Many different factors, among which must be included the teaching of the Church's Magisterium, have contributed to create and promote the deep social awareness that exists today. We hear a lot about the virtue of poverty as giving witness to Christianity. How can a housewife, whose duty it is to secure the well-being of her family, live this virtue?

'The poor will have the Gospel preached to them' (Matt 11:6), we read in Scripture, precisely as one of the signs which mark the arrival of the Kingdom of God. Those who do not love and practise the virtue of poverty do not have Christ's spirit. This holds true for everyone. For the hermit who retires to the desert; and for the ordinary Christian who lives among his fellow men, whether he enjoys the use of this world's resources or is short of many of them.

I would like to go into this topic at some length because when poverty is preached nowadays it is not always made clear how its message can be applied in daily life. There are some people, well-intentioned no doubt but they haven't quite managed to move with the times, who preach a poverty which is the result of 'armchair speculation'. This poverty has certain ostentatious outward signs while at the same time it betrays enormous interior — and also sometimes exterior — deficiencies.

Recalling an expression of the prophet Isaiah — discite benefacere (Is 1:17) — I like to say that we have to learn to live every virtue and perhaps this is especially true of poverty. We have to learn to live it, otherwise it will be reduced to an ideal about which much is written but which no one seriously puts into practice. We have to make people see that poverty is an invitation which our Lord issues to each Christian, and that it is therefore a definite call that should shape every human life.

Poverty is not a state of miserable want; and it has nothing to do with dirtiness. Because, to start with, what makes a Christian is not so much the external conditions of his existence as the attitude of his heart. And with this, we are getting close to a very important point, on which a correct understanding of the lay vocation depends. For poverty is not simply renunciation. In certain circumstance Christians may be asked to give up everything as a testimony to poverty. They may be asked to challenge directly a society bent on material well-being, and thus to proclaim to the four winds that nothing is good if it is preferred to God. However, is this the witness that the Church usually asks today? Isn't it also asking us to give an explicit testimony of love for the world and of solidarity with our fellow men?

Sometimes when people consider Christian poverty they take as their main point of reference the religious whose job it is to give, at all times and in all places, official and public testimony of poverty. Such considerations run the risk of not recognising the specific characteristics of a lay testimony, lived interiorly, in the ordinary circumstances of everyday.

The ordinary Christian has to reconcile two aspects in his life that may at first seem contradictory. There is on the one hand, true poverty, which is obvious and tangible and made up of definite things. This poverty should be an expression of faith in God and a sign that the heart is not satisfied with created things and aspires to the Creator; that it wants to be filled with love of God so as to be able to give this same love to everyone. On the other hand an ordinary Christian is and wants to be one more amongst his fellow men, sharing their way of life, their joys and happiness; working with them, loving the world and all the good things that exist in it; using all created things to solve the problems of human life and to establish a spiritual and material environment which will foster personal and social development.

Achieving a synthesis between these two aspects is to a great extent a personal matter. It requires interior life, which will help us assess in every circumstance what God is asking of us. For this reason I do not want to give fixed rules, although I will give some general indications with special reference to mothers of families.