Dirty Bread

Last week Pope Francis spoke again about the corrupt and their families. In his Friday homily at the Mass he celebrated at the Casa Santa Marta, he commented on the Gospel in which Jesus speaks of the dishonest steward (Lk 16:1-8). His words were very strong, and at the end he called on us to pray for the corrupt who are giving their children “dirty bread,” so that they may reflect and manage to leave that world behind. He also asked us to pray very especially for the children of the corrupt, who are hungry for dignity. Below I summarize and comment on what the Holy Father said.

The Pope said that when we think of our enemies, we should first think of the devil, because he is the one who truly does us harm, and that the devil is very fond of worldliness: living according to the “values,” in quotation marks, of the world. The dishonest steward, he said, is an example of worldliness. Some might say this man only did what everybody does. But not everybody! Some administrators, business managers, public officials, some government administrators… perhaps not many. But it is that attitude of looking for the shortest, most comfortable way to make a living.

When the Pope says there aren’t many, I think he is right. The thing is that the corrupt do a lot of harm, and cause a lot of scandal!, and so one thinks there are a great many of them. As an example, I’ll mention what happened here a few days ago when a store in Valencia was looted. It was striking to see, in the videos, honest people shouting “thieves, thieves” at the looters, and on Twitter thousands of Venezuelans condemned those acts. One of the tweets I read said: “How will those looters teach their children that stealing is wrong when they’re going to watch cartoons on the flat-screen TV they stole?” Seeing those images, I thought that sadly what happened there is a small reflection of the looting that a few dishonest “administrators” have been doing all these years with the nation’s resources, and that is why the country is the way it is. But when I saw so many people writing against theft and corruption, I realized how immensely many honest Venezuelans live in our country. They are the ones who will save Venezuela!

Continuing his homily, the Pope said that the habit of bribery is a worldly habit and a gravely sinful one, a habit that does not come from God, because God has asked us to bring bread home through honest work. The steward did bring bread home, but how? He fed his children dirty bread. And his children, perhaps educated at expensive schools and raised in cultured surroundings, had received filth as food from their father, because by bringing dirty bread home their father had lost his dignity. This, the Pope said, is a grave sin, because it may begin with a small bribe, but it is like a drug.

Do you see how harsh those words are? Feeding your children dirty food. How horrible! These are words to reflect on as a family, to read to our children and our students… so that they know how dangerous it is to become corrupt!

Pope Francis went on to say that the habit of bribery becomes a dependency. But just as there is a “worldly cleverness,” there is also a “Christian cleverness” of doing things shrewdly, not in the spirit of the world but honestly. That is what Jesus means when he invites us to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves: to bring those two dimensions together is a grace of the Holy Spirit, a gift we must ask for. And one can indeed live with dignity through honest work; there are plenty of examples all around us.

To conclude, the Pope said it would do us all good to pray for the many children and young people who receive dirty bread from their parents, because they too are hungry, hungry for dignity. He asked us to pray that the Lord would change the hearts of these devotees of the god of bribery, so that they realize that dignity comes from dignified work, honest work, everyday work, and not from those easier paths that in the end take everything away. Otherwise they will end up like the man in the Gospel who had full barns and silos and didn’t know what to do with them, to whom the Lord said, “This night you will die.” These poor people, the Pope said, who have lost their dignity through bribery, take with them not the money they made but their lack of dignity. Let us pray for them!

So it will be, Holy Father: we will pray hard for them and for their families. Because although they believe they are untouchable and very rich because they have a lot of power and a lot of money, they are very vulnerable and very poor, because they have lost their dignity. What they truly inspire is great sorrow and great pity. Let us pray for them, that they may change course and give clean bread to their children. Their children will thank them!