The first indictment seems to hint at a contradiction, or at least an incompatibility, between the profession of poverty and the fact of possessing wealth.  We claim that the one does not affect the’ other, that a religious may belong to a rich order and still keep his vow inviolate.  The vow in the religious is individual and personal; the riches collective.  It is the physical person that is poor; the moral being has the wealth.  Men may club together, put their means into a common fund, renounce all personal claim thereto, live on a meagre revenue and employ the surplus for various purposes other than their needs.  The personal poverty of such as these is real.

This is the case of the religious.  Personally they do not own the clothes on their backs.  The necessaries of life are furnished them out of a common fund.  What remains, goes through their hands for the glory of God and in charity to fellow-man.  The employment to which these men devote their lives, such as prayer, charity, the maintenance and conducting of schools and hospitals, is not lucrative to any great extent.  And since very few Orders resort to begging, the revenue from capital is the only means of assuring existence.  It is therefore no more repugnant for religious to depend on funded wealth than it was for the Apostolic College to have a common purse.  The secret reason for this condition of things is that works of zeal rarely yield abundant returns, and man cannot live on the air of heaven.

As to the extent of such wealth and its dangers, it would seem that if it be neither ill gotten nor employed for illegitimate purposes, in justice and equity, there cannot be two opinions on the subject.  Every human being has a right to the fruit of his industry and activity.  To deny this is to advocate extreme socialism and anarchy and, he who puts this doctrine into practice, destroys the principle on which society rests.  The law that strikes at religious corporations whose wealth accrues from centuries of toil and labor, may to-morrow consistently confiscate the goods and finances of every other corporation in the realm.  If you force the religious out of land and home, why not force Morgan, Rockefeller & Co., out of theirs!  The justice in one case is as good as in the other.

It is difficult to see how the people suffer from accumulated wealth, the revenues from which are almost entirely devoted to the relief of misery and the instruction of the ignorant.  The people are the sole beneficiaries.  There is here none of the arrogance and selfishness that usually characterize the possession of wealth to the embitterment of misery and misfortune.  The religious, by their vow and their means, can share the condition of the poor and relieve it.  If there is any institution better calculated to promote the well-being of the common people, it should be put to work.  When the moneyed combinations whose rights are respected, show themselves as little prejudicial to the welfare of the classes, the religious will be prepared to go out of existence.