One of the greatest dangers for any Christian is being subsumed by his culture. Every person is a member of his culture and this membership shapes the way he thinks and lives. Often there is no harm in this, but when the culture espouses something counter to the Gospel, then it becomes quite dangerous. Here in America, Christians must fight against many anti-Christian trends in the culture, especially those which are anti-life. But there is another cultural force which I believe can be even more dangerous because it is less obvious: materialism.

Our culture is so prosperous that our standard of what it means to be poor has radically changed over the past century. Someone who felt financially well-off a hundred years ago would be considered dirt-poor today. By just about any historical standard, the vast majority of modern Americans are rich. Yet Christ time and time again warned that the rich will have a very difficult time in obtaining salvation. In fact, there is one particular parable Christ told that applies to most of us today:

“Take care to guard against all greed,
for though one may be rich,
one’s life does not consist of possessions.”

Then he told them a parable.
“There was a rich man whose land produced a bountiful harvest.
He asked himself, ‘What shall I do,
for I do not have space to store my harvest?’
And he said, ‘This is what I shall do:
I shall tear down my barns and build larger ones.
There I shall store all my grain and other goods
and I shall say to myself, “Now as for you,
you have so many good things stored up for many years,
rest, eat, drink, be merry!”’
But God said to him,
‘You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you;
and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?’
Thus will it be for all who store up treasure for themselves
but are not rich in what matters to God.” (Luke 12:15-21)

I would argue that the primary problem most of us have today is not making a lot of money (by historical standards), but in having a lot of possessions. In other words, what do we buy with our money? Are our houses filled to the brim with our things? Is our security found in the Lord or in our possessions?

There is one man who is trying to detach himself from the things of this world in an admirable way: Dave Bruno, who has started the 100 Thing Challenge:

The 100 Thing Challenge has been my little way to personalize my efforts to fight American-style consumerism…

The goal of the 100 Thing Challenge is to break free from the confining habits of American-style consumerism. A lot [of] people around the world feel “stuck in stuff.” They feel like their closets and garages are too full of things that don’t really make their lives much better. But how to get unstuck?

Reduce (get rid of some of your stuff)

Refuse (to get more new stuff)

Rejigger (your priorities)

I totally believe that living without abundance of personal possessions for an extended period of time is the first step we ought to take in order to realize that we don’t need ever-more stuff. If you do this — if you will give up your stuff for a while — I am sure you’ll never go back. You’ll spend the rest of your life creating a more valuable life, instead of wasting your money and time on stuff. You will be glad. And best of all, the people around you will be blessed by your efforts to prioritize more meaningful pursuits.

Dave decided to live with only 100 “things,” which includes ALL his possessions: clothes, gadgets, books, etc. I think this is a great idea and one everyone could try. It doesn’t have to be exactly 100 things, but I’m willing to bet each of us could look through our possessions and realize that many are not needed. And going forward, I’m sure there are a large number of things we want to buy that are not really needed. In doing so, we might end up putting more faith in the Lord instead of our possessions to make us happy and fulfilled.

So, how many things do you have? How many do you actually need?

Recently I ran across this profound and insightful statement by Joseph Ratzinger, written in 1977:

[In] the very structure of modern society the corporate life of the family is increasingly displaced by the logic of production and the specializations which it has developed. As a result, the family home frequently seems no more than a sleeping-bag. In the daytime it effectively dematerializes. No more can it be that sheltering space which brings human beings together in birth and living, in sickness and dying. (Eschatology, pp. 69-70, emphasis added)

Two hundred years ago in this country, the vast majority of families had all their members stay close to home throughout the day. The mother stayed at home to tend the house and raise the kids, and the father either worked the farm or at a local shop nearby. Family life revolved around the house, making it a “sheltering space,” as the future Pope Benedict noted. Today, however, nothing could be further from reality. As Ratzinger writes, during the daytime, our homes “dematerialize.”

It is amazing how my own neighborhood becomes a virtual ghost town during the day, even during the summer. Although plenty of families have young children, you never see any during working hours, as they are all away at day care or summer camp (at night, it is little better, as yards are still empty and most homes seem to have a TV-blue glow emanating from their homes). The days of children playing with their siblings and the neighborhood children are long gone, as are many of the deep bonds that unite a family together and to their community.

It would be easy to point the finger at individuals and blame them for this epidemic. But, as Ratzinger points out, such a situation is due to the very structure of modern society. Everything about our modern economy and society pushes families to become two-income households, and drives families to live farther and farther away from work-centers, thus adding to the total time away from the home. And the process is self-perpetuating: as more families become dual-income, their total income rises, thus rising the cost of homes, which in turn pushes more families to become dual-income and to live farther from work-centers. The devil has done a wonderful job in modern times in preventing homes from becoming “sheltering spaces” as long commute times and mothers having to work outside the home are destroying any sense of the family home being anything more than a “sleeping-bag.”

All of these factors make me more and more appreciative of stay-at-home mothers. I understand that there are situations in which a mother must work outside the home, but I still cannot but praise those families who make the great sacrifices necessary to have the mother stay at home with their children. I am very grateful to my parents for many things, but one of things I’m most thankful for is that my own mother stayed at home throughout my childhood years. By doing so, she made my home a “sheltering space.” Without exception, there is no job I admire more than mothers who stay at home with their children. This feeling of admiration even is greater than the one I have for priests, of whom I have great admiration. In my estimation, stay-at-home moms have an even more noble – and thankless – task. As grace builds on nature, so too does the work of the priest build on the work of the mother, the first educator in the school of love for any child. A loving mother does more to help a priest in his work to sanctify souls than any other person.

The greatest human person who ever lived – the Blessed Virgin Mary – was a stay-at-home mom, and her task was a humble one, although it was also the most important one given to a human person in the history of mankind: to raise the God-man, Jesus Christ. In the fifth glorious mystery, we contemplate the coronation of Mary as Queen of Heaven and Earth: here is a simple stay-at-home mom made the Queen of men and angels! I often think that there will be countless other unknown stay-at-home mothers who will one day be glorified in heaven because of their work to make their homes sheltering spaces and not just sleeping-bags.

Our Lady, Mother of God, pray for us!

Back in the late 1990′s I changed jobs and rolled-over my (minuscule) 401k into a self-directed IRA. I did some basic research and chose a mutual fund to put the IRA money into. Every quarter I got a statement from the mutual fund company and I would usually scan it briefly. Imagine my surprise one day when I noticed that they added Playboy to the list of companies they invested in. I wrote the company asking them to stop investing in Playboy. I received a very professional response respecting my position, but telling me that they would remain invested in Playboy as it was good for their investors.

So what was I to do? I figured I had five options:

1. Invest in another mutual fund with the possibility that it too would eventually invest in a morally-objectionable company.
2. Invest in a “socially-responsible” mutual fund which respected my worldview but could very well lag other mutual funds in performance.
3. Invest the money in individual stocks instead of a mutual fund I couldn’t control.
4. Invest the money in federal bonds or another non-stock vehicle which didn’t involve morally problematic firms.
5. Leave the market.

These are the choices the Catholic faces when involved in the stock market, either directly or through mutual funds. I came to the conclusion that option (1) wasn’t a viable choice for me, as I didn’t want my money being invested in companies that engaged in explicitly immoral activities. I also don’t think option (5) is a good option for those who wish to be good stewards of their money, and option (4), while viable, definitely limits one’s ability to grow their money over time. So that leaves options (2) and (3), both of which have serious downsides: a “socially-responsible” fund usually performs worse than comparable mutual funds because of its restrictions, and do-it-yourself investing has a whole host of potential problems associated with it.

In the end I made my choice and it has worked out fine for me over the years. But these are the type of questions every Catholic must make while living in a culture which increasingly disrespects our values. And with the advent of government-funded abortion, the conceit that our money isn’t directly used for evil is quickly slipping away. What type of choices will the Catholic have to make in the future?

The great thing about the truth is that those with open hearts will always recognize it, no matter their state of life:

Millionaire gives away fortune which made him miserable

Austrian millionaire Karl Rabeder is giving away every penny of his £3 million fortune after realising his riches were making him unhappy.

Mr Rabeder, 47, a businessman from Telfs is in the process of selling his luxury 3,455 sq ft villa with lake, sauna and spectacular mountain views over the Alps, valued at £1.4 million….

“My idea is to have nothing left. Absolutely nothing,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “Money is counterproductive – it prevents happiness to come.”

Instead, he will move out of his luxury Alpine retreat into a small wooden hut in the mountains or a simple bedsit in Innsbruck.

His entire proceeds are going to charities he set up in Central and Latin America, but he will not even take a salary from these.

“For a long time I believed that more wealth and luxury automatically meant more happiness,” he said. “I come from a very poor family where the rules were to work more to achieve more material things, and I applied this for many years,” said Mr Rabeder.

But over time, he had another, conflicting feeling.

“More and more I heard the words: ‘Stop what you are doing now – all this luxury and consumerism – and start your real life’,” he said. “I had the feeling I was working as a slave for things that I did not wish for or need.

God bless Mr. Rabeder. Those of us who are rich – and by any historical standard that includes the vast majority of Americans – need to always remind ourselves about the power of money to make us slaves. The more we have, the more we want. Mr. Rabeder has realized that the truth that money will never make one happy.

A Vatican economist is blaming the recession on the world’s lowering birth rates:

Bankers are not the cause of the global economic crisis, according to the president of the Institute for the Works of Religion. Rather, the cause is ordinary people who do not “believe in the future” and have few or no children.

“The true cause of the crisis is the decline in the birth rate,” Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, said in an interview on Vatican Television’s “Octava Dies.”

He noted the Western world’s population growth rate is at 0% — that is, two children per couple — and this, he said, has led to a profound change in the structure of society.

“Instead of stimulating families and society to again believe in the future and have children […] we have stopped having children and have created a situation, a negative economic context decrease,” Gotti Tedeschi observed. “And decrease means greater austerity.”

“With the decline in births,” he explained, “there are fewer young people that productively enter the working world. And there are many more elderly people that leave the system of production and become a cost for the collective.

People have been saying for years that the Western world cannot continue socially, economically or culturally with our current birthrates. But the reason for our falling birth rates is spiritual, not economic: without belief in a loving God, you are very likely to be self-centered and/or pessimistic about the future, and both of these attitudes will make it less likely that you will have children.

Ultimately, it is a crisis in evangelization: we need to proclaim the Good News to others so that they will joyfully welcome new life into their families. Then it is also likely that our economic fortunes will improve as well.

A few years ago I was talking to a priest and told him that I was very concerned about my childrens’ college tuition. I had four young children at the time, knew that I might have more in the future, and I saw no way to be able to pay for their college education, as my parents did for me. He quickly told me that I had to get over the idea that I could pay for their tuition – “that just isn’t possible anymore”. I should just try to do my best to help them as much as I could.

I took his advice to heart but I still worry. I have met too many people who have crushing college debt, which can have life-changing implications. If you graduate from college with a Theology degree and $50,000 in debt, are you really going to be able to consider the religious life or the priesthood? If you get a medical degree with $150,000 debt, is it really possible for you to consider using your newly acquired skills as a medical missionary? The impact does not even have to be that explicit: a newly married couple with combined $100,000 student loans has introduced a stress in their marriage that will impact all aspects of their life, including their decisions regarding the use of contraception in their marriage.

The Catholic News Agency just published an article about the impact of student loans on the lives of young people. Some excerpts:

The “crushing burden” of student loans delays marriage and childbirth and encourages cohabitation, family policy expert Allan Carlson said in a lecture on Friday. He urged a pro-family debt relief program to help alleviate the financial stresses student loans can cause…

[T]he recent practice of burdening young adults with substantial educational debt appears to significantly discourage marriage and childbirth.

At the FRC on Friday, Carlson cited a 2002 survey indicating that 14 percent of indebted students delayed marriage because of their loans, while 21 percent delayed having children. In 1988 these numbers were nine and 12 percent, respectively.

This debt can also cause problems in marriages. One survey which examined 41 marital problems and found that “debt brought into marriage” was the third most problematic issue facing newlyweds. Among respondents who had no children, debt was the second most problematic problem. Among respondents ages 29 and below, debt was named the most problematic issue.

Carlson suggested student loan debt has encouraged a “retreat” from marriage.

The marriage rate for women aged 20-24 declined 41.4 percent between 1984 and 2004. The rate for women aged 25-29 declined 19.4 percent. For men, the marriage rate in those cohorts declined 45.5 percent and 29.6 percent, respectively.

Read the whole article here.

I don’t really have a solution, but I know that in my own situation, expensive trips to Disneyworld and costly toys at Christmas are replaced with more money in the kids’ college fund. Hopefully it will be the best present I can give them.

Before my wife and I married, I read a book by the late Larry Burkett called “The Complete Financial Guide for Young Couples” . Burkett, who was a popular Evangelical financial adviser, recommends a very old-fashioned financial plan for couples just starting off in life: spend less than you make. We followed the advice of the book (we even did the “envelope system” in which you have different envelopes of cash for each category of spending) and it was one of the best decisions we ever made. Even the wise sages at Saturday Night Live realize the wisdom of this advice:

I thought of Burkett’s book while reading this article in the Atlantic about Dave Ramsey, who appears to be an up-to-date version of Burkett. Ramsey travels around the country preaching the “no-debt” gospel, and his work has moved beyond Evangelical circles, as can be seen in this profile in the Atlantic:

There was, of course, a great deal of talk about money, and what to do with it. But the format was more tent revival than accounting seminar, with the first 90 minutes or so mostly devoted to Ramsey’s personal story of ruin and redemption. We heard how, during the second half of the 1980s, a young Ramsey built up a multimillion-dollar real-estate empire—then lost it all as the bank got nervous and called his loans, ultimately forcing him and his wife into bankruptcy. How, searching for help in his hour of need, he turned to the Bible and discovered Proverbs 22:7: “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave of the lender.” At that moment, he told an audience so hushed that we could hear the ice squeak, Ramsey decided to never borrow another dollar again…

Ramsey offers some investment advice (much of which would have struck horror in my business-school professors), but for most of his followers, the main attraction is a simple program: give 10 percent of your income to charity, save 15 percent for retirement, build up a sizable emergency stash and a college fund for your kids, and above all, stop borrowing money. Ramsey devotees pay cash for everything they can. They are allowed only one exception to the no-more-debt rule: a 15-year fixed-rate mortgage. He is so serious about shunning debt that his Web site takes only debit cards; try to pay with a Capital One Visa, and the system rejects the card, then tut-tuts at you. These simple, austere, unbreakable rules are, as Ramsey likes to say, “the advice that God and Grandma gave you.”…

When you pay for something with a credit card, or even a debit card, you can easily spend a few extra dollars here and there. But as Ramsey explained—while waving a handful of hundred-dollar bills to illustrate the point—if you have to actually hand over some of your dwindling cash supply, you tend to ponder every purchase. That impulsive latte buy becomes a little less enjoyable when every time you haul out your wallet, a quavering voice inside your head asks, “You want to send Uncle Abe away?” And sure enough, though we thought we’d budgeted conservatively for just the necessities, we nonetheless finished the month with extra money in every envelope.

It’s also hard to spend cash, because so many people look at you funny when you try. The very first day, I spent almost 20 minutes trying to check out in the “better dresses” section of a department store. The saleslady stared at the hundred-dollar bill in her palm as if I’d just handed her an eel. After a series of plaintive looks at my obviously card-free wallet, she started stabbing at the cash-register keyboard with a sort of bleak despair. To my immense surprise and relief—and clearly, also to hers—the cash drawer eventually opened.

And then the “money line”:

Ramsey calls this “being weird.” The phrase came up over and over again in his five-hour spiel, always punctuated with the same rejoinder: “Normal is broke.”

Be sure to read the entire article. I have often been scandalized by the fact that Christians seem to live no differently than the rest of society when it comes to money (as well as just about everything else). We have a responsibility to be, well, responsible with our money. Can you imagine the parable of the talents told today? “I know you gave me 10 talents, Lord, but I leveraged that into 100 talents so I could buy a nice house and a vacation to Disneyworld for the kids. But then the bank called my loan and so now I’m in the hole. Could I borrow another 100 talents?”

By living within our means we are also evangelizing: we are showing people by our actions that accumulating “stuff” isn’t the most important thing in life, that there is something out there that fulfills us unlike the temporary fulfillment we get when we buy something. Hopefully Mr. Ramsey’s work will increase our awareness of this fact.

I wish Christians would lead the charge in returning to this type of lifestyle:

Living without the plastic cushion: Why some people cut up their credit cards and live a cash-only lifestyle

In 2005, [Brough] took drastic measures. She decided to sell her $350,000 home, pay off all the family’s debt, and move to lower-cost Cary, N.C., where she was able to buy a house for $164,000 house in cash.

Since then it’s been cash and debit cards only for Brough, 50, who has no debt of any kind.

How does she do it? She buys secondhand furniture and electronics, gets her husband’s medicines from Canada at cut rates, has a $10,000 emergency fund and thinks long and hard before she opens up her wallet.

“When you use cash you think about what your needs are because you’re paying a big chunk of money at once,” she said.

This concept is probably a foreign one to many Americans who are addicted to buying almost everything on credit. But believe it or not, it is possible to survive and thrive without depending on credit cards. In fact, Brough is part of a small but growing debt-free movement, some joining because of personal or economic hardships, and others just looking to simplify their lives.

It’s all about economic empowerment. “Times are tough and people want to take control of their finances,” says Denis Cauvier, a financial psychologist and co-author of “The ABCs of Making Money.”

“When people look at what’s happening, all the ups and down of the stock market, housing prices, people getting laid off, they get a sense they are out of control,” Cauvier says.

As a result, “we’re seeing a huge rise in the use of cash and debit cards,” he says. “It’s a positive way of gaining self control.”

The Scriptures warn repeatedly of the dangers of money – and one of the greatest dangers is that money and possessions quickly control you. This appears to be even more true of “plastic” money:

“The thing that hit me the hardest was that plastic has no emotion to it. Whip it out, use it, done,” he says. “Cash is harder to part with.”

Businesses have worked endlessly to make it easier and easier for a customer to part with his money. Contrary to what the commercials say, this has not been for our convenience; it has been so that we spend more. It is considerably harder to spend $100 in cash than it is to spend $100 on a credit card, yet it takes just as long to work to earn that amount of money. I think more and more people should consider the “radical” step of cutting up their credit cards, especially if they are controlled by them (and if someone has thousands of dollars of credit card debt, I think it is clear that the card, not the person, is in control).

H/t: Ad Orientem

If you want a microcosm of how we got in the economic mess we are in, look no further than this article by New York Times writer Edmund Andrews. Andrews, an economics writer for the Times, tells the personal story of his own slide into deep debt. His story, alas, is all too common, and it starts and ends with a bad mortgage:

Patty discovered a small but stately brick home in a leafy, kid-filled neighborhood in Silver Spring, Md. We sent in an offer of $460,000 and one day later got our answer: the sellers accepted. I felt both amazed and exhilarated, convinced that the stars had aligned for us. I loved the house as soon as I saw it. It was one block from a school and a park. My boys would be within a 15-minute drive, and it would be easy for them to come over and stay whenever they wanted.

The only problem was money. Having separated from my wife of 21 years, who had physical custody of our sons, I was handing over $4,000 a month in alimony and child-support payments. That left me with take-home pay of $2,777, barely enough to make ends meet in a one-bedroom rental apartment. Patty had yet to even look for a job. At any other time in history, the idea of someone like me borrowing more than $400,000 would have seemed insane.

For those who live outside the DC area, a $460,000 house might sound like a mansion, but I can assure you that in late 2004, that would not get you a very large house in the Silver Spring area. So Mr. Andrews was not purchasing a “McMansion,” nor was he getting acres and acres of land. Yet by any historical measure, he was buying a house way over his means – and he was able to do so easily.

I have sympathy for Mr. Andrews, I really do. He recognizes his mistakes and he doesn’t blame anyone else for them. But he clearly got caught up in a wave that pulled thousands of people with it.

What I find most disappointing about the overspending America has engaged in is that Christians have acted no differently than the general population. We too felt that we “needed” a large house, large cars, and large vacations. For all the warnings against money in the Bible (and they are legion), we didn’t show any more financial responsibility than the average non-believing American. Can you imagine the witness we would have had if we had all refrained from such profligate spending and instead used our excess income to help those truly in need?

If the Gospel does not change how we live, what is the point of it?

I often tell people we could have avoided the current economic crisis if we just followed the advice of our parents and grandparents and lived more simply. It looks like even Saturday Night Live knew this: