My first post on this was here but I posted early this week so missed out on a thoughtful article on this Sunday's gospel on the Rich man with an intriguing title Coats, Cold Words and Chamberpots ! by Joseph A.Komonchak from dot Commonweal .
Below is an extract of the introduction and you can read the whole article here
The comments section is interesting too.
"I have always heard ascribed to Peter Maurin the dictum: “The coat that hangs in your closet belongs to the poor.”
The London Catholic Worker website echoes it: “Houses of hospitality are centres for learning to do the acts of love, so that the poor can receive what is, in justice, theirs, the second coat in our closet, the spare room in our home, a place at our table.
Anything beyond what we immediately need belongs to those who go without.”
Anything beyond what we immediately need belongs to those who go without.”
But now I wonder whether Peter Maurin was echoing a paragraph of St. Basil the Great’s homily on next Sunday’s Gospel (Lk 12: 13-21);
Basil represented a common view of the Fathers well summed up by the Venerable Bede: The reason the Lord reproved the man who tore down his barns in order to build bigger ones was not that he cultivated the earth and collected its fruits into his barns, but that he did not divide with the poor what went beyond his needs–in which case he wouldn’t need larger barns–but instead built larger barns in which to keep them for himself. ..............................
