PROSPERITY

Charles B. Galloway, the famous Methodist Episcopal bishop (1886) of Mississippi, noted in his lecture (1898) that where Roman Catholicism predominates, her adherents were almost always poorer than the neighboring countries that were not Roman Catholics, whether they be Christian or non-Christian. To quote Galloway (2005): "All history attests the truth of Lord Macaulay’s eloquent words: ‘Whoever passes in Germany from a Roman Catholic to a Protestant principality, in Switzerland from a Roman Catholic to a Protestant Canton, in Ireland from a Roman Catholic to a Protestant county, finds that he has passed from a lower to a higher grade of civilization. On the other side of the Atlantic the same law prevails. The protestants of the United States have left far behind the Roman Catholics of Mexico, Peru, and Brazil. The Roman Catholics of Lower Canada remain inert, while the whole continent around them is in a ferment with Protestant activity and enterprise.’”

That the situation cited above remains true today is obvious when one compares the gross domestic products (GDP) of the twenty countries in South America (Latin Business Chronicle: GDP), whose Catholic populations ranged from 75 percent in Guatemala to 93 percent in Uruguay (2003 Statistics, Latin America), with those of the various States of the United States (U.S. States and Countries Nominal GDP) whose populations are dominated by Protestant Christians. Similar disparity in the economies prevails, although to a lesser degree, between Canada, with 43 percent Catholics and 29 percent Protestants (2001 Statistics, Canada), and the United States as a whole (U.S. States and Countries Nominal GDP). Also, although the lay Catholics are poor, the Catholic Church hierarchies in these countries or states, as well as in most of the world, appear to enjoy more affluence than the hierarchies of the other Christian denominations. This reality is truly ironic!

And, also, graft and corruptions in the governments and among the peoples in the Latin American countries are no better or worse than the graft and corruptions in the Philippines.

What could be the root cause or causes of this poverty? I believe that there are two major causes. The first is the centuries of mental conditioning of generations of native peoples that were converted from paganism to Christianity by the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church that glorifies the poor, with or without virtue, or poverty by itself as a virtue. This attitude towards poverty has produced to this day peoples whose mentalities range from dependency to mendicancy, particularly in the Philippines and in almost all the countries in Latin America. Such glorification of the poor could be due to a miscommunication, if not misinterpretation, of Scriptures. But the undeniable resultant crippling poverty among the masses in these Roman Catholic countries has made these nations financially incapable of participating in God’s call to evangelize the world for Christ.

The defenders of the Roman Catholic Church would likely raise a lot of issues with those who read in the Bible promises of prosperity for Christians. Some theologians of mainline Protestant churches have raised questions on the “Prosperity Gospels” of TV evangelists, such as Gloria and Kenneth Copeland. In his critique of prosperity gospels, Ken L. Sarles (1986) took the position that “Scripture refutes rather than supports the prosperity point of view.” The author, a lay Roman Catholic Christian, wrote the book to show otherwise.

The second cause is the failure of the Church to make the rich in these countries and the powerful in these governments feel personally accountable, before God in Christ Jesus, for the poverty of their nations. And this could only be the result of the failure, again, of the Church to teach the purpose of wealth and power in the Kingdom of God on Earth to the lay Catholic elites. The sad consequences of such failure of the Church are the notoriously selfish and corrupt social elites that run the national governments and the national political leaderships’ abysmal failures in these countries to create an overall social-economic-political-legal environment on which every child can grow and develop to the fullest his/her God-given potential for service to one another to the glory of God.

This attitude on poverty as a blessing that has conditioned the minds of millions of Christians for centuries, Catholics or Protestants, must be shown, on the strength of the Scripture, to be against God’s desire for His People! Only then may the minds of these millions be redeemed from mental slavery and be renewed, also on the strength of the Scripture, to believe in prosperity as God’s desire for His people.