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A third of the UK’s population lives on inadequate income, according to research published yesterday by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. That is 19 million people, including six million children – and inflation over the next 10 years could push another 4 million below the benchmark which the report relies on as defining adequate income and poverty. Where that line should be drawn could, of course, be subject to considerable debate – but that a substantial proportion of the population is either ‘just about managing’ as the Prime Minister put it, or not managing at all, seems pretty clear.

Christianity’s attitude to poverty can, I think, be confusing. After all, Christian monastics often sought to live very simply indeed – in what we would almost certainly deem poverty – and some others even more radically and self-consciously embraced impoverishment, as Oscar Wilde memorably reminds us with his observation that like St Francis he had been married to poverty, though in his case it had not been a happy marriage.

We might be tempted to take from these traditions of renunciation the thought that we really shouldn’t be too concerned with our material circumstances, and perhaps even move on to the conclusion that poverty shouldn’t matter for the spiritually minded.

St Francis’s voluntary embrace of poverty requires, however, a bit of interpretation. Francis was himself the son of a prosperous merchant. He grew up in one of the Italian cities where the spirit of mercantilism was on the rise, and would give birth to our modern world in which many take desire for profit, acquisition and possession to be the very basis of society. Against this spirit and conception of society, Francis’s launched a radical protest. He and his followers chose habits of the meanest and coarsest material – but this was just the outward sign of a more dramatic questioning. Other religious communities had held goods in common and so had still lived, no matter how frugal their life style, in some security. Against this model, Francis favoured, both personally and corporately, a dispossession which amounted to penury. And he and his followers proclaimed this dispossession and sharing in the poverty of the poor in a dramatic gesture – they went out on the streets begging for their daily bread.

The central point of Francis’s renunciation of ownership was not then, to proclaim that what we call goods are not goods, and that somehow we should rise above material needs. Rather by identifying with and dramatising the claims of the poor, Francis sought to challenge what was the then new commercial spirit which threatened to convert all the world’s goods into possessions, to be held personally and exclusively, to do with as we will. On behalf of the poor, Francis proclaimed a message which is, I believe, as pertinent now as it was then – and that is that people in poverty make valid claims upon us all to address their plight, and even make claims on what we are perhaps only too ready to think of as our very own possessions.

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