Lent with the Early Church Fathers Day 23

Day 23

Lent with the Early Church Fathers

A daily post from Tom Bandy 

Based on A Year with the Church Fathers (Ed. Mike Aquilina, St. Benedict Press, 2010) 

Live for others, not for yourself

St. Leo the Great 

It may be praiseworthy to run away from intemperance and avoid the waste of dishonorable pleasures. And there are many who, in their magnificence, disdain to conceal their wealth, and in the abundance of their good, scorn contemptible and sordid stinginess. 

But the liberality of men like that is not happy, and that thriftiness is not to be commended, if the riches benefit only themselves – if no poor people are helped by what they have, no sick people nourished; if out of their abundant possessions the captive gets no ransom, the stranger no comfort, the exile no relief.

Rich men like this are needier than all the needy. For they lose the returns that they might have eternally. While they gloat over the brief – and not always unfettered – enjoyment of what they have, they are not fed on the bread of justice or the sweets of mercy. Splendid on the outside, they have no light inside. They have temporal things in abundance, but nothing at all of things eternal. They starve their souls and bring them to shame and nakedness because they will not spend on heavily treasures any of those things that they put in their earthly warehouses. 

TGB: Leo wrote in the last decades of the western Roman Empire … when 1-2% had all the money and ignored the good of the community. And the empire fell to barbarians. Should the west take warning once again?