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134 Patristics and Catholic Social Thought However, at the end of the homily, Jerome dabbles in a brief moment of sophistication. He wrote, “Poverty, too, has its martyrdom; need well borne is martyrdom—but need suffered for the sake of Christ and not from necessity. How many beggars there are who long to be rich men and, therefore, commit crime! Poverty of itself does not render one blessed, but poverty for the sake of Christ.”49 Here Jerome distinguishes between what he thinks are the righteous and the unrighteous poor. The righteous poor are those who voluntarily accept poverty for the sake of Christ; the unrighteous poor are those who are poor from necessity but want to become rich. Yet, what about people like Lazarus, who were poor from necessity but did not evidence envy of the rich? Jerome nowhere comments on this. He was so keen to connect the life of Lazarus to the life of an ascetic that he forgot about Lazarus entirely. This is surprising, for Jerome repeatedly joined the biblical text in its criticism of the rich man. When the rich man asks Abraham for pity, Jerome responded that Abraham can give no pity. In one scene where Jerome acts out the rich man’s part, he had the rich man recalling the story of the prodigal son, “Even though I am in the grip of torments, nevertheless, I call upon my father. Just as that son who squandered all his possessions calls his father, even so I call you father , despite my punishments.”50 Here, the rich man has accepted his eternal lot. We read later that Jerome and his audience find joy in the rich man’s torments, much as the rich man’s torments increase at the knowledge of these saints’ happiness.51 Yet, and as we noted in the third chapter, the justification for the pain and suffering of the rich man, according to Jerome, was his pride.52 The rich man did not steal. He did not commit adultery. He was not envious. Presumably, like the rich young ruler who encountered Jesus (cf. Mk 10:17–22), the rich man in this parable would say, “I have kept all these since my youth” (Mk 10:20). However, unlike the story in Mark’s Gospel, Jerome does not say to the rich man that he should have sold all of his possessions and given them to the poor. The rich man needed only to have dispensed with his pride. In applying the NOF model to this aspect of Jerome’s text, there is an aspect of human sin finding its way through the otherwise ad- A “Normativity of the Future” Model 135 mirable call to voluntary poverty. The neglect of Lazarus, the neglect of the conditions that led Lazarus to the state he was in, the rich man’s neglect of Lazarus’s needs, and the rich man’s only sin being pride—these are the ways in which Jerome’s text conceals an inclusive future for the marginalized and for the poor who are such out of necessity. Yet, such crooked lines may be straightened. The underlying dimension to Jerome’s text is that the lives of people like Lazarus are special to God, even if Jerome has mistakenly assigned that type of life only to ascetics. Also, that God deigns to call even the wealthy into a relationship with himself is equally admirable—again, though, in spite of Jerome’s feeling that this call ends at the point of death. There are at least two other aspects of Jerome’s text that project an inclusive future, and these begin from a more positive perspective than what I have noted thus far. They give the reader a sense that Jerome has eclipsed himself in his defense of the joy of poverty. The first of these two is Jerome’s belief in the inherent equality between people like Lazarus and the rich man on the basis of their common humanity. He expressed this view in two places. One is at lines 29–30. There, Jerome proposes that one symptom of the rich man’s problem of pride is his lack of compassion for people who are suffering. “Most wretched of men, you see a member of your own body lying there outside at your gate, and have you no compassion ?”53 Lazarus is partem corporis tui. Jerome does not wish for his audience to become like the rich man. He urges them...

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