Yesterday’s Bible study focused on the passage in Luke where Christ declares the prophecy in Isaiah 61 fulfilled in the hearing of the Nazareth synagogue:
After listening to Father Mike Schmitz’s gentle tones on the Bible in a Year, it seems natural that this passage is supposed to refer to the Year of Jubilee. This is a topic fit to give any self-respecting American conservative fits. Highlights from Leviticus 25.The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord."
And you shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants; it shall be a jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his family.
A jubilee shall that fiftieth year be to you; in it you shall neither sow, nor reap what grows of itself, nor gather the grapes from the undressed vines. "In this year of jubilee each of you shall return to his property.
And if you sell to your neighbor or buy from your neighbor, you shall not wrong one another. According to the number of years after the jubilee, you shall buy from your neighbor, and according to the number of years for crops he shall sell to you. If the years are many you shall increase the price, and if the years are few you shall diminish the price, for it is the number of the crops that he is selling to you.
You shall not wrong one another, but you shall fear your God; for I am the LORD your God. "Therefore you shall do my statutes, and keep my ordinances and perform them; so you will dwell in the land securely. The land will yield its fruit, and you will eat your fill, and dwell in it securely. And if you say, 'What shall we eat in the seventh year, if we may not sow or gather in our crop?” I will command my blessing upon you in the sixth year, so that it will bring forth fruit for three years. The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with me. And in all the country you possess, you shall grant a redemption of the land.
"If your brother becomes poor, and sells part of his property, then his next of kin shall come and redeem what his brother has sold. If a man has no one to redeem it, and then himself becomes prosperous and finds sufficient means to redeem it, let him reckon the years since he sold it and pay back the overpayment to the man to whom he sold it; and he shall return to his property.
But if he has not sufficient means to get it back for himself, then what he sold shall remain in the hand of him who bought it until the year of jubilee; in the jubilee it shall be released, and he shall return to his property.
"And if your brother becomes poor, and cannot maintain himself with you, you shall maintain him; as a stranger and a sojourner he shall live with you. Take no interest from him or increase, but fear your God; that your brother may live beside you.
You shall not lend him your money at interest, nor give him your food for profit.
I am the LORD your God, who brought you forth out of the land of Egypt to give you the land of Canaan, and to be your God. "And if your brother becomes poor beside you, and sells himself to you, you shall not make him serve as a slave: he shall be with you as a hired servant and as a sojourner. He shall serve with you until the year of the jubilee; then he shall go out from you, he and his children with him, and go back to his own family, and return to the possession of his fathers.
For they are my servants, whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt; they shall not be sold as slaves. You shall not rule over him with harshness, but shall fear your God.
It would be difficult to find a passage more scandalous to American conservatism than the above passage. God repeatedly links acknowledgement of His lordship with restoring property to the poor, canceling debts, paying fair wages, refusing to pursue wealth and sustenance for a full year, and giving the poor what they need out of charity, foregoing any profit.
The Lord is God, and we are not. It is not our ingenuity, money, economic systems, or productivity that sustain our lives but God. The Levitical economy revolves around God and His justice, not human contracts, pareto efficiency, or GDP statistics. We require a regular interruption to the workaday cycle that prioritizes wealth and commerce over justice and faith.
This is an early Biblical example of a kind of socio spiritual physics. Our modern world should understand what this means:
You shall not wrong one another, but you shall fear your God; for I am the LORD your God. "Therefore you shall do my statutes, and keep my ordinances and perform them; so you will dwell in the land securely.
Surely we’ve seen this movie before. A society grows economically, abuses the poor, the poor become disenfranchised and radicalized, and then some popular figure takes advantage and topples the existing order. It happened in Israel and Judah repeatedly, with the Gracchi and Caesar in Rome, in communist countries worldwide, and it is happening in the United States right now.
Traditionalists should ask themselves the honest question of how the United States would look different morally, culturally, and politically had Catholics fully put the social teaching of Leo XIII and Pius XI into practice by working to restore and retain the poor in their property and by demanding just wages and contracts as a condition for participation in the American economy.
The Catholic and Levitical ideal looks an awful lot like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. In one scene, rich man Potter’s rent collector informs him that George Bailey built a whole neighborhood of homes valued at twice what it cost George to build them. In another scene George tells the bank examiner that his Building and Loan firm is broke. The implication is clear: George spent a life in economic hardship and anxiety because he sold homes at break even prices to enable the poor of Bedford Falls to afford to own their own property.
Instead, most self-identified orthodox Catholics appear to have sold out to the neoliberal philosophy. Economic anarchy and self indulgence is fine, as long as you’re giving something to the Church (well I can’t tithe because, don’t ya know, my family and all) and not funding Planned Parenthood.
This is neither Scriptural nor Catholic teaching, both of which make it clear that usury (which powers credit card companies and good deal of retirement investing) is always morally wrong. Both also demand the payment of a just wage to the laborer and fair contracts. They also insist on living a simple life focused on the necessities.
The stock market portfolio, 401k dependent lifestyle is explicitly condemned in the story of the man in Luke 12 who built larger barns to store his excess. Isaiah 5 proclaims woe to those who join house upon house, field upon field.
We cannot just ignore the fact that this Reaganist approach to economics directly contradicts Scripture and has trained society to focus on dollar amounts as the only acceptable measure of value. This has created a whole murderer’s row of corporations who have no values at all, or whose only values are those opposed to tradition.
Former Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia (yes, from that Scalia family) personified this selling out of Catholic values in 2020 with an infuriating rule to ban retirement plans from considering Environmental, Social, and Governance factors of companies they invest in.
Private employer-sponsored retirement plans are not vehicles for furthering social goals or policy objectives that are not in the financial interest of the plan,” Scalia says. “Rather, ERISA plans should be managed with unwavering focus on a single, very important social goal—providing for the retirement security of American workers.”
It should bother us that a public figure from a prominent, mostly orthodox Catholic family used his position to force companies to consider only financial value when investing billions of dollars into the economy.
Another path would be to take God’s commands seriously, even when they don’t align with convenient partisan politics. Think intentionally about how to apply teachings on the sabbatical year, year of jubilee, and ensuring property and just wages to the poor in one’s own financial investments, purchases, and career decisions. And call out Catholics who think they can justify themselves by separating the Church’s moral teaching on family and intimacy from moral teaching on economics.
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