Monti di Pietà – Poverty Generates Wealth
Not poverty, but communal praxis
At a time when urban society is being established with its shops, factories, workers, merchants, and trades, Saint Francis proposed an alternative between appropriating and not appropriating. He knows the logic, forms and values of the nascent civitas mercantile, and therefore, with regard to the use of goods, he distinguishes between the logic of the 'property owner’ and that of' the 'non-owner', what is personal, from what is shareable. The whole world is a common good, proclaims the Canticle of Creatures. One therefore should look at capital and money as analogous to water: "very humble, precious and chaste", when it is running water; but if it stagnates, it decays and smells foul, according to the famous metaphor of Caesarean Basil (4th century). Thus, nature is not only beauty personified, but also an inexhaustible font for resources – not to be plundered and stripped, but rather to be guarded and managed for the good of all. According to Franciscan thinkers, capital, like water, must circulate in order to be useful for the development of a universal fraternity. The Franciscans choice for poverty, garnered from sequela Christi (following Christ), extends to the socio-economic content of society as a whole. What a surprise it is to find that poverty, lived according to the Gospel, allows a liberated relationship with things, which do not "belong", but "are used".
Without the human ability to develop and share the products of nature and work, one would not understand the correlation between "needs", "resources", "production", "consumption" and "exchange": concepts that constitute the origins and purpose of the modern economy. With such a perspective, the understanding of power and its exercise is not of dominium, but of ministerium, the management of resources for the common good. Attentive to the concrete aspects of evangelization, the Franciscans realized that it was impossible for less well-off families and tradesmen to have access to credit at a fair interest rate. They were witnesses to the plight of many people, plunged into misery, because they were being suffocated by unscrupulous usurers. It is primarily from this situation that the happy initiatives of the Monte di Pieta and Monte Frumentari develop. The difference between the two institutions is that the former were used to moderate the cost of money, while the latter were intended to control the price of seeds to be used for the farmers' sowing. These organizations had staunch opponents, but their activity did not violate the rule on money imposed by Francis: the friars manage money for the usefulness of the people, without considering and retaining it as their own property; in fact, they must ensure that it circulates constantly. The Monti di Pietà and the Monti Frumentari served not only to help people in need, but also to ensure a fair market, and provide a social cushion in the context of a static economic environment, subject to rapid collapses. In addition, they made stagnant wealth productive, at the same time inserting themselves in an orthodox manner within the line of reflection on the concept of money from previous centuries.