By John Mac Ghlionn
Crisis Magazine
October 24, 2025
I was raised Catholic-the kind of Catholic who knew the smell of incense before the sound of morning cartoons. My father was (and still is) a farmer, my mother a care nurse tending to the elderly in their final days. We weren't poor, but we were acquainted with struggle. So when Pope Leo recently declared that "love for the poor-whatever the form their poverty may take-is the evangelical hallmark of a Church faithful to the heart of God," I felt something between irritation and déjà vu. It's not that I disagree with loving the poor. It's that many Catholics seem to have mistaken poverty for holiness itself.
It's an old Catholic habit, this romanticizing of suffering. Somewhere between St. Francis stripping naked in the square and the endless talk of "blessed are the meek," the Church began confusing destitution with decency, as if the less you own, the more your soul shines. It's a comforting fantasy, especially for those sitting in marble halls. But equating poverty with purity is as false as equating wealth with wickedness. The poor can be cruel, the rich can be kind, and goodness cannot be measured by one's bank balance or battered boots.
The truth is, the Bible never glorifies poverty; it simply refuses to lie about it. Scripture speaks of the poor often, not as paragons of virtue but as people to be helped, fed, and treated with respect. Christ dined with fishermen and tax collectors alike-not to canonize deprivation but to shatter the hierarchy that measured worth by wealth. The command was clear: feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and lift the fallen-not idolize their condition. Poverty was never meant to be a stage for holiness, but rather, a challenge for justice.
What Pope Leo calls an "evangelical hallmark" has become a badge of humility for those who rarely live it. The modern Church doesn't love the poor as much as she loves being seen loving them. Somewhere between the sermon and the snapshot, poverty becomes a prop.
It's a dangerous delusion because it infantilizes the very people it claims to uplift. Treating the poor as sacred objects rather than self-determining people robs them of agency. It's pity masquerading as faith. My father used to say, "Work is the prayer God answers fastest," and he was right. Real compassion isn't tossing coins into the collection plate and calling it charity; it's creating conditions where people don't need your coins at all.
But the Church doesn't like that kind of talk. She prefers symbols to systems. She prefers the image of a barefoot priest over the idea of an educated laborer. When the pope praises "love for the poor," what he rarely mentions is the love for competence, for responsibility, for the dignity of work.
There's a reason Catholic art is filled with weeping Madonnas and bleeding saints. The Church has long treated suffering as currency, as if pain itself buys salvation. This is a mistake. Misery isn't a sacrament but a condition-often man-made, sometimes preventable, and always undeserving of worship. The Gospels tell us to feed the hungry, not to glorify hunger.
To his credit, Pope Leo speaks often about "different forms" of poverty-not just material but emotional, spiritual, and social. Yet this only dilutes the meaning further. By broadening the word to include everyone, he drains it of weight. If everyone is poor in some way, then no one is. It's linguistic inflation. It's compassion without clarity.
And yet, I write this not as a cynic but as a Catholic who still believes in redemption, both personal and institutional. My mother, after 10-hour shifts lifting bodies and spirits, embodied Christ far more than any sermon I've heard from Rome. Her faith was, and still is, simple and without show. She never confused poverty with purity because she saw both up close, sometimes in the same person.
The poor aren't moral mascots. They're people navigating life with whatever scraps of self-respect they can find. Some succeed. Some fail, just like the rest of us. To elevate poverty to sainthood is to patronize the very souls Christ treated as equals.
Still, I remain proud of my Faith. Catholicism gave me a vocabulary of discipline, sacrifice, and genuine awe. But awe without awareness becomes sentimentality, and that's where the Church too often lives today. If love for the poor is to mean anything, it must involve helping them stop being poor-not through pity, not through pageantry, but through opportunity, through the structure of education and the restoration of self-reliance.
Pope Leo may believe poverty is a mirror reflecting the heart of God. I think it's a mirror reflecting our own failures-political, human, and moral. The world doesn't need more saints of sorrow; she needs fewer spectators to it.
That's not heresy but honesty. And if there's one thing Catholicism should have learned after two millennia, it's that truth, however uncomfortable, is still the closest thing we have to grace.
This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.