Poverty is a lack of the means of subsistence (food, clothing, shelter, and so on). But besides privations of this kind, poverty also connotes helplessness when faced with the demands of life : ignorance, weakness, bondage, isolation, defencelessness against injustice. Such poverty is more or less relative. The most radical experience of poverty is the absolute destitution of death.

1. Scripture. Revelation gives poverty its full meaning both as inescapable distress which opens a man for God, and as the …