Now someone approached him and said, “Teacher, what good must I do to gain eternal life?” He answered him, “Why do you ask me about the good? There is only One who is good. If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.” He asked him, “Which ones?” And Jesus replied, “‘You shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness; honor your father and your mother’; and ‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” The young man said to him, “All of these I have observed. What do I still lack?” Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to [the] poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” When the young man heard this statement, he went away sad, for he had many possessions. Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Amen, I say to you, it will be hard for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:16-24)
And, of course, ending the well-known passage about the Final Judgment:
He [the Son of Man] will answer them, “Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.” And these will go off to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life. (Matthew 25:45-46)
Both Tradition (again, the quote from Pope St. John Paul II is clear) and Scripture say that the poor and marginalized are a particular concern within the universal message of the Church. One might say that, in terms of justice, they are the center. When they come we are told to give, to worry not, and to recognize that the Gospel demands radical acts of us, uncomfortable acts rooted in a self-effacing love of God, justice, and charity.
It is in this sense that Althusser’s words, whatever their errors, can teach us something about how we ought to comport ourselves to the Faith. All movements that claim a real good (family, country—essentially piety) but distort it into something opposed to the universal nature and call of Christ’s message ought to be treated with suspicion. For it is said:
If any one comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26-27)
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