A Challenge to Our Humanity

Wealth that risks making itself blind and deaf

Message of the Rector Major Fr. Fabio Attard, SDB

The parable of the rich man and Lazarus, found in Luke’s Gospel (16:19-31), isn’t simply a story about the just distribution of material wealth. It’s a story that penetrates the heart of the human condition, confronting us with a disturbing question: who/what truly owns whom? Did the rich man own his wealth, or did wealth own him, turning him into its slave?

This reversal of perspective opens a space for profound reflection. The man in the parable was condemned not for stealing or exploiting, but for becoming blind and deaf. His tragedy lay not in having, but in not seeing and not hearing. He lived in a world reduced solely to the sphere of his home, his possessions, his immediate well-being. At the door of his house lay Lazarus, covered in sores that the dogs came to lick, but that poor man had become invisible, his silent cry inaudible.

Existential wealth

When we talk about wealth, we tend to think immediately of money, material possessions, and financial success. But there’s a more subtle and pervasive wealth: existential wealth. It’s the wealth of those who are comfortable, who’ve found their own comfort spot, who live surrounded by positive relationships, rewarding experiences, and reassuring certainties. This is the wealth of a functioning community—a group where one feels welcomed and an environment where everything goes along nicely.

This existential wealth is a gift, there’s no doubt about it. It’s right to enjoy it, celebrate it, and realize the beauty of what we experience. But it’s precisely here that the most insidious danger lies: that of closing oneself off within this abundance, of transforming the space of well-being into a gilded ghetto, cut off from one’s surrounding reality.

The rich man in the parable lived like this. He lacked nothing, yet he lacked everything: he lacked the ability to see beyond himself, to notice others, and to allow himself to be touched by the reality that was pressing at his door. His wealth had become an invisible prison, with bars made of habit, indifference, and self-absorption.

The blindness and deafness of comfort

The “comfort zone” is one of the most dangerous concepts of modernity. It deludes us into thinking that well-being is a right to be protected rather than a gift to be shared. It convinces us that maintaining our equilibrium is more important than opening ourselves up to the cries of others. It whispers to us that we’ve already done enough, that we can finally relax, that other problems don’t directly concern us.

The rich man’s blindness wasn’t physical but spiritual. He saw his own palace, his own clothes, his own lavish table.

But he didn’t see Lazarus. Not because Lazarus was hidden, but because the rich man had developed that particular form of blindness that filters reality, allowing only what confirms his own vision of the world to pass through.

And there was also deafness. The text reveals this second flaw when the man, from the afterlife, begs Abraham to send someone from the dead so that his brothers will listen. But it was he himself who hadn’t listened! He was deaf to the silent cry of poverty, to that suffering that doesn’t scream but persists, that doesn’t disturb but exists, that doesn’t demand but waits.

Interior listening as the indispensable condition for exterior listening

How do we overcome this double paralysis of blindness and deafness? The answer lies not in a simple effort of the will or a program of social activities. The answer lies in a deeper conversion: we can’t see Christ in the poor if we don’t contemplate Christ within ourselves. We can’t hear the cry of the vulnerable if we aren’t attuned to the voice of God in our hearts.

The great witnesses of charity—from Don Bosco to Mother Teresa of Calcutta—did not begin with a sociological analysis of poverty, but with a mystical experience of God’s love. Their ability to see, hear, and respond externally was born of an intense interior life, a contemplation that was not an escape from the world but a preparation for an encounter with the world.

This is the paradox: the more we descend into the depths of our own hearts to recognize God’s love, the more we acquire the capacity to reach out to encounter others. Spiritual life isn’t a narcissistic withdrawal, but the training necessary to develop the sensitivity that allows us to perceive Christ wherever he manifests himself.

The mission as a sharing of wealth

Every person is a mission. This statement doesn’t mean we all need to become frenetic activists or commit ourselves to grandiose projects. Rather, it means that the wealth we have received—material, cultural, spiritual, existential—isn’t our exclusive property but a gift meant to be shared.

Those who love get moving, go outside themselves, allow themselves to be attracted and attract in return. Love is dynamic by nature: it can’t be accumulated, preserved, locked away in a comfort zone. Either we share it, or we lose it. Either we circulate it, or it becomes corrupted.

The challenge, therefore, isn’t to give up existential wealth, but to possess it differently: not as jealous owners but as generous stewards, not as final recipients but as channels of transmission, not as a point of arrival but as a starting point for new paths of sharing.

Creative minority and signs of hope

In a world marked by growing inequality and structural indifference, those who choose not to become blind and deaf necessarily become a minority. But this is a creative minority, capable of kindling glimmers of hope, even small ones, but certainly contagious ones.

Hope is neither naive optimism nor passive resignation. Hope is a person: Christ, who continues to challenge us through every Lazarus lying at the door of our existence. Recognizing him there, in the disfigured face of the poor, in the silent cry of the excluded, in the ignored suffering of the vulnerable, is the only way to avoid becoming slaves to our wealth, to avoid being consumed by our own well-being.

The parable leaves us with an urgent message: today, now, before it’s too late, to open our eyes and ears to the reality that surrounds us. Because tomorrow, on the other side, it’ll be useless to regret not having seen and listened.