Religious Poverty and Human Society

Extract

DOES the religious life have anything to say about how men should live in society? People tend to think that anyone entering chooses a life that is, in human terms, a-social. Even religious orders which exist to be of direct use to society only perform their function from outside society, without getting intimately involved with the lives of the people they serve. And today, more than ever, religious are being reproached with this, even by Catholics. Religious life is too ‘other', and religious poverty, in particular, bears slight resemblance to the real poverty in which so many people spend their lives. In fact the religious orders have abandoned the poor and grown indifferent to human misery; it has even been suggested that they aggravate it by their insistent appeals for the means to maintain themselves in their vast establishments. As it stands religious life is not only a-social but quite possibly anti-social as well.