Novena of Saint Francis of Assisi Day Three

Francis – the austerity of solidarity 

Austerity was for many years considered a nasty word. It usually meant that international institutions forced poor countries to take austerity measures – especially cutting social programs – in order to receive aid to bolster a failing economy. With this type of austerity, the poor suffered. 

Several decades ago, I came across a different notion of austerity in the works of Denis Goulet, whom I first met in the early 1970s at a week-long educational program. A scholar of development, he lived among the poor in several parts of the world including France, Spain, and Algeria, and he has done research in Guinea-Bissau, Lebanon, Mexico, Brazil, and other countries. His final work was at the University of Notre Dame.

In The Uncertain Promise: Value Conflicts in Technology Transfer, he looks at two different notions of austerity:

An important difference is to be found in the underlying imagery: austerity seen as a necessary evil or as a permanent component of developmental humanism. The former conception is purely instrumental: under certain conditions austerity or belt-tightening is accepted as undesirable but necessary. But the second view considers austerity as a value for its own sake, even if it is not strictly necessary on purely economic grounds. (p. 161) Austerity understood as “sufficiency for all as its first priority” is the only path which can directly attack the poverty of the poorest majorities. (p. 164)

Many may argue whether this is possible but reading a passage a passage of The Mirror of Perfection reminded me that this is the wisdom of the saints. The anonymous author (whom some identify as Brother Leo) recalls:

Blessed Francis was used to say these words to his brethren, “I have never been a thief concerning alms, in getting them or using them beyond necessity. Always have I taken less than I needed, lest I should defraud other poor folk of their portion, for to do the contrary would have been theft.”

The poverty of Francis is directly related to his desire to identify completely with Christ, who emptied himself and became poor for our sake. But his poverty also has this dimension of solidarity with the poor. 

Many of us live lives that are fall from austere. And I acknowledge my lifestyle is far from the forced austerity of my neighbors here in Honduras.

But Francis gives us a real challenge. Will we live in real solidarity? 

The saints suggest that this emptying, austerity, detachment, brings freedom and joy. Denis Goulet noted this in A New Moral Order: Development Ethics and Liberation Theology:

Gospel poverty is not a disdain for material goods but the refusal to let the desire for even necessary goods destroy one’s spiritual freedom…. Not by accident have Dorothy Day, Charles de Foucauld, and others discovered liberating joy in gospel poverty to the degree that they have fought unrelentingly against social privilege and the institutional idols of wealth and acquisition. (pp. 138-139)

May Saint Francis open for us the way of spiritual freedom through giving up, solidarity, and sharing.

Francis and the beggar, in a chapel near Chiesa Nuova, Assisi