If you are Catholic, you are poor.
It doesn't matter what income bracket you're in, when you're a practicing, believing, hopeful Catholic you are trying to do more than your neighbors with far less time and money.
Everyone's financial challenges are different. Maybe you're trying to raise 5 kids on one income. Maybe you work for the Church or Catholic charities. Maybe you're trying to launch a start-up business in this dreadful economy, or paying for Catholic School tuition, or supporting your widowed mother, or adopting a special needs orphan from Bulgaria. Our financial struggles look unique--but they follow a similar pattern.
Jesus tells us "you can not serve God and money." So if you elect to serve God in your heart, you are going to get less money in your life. It's a one for one trade.
Now, God provides. It doesn't follow that opening your heart to following God's will in your life is going to necessarily mean that you'll soon be redeeming food stamps. Yet it's important in our American Culture of excess, that we embrace the blessings of poverty.
God sees poverty as a virtue, not a vice.
If you are having financial trouble in your life, don't let it zap the strength of your marriage. Stay unified. Stay hopeful. Say your prayers to the Infant of Prague together. It's okay to wish this burden to pass, but remember you are not alone in your suffering, and God gives us this poverty as a way to protect us, teach us, and save us.
The holy widow in last Mass' reading could not have gotten her great blessing from Jesus Christ until God had whittled her savings down to only two small coins.
Let yourself be whittled down by the blessings of what St. Francis of Assisi called "Lady Poverty!"
