In the course of my research, I had the pleasure of interviewing Fr. Patrick "Paddy" Gilger, S.J., PhD, to gain a deeper insight into my guiding research questions. Fr. Paddy is an extensively well-published PhD Sociologist, and currently an Assistant Professor at Loyola University Chicago We spoke about the values underpinning Christian monasticism, the medieval mindset surrounding resources and money, and the Catholic, and specifically Jesuit, understanding of the evangelical counsels: the vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience shared by all religious orders in the Catholic Church, including Jesuits, Benedictines, and Augustinians.
Part I: The Jesuit Experience
My initial questions for Fr. Paddy centered around his experience in the Jesuit order, and the forms that the vows of poverty and obedience take in that context. First, I asked him about the rational and motivation for the vows that religious orders take. All religious orders in the Catholic Church take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, which are called the evangelical counsels. These vows orient members of those orders to imitate Jesus thoroughly in their life, as they represent three major characteristics of the way the gospel was lived out by Jesus. The particular charism of each religious order can be identified by the different ways they approach these vows. For example, the Franciscan order is centered around poverty, and obedience and chastity are oriented towards that vow. For Jesuits, obedience is the counsel that links together poverty and chastity; they are always for the service of the mission. For Jesuits, their poverty has to be oriented explicitly for the mission in obedience. Like other orders, no Jesuits owns anything themselves. Everything they appear to possess is given to them by the Society of Jesus, and they are given materials only in service of the mission granted to each of them. For example, Fr. Paddy is missioned to be a professor at Loyola University Chicago, so he has many academic materials, but they are not explicitly his. Even his salary as a professor is paid directly to the Society. Money is a form of control; therefore poverty is a lack of that control, which Jesuits and Catholics in general view as a good thing.
I then asked Fr. Paddy about how the different realizations of the Jesuit vow of poverty across missions. The standard of Jesuit poverty, as outlined by St. Ignatius of Loyola, is "to live as a family of slender means". What this actually means differs from place to place: "what a family of slender means looks like is different in Chicago than it is in Jamshedpur[, India]", and that difference is very important. Fr. Paddy shared his experiences living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and the jungles of northeast India. Living like a family of slender means as one would in those places was radically different than in Rogers Park, but to Fr. Paddy, it felt "freeing". As a Jesuit, one must "be comfortable having lunch at a homeless shelter...and that evening being at a fancy five course dinner, knowing how to use the silverware". Living as a family of slender means allows the Jesuits more connection with the local community, keeping them close to the people they serve. At Loyola, Fr. Paddy pointed out, besides students, Jesuits are the only other adults who live on campus.
Part II: A Sociological Perspective
The second half of our conversation approached the general topic of monastic economics from a sociological lens. My first question asked Fr. Paddy what the major concerns would be for a community balancing a personal vow of poverty with a need for resource management. From an anthropological foundation, human beings are always struggling over resources. Scarcity is driven by both material constraints and ideal constraints (the why behind pursuing resources). Both these universal human aspects and different social contexts help rationalize why people should share or not share their resources. In the modern day, our culture uses the word "capitalism" as a cultural rationalization "to justify whether things are kept by individuals or shared constitutionally amongst other people".
Catholic social teaching emphasizes the idea of the universal destination of goods; that all goods come from God and should return fully to other people. One may have a right to some property or some income, but once one's needs are satisfied, they do not have a right to the rest of those things. This constraint on accumulation is another kind of cultural systems, a "way of imagining how the world fits together", and each of those ways determine whether an individual or community gets to keep which sets of goods. Monasteries use a similar system to rationalize their behavior; individuals take vows of poverty and own nothing themselves, while the "corporate" monastery possesses some resources in service of itself. These possessions allowed economic life to occur around monasteries in the middle ages, and they could be a place of physical and economic safety. However, it was important to the monastic understanding that nothing was accumulated in excess, and that the surplus of goods ought to return "fully to people".
Another question I asked Fr. Paddy was whether it was possible to understand monastic economics in modern terms, and what pieces of our understanding might be missing. He pointed out that something like money only has meaning within a cultural horizon, and that "the way we collectively imagine our society shapes the meaning of the action we take within it, and the meaning of the objects with which we interact within it". The way we exchange goods means something different in different places, and forms different kinds of bonds with one another. Modern-day capitalism "loosens" these bonds, but this was not so in the medieval monastic society. Modern macroeconomics cannot simply be used to understand even large-scale systems in the medieval world, because the cultural meaning of exchange is not the same. However, the field of cultural economics does exist today, and it is important to take culture seriously in discussions about historical economics.
Finally, I asked Fr. Paddy about the contrast between centrally-planned monasteries, which endured for thousands of years, and centrally-planned secular nations, especially those in the 20th century, which disintegrated relatively quickly. He discussed the different understandings of what it means to be a human person operating in those different planned economies as a key part of the contrast I mentioned. In a 20th-century Marxist-Leninist planned economy, human beings are homo faber, "Man the maker", and stripped of any transcendent dimension. The human person ought not to be an individual as happens after their alienation from what they produce under capitalism. The human person is not a created being; they make themselves, and the world one makes is the world in which one lives. In this regard, planned economies "force people to be free", so to speak, as they strive to undo this alienation.
From the perspective of a medieval Catholic monastery, however, the planned economy consists of people who are "mutually dependent all the way through". For them, their lives have been given to them by God, and they are to labor in this world to give love back to others. "My life is a gift, where I give it to others and they give it back to me". Of course, monks are never perfectly selfless in this way, but when the dominant logic, the norm, is this idea of "the gift", rather than enforced communal responsibility, mutual cooperation is much more successful.