Rome Newsroom, Jan 24, 2024 / 10:55 am
During his general audience on Wednesday, Pope Francis focused on the vice of avarice, or greed, noting that the preoccupation with the accumulation of material goods reflects a greater “compulsive hoarding and pathological accumulation.”
“It is not a sin that regards only people with large assets but rather a transversal vice, which often has nothing to do with the bank balance. It is a sickness of the heart, not of the wallet,” the pope said to the faithful gathered in the Paul VI Audience Hall.
The pope cited the example of the Desert Fathers — some of the earliest Christian hermits — who renounced their “enormous inheritances” yet who still “in the solitude of their cells clung to objects of little value. Those objects became for them a sort of fetish from which they could not detach themselves.”
The “attachment to small things” assumes a totalizing effect whereby it “takes away freedom,” Francis continued.