Every single person on the face of the planet is created in God’s image. Everybody has the same heavenly Father. Everybody has capacity, talent, and ability. Everybody has responsibility. Everybody has stewardship responsibility. I don’t care what dirt hovel you’re living in, in Brazil or Mexico City or Manila. You have a responsibility to be a steward of the resources under your control because you have a heavenly Father who has put great things inside of you and that’s waiting to be called out and developed and extracted.

There is one parable in the Bible that I really love and I think captures part of what I am trying to say, and that’s the Parable of the Talents. You know, we all were given certain gifts by God. It is our job to multiply them.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, there’s the belief that human beings are made in the image of God, so they have the spark of divinity in them and poverty degrades and defaces the image of God in people. That’s why it’s a scandal.

Charity has its place in emergency situations…. A life that is lived on as a recipient of charity is a miserable life. I think, in our DNA, the way God made us, we are made as co-creators. God wants us to perfect and to really finish His creation. And if you’re simply a recipient of charity, you’re not doing that; you’re not fulfilling your real destiny, which is this creative capacity that God has endowed us with, we’re letting that creative capacity sit idle. I think that’s—at probably at the deepest level that I can reach—what’s so inadequate about the traditional response to poverty.

While there are some success stories, aid has been largely ineffective. Now why is that? John Paul II said that “The primary fault of socialism was anthropological in nature.” What he meant was, socialism failed because it got the person wrong. Well, I would argue that aid failed because it gets the person wrong.

God is an incredibly creative individual, and He said that I’m making men and women in my own image. He made us to be creative individuals … He gave a number of things to humanity and to mankind and said, ‘Look, this is who I want you to be. This is who I’ve made you to be. I want you to take dominion. I want you to exercise your creative gifts.’

It’s easier to write a check than it is to give of yourself.… All too often that’s what the people in the pews have done and the churches have told us, that the NGOs have told us – that’s all they need, they want our money ... But when you go to find people in these countries, and they don’t have jobs and you realize what they need is not just a check, but they need a job, they need meaningful work. God made us creative, he made us to work—what they need is the kind of dignity that comes with a paycheck that says, ‘Somebody values my services, somebody values my life, and I have dignity.’

After Constantine there was at least an acknowledgement that there was a higher authority than the will of the king. Human nature being what it is, many kings and monarchs then claimed that their will was the same as the higher authority, that they were, in fact, the direct representatives of God. This, of course, is a distortion. But, the Christian principle that the highest authority in the universe is the will of God and is not the will of the monarch and, furthermore, that the image of God is in each man and is not just in the monarch would eventually help to fight against tyranny.

The idea that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their creator with certain rights is not at all a new idea. It is, in fact, as the phrasing indicates, it is in the creation story. God put his image in man. It is in the Old Testament accounts of Israel trying to find justice for the poor. It is in the Minor Prophets. It is in the New Testament when Paul says, ‘Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, we are all one in Jesus Christ.’

If all things are relative in matters of subjective opinion, then the belief in the dignity of the individual, the belief that people ought not to be enslaved, the idea that people should have their freedom respected, the idea that all citizens should participate in government and have a right to—the democratic ideal—all of those would be undermined. There would be no reason for believing those. The contrary opinions of Stalin or Hitler would have just as great a claim to governing, to ruling, as, our own claims for democratic freedom and liberty … If freedom and democracy are in fact defensible, then it’s not because there is no absolute truth. Rather it’s because that is the truth. The truth about man is that man has a special dignity that requires that his fundamental freedoms be respected and that he be entitled to participate as a full citizen in the affairs of the community.

The question is, where did Europe learn its dignity? Where did European men and women learn that they were people of inalienable or inherent dignity and value, who had a right to be consulted about how they were ruled? Where did Europe learn that the prince is also subject to the law? Where did Europe learn that there was a moral law written on the human heart, moral truths that we can know by reason? Where did Europe learn that persuasion is better than coercion in the doing of the public business? One answer to that is that it learned it only in the Enlightenment, only in the 17th Century and the subsequent history embodied by the French Revolution. I think that’s a desperately foreshortened and truncated answer.

“European humanity learned its dignity in the school of Christian freedom, in the rich social pluralism of the medieval world, in those biblical stories we see in the glass of Notre Dame, which taught European men and women that they were made in the image and likeness of God, that they were somebody not just some thing.

We are made in the image of God to be creators, and this imperative, this vocation has made people who descend from Jews and Christians particularly energetic in creating and exploring, and discovering. They had the idea that God created the world, and He created it good. He saw that it was good, and so I think they felt the imperative of “Be not afraid.” We don’t understand what’s going to happen but let’s risk it, and I think there was a bravery inherent in the Jewish and Christian ideas that have led to one discovery after another. I recently read a report of a study done by Chinese scholars trying to say, what is it that made the West jump forward? A thousand years ago, China was ahead of the rest in invention and discovery with gun powder and other things. Why did the West jump further and further ahead? They said, we’ve studied everything, your military power, your engineers, your mathematicians, your— everything. We think the one thing that is distinctive is your religion because this penetrates through the whole population, the people at the very bottom, and it makes other people who live at the very bottom often are the people that lead in the future. They have confidence in themselves. They have a vocation and, and they feel the obligation to lunge forward.

The real mystery, the real mystery of economic development, I would argue, is essentially Christianity. Why? Christianity contains a view of human beings as creators. It has a strong sense of the importance of property – not just for economic reasons, but also for the moral reasons that we know private property changes the way people view themselves and other people in their entire lives.

So, it’s not just a question of resolving little problems that upset us. It’s not just a question of more efficiently arranging things. It’s about living out our vocation as Christians.That’s why we’re concerned about the poor, not because we’re trying to build utopia but because they are our Christ in front of us. We need to see Christ in front of us and in the eyes of the poor, and then look back in through our tradition to understand why we help the poor and the best ways of doing so.