As always, being rich has its perks and power and puff. Often, awards are given to people because they “made” themselves incredibly wealthy. In some cases, regardless of riches acquired through crime, the rich find themselves surrounded by subservient folk wanting brief interludes with the pomp of big money.
Politicians scoff those chiding them for letting go of wads of cash in casinos, reasoning it’s their money anyway.
The rich, already having enough to tide over their living descendants through comfortable lives to the day they die, themselves die striving towards nothing but getting richer. In death, they are hailed by the living as “successful” because they had stashed so much wealth.
Even in a Catholic country like the Philippines, that biblical passage on the rich and the camel and the hole of the needle has all but lost meaning.
Let’s go back to the woman who was privileged to experience and have insights into Purgatory (culled from a book with nihil obstat and imprimatur, translated by Fr. Adolf Faroni, SDB). Here are pertinent quotes from her.
“The Good Lord has given to men a superabundance of material goods with the duty to help others who have too little. The rich have the duty to give alms in the name of God, because to Him belongs the wealth and every property.
And if the rich truly want to avoid loading their consciences with sin, they should consider riches not as something of their own, but from God.”
And this quote from her I want to stress: “They (the rich) should consider themselves sent by God to distribute riches.”
The privileged woman was not short of underscoring the role of the rich: “If the Good Lord blesses them so much with riches and takes care of them so generously, He does it so that, in turn, they may take care of the poor and that He himself, through them, may take care of others.” She opted to remain anonymous.
“There are, in Purgatory, many rich people who are frightfully poor, but also many poor people who are rich in the Lord. To help others, to do good is not only benevolence but a duty. Woe to the rich who have used the superfluous for themselves only, while they were giving little to their poor brothers, or despised them,” she said.
She lamented” “How many could do more helping others, and yet do not do so, while they themselves enjoy superabundance. God has not given riches only for those who possess them, but also for others.”
“Those who live in superabundance steal from God. God imposes tributes. He who has little, has given the maximum with little, but he who has much should give much and give humbly because riches come from God and belong to Him,” she added.
Having been taken to the sphere of eternity, the woman once remarked: “It is disturbing to comtemplate the spectacle which takes place in eternity. Books cannot cover what the soul can embrace here.”
Eternity, as against the temporal riches of the world.
