of communion. When consumption, he writes, “which is our most violent act—is not destructive and violent, but rather a respectful communion with things, it is transformed into a eucharistic act, that is, thanksgiving.”
This conversion of economies and holy use of money is an enormous challenge at all levels, from the personal to the systemic. Yet it is also inspiring and visionary. At 102 years old, Arturo Paoli continues this practice of “friendship,” in humility and ultimate faithfulness to the teachings of Christ.
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