Nostro Pane Quotidiano
By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
“Our daily bread.”
Italians befuddle. One moment they’re boasting that socialism is the best form of government, while capitalism is by contrast awful. The next they’re complaining about the economic crisis. I’ve never seen the Italians go without their daily “pane,” however. We can easily believe that this is so more out of charity than efficiently functioning bureaucracy, an oxymoron if there ever was one.
Italian temperament has certainly not found its apogee in the effective organization of society since the fall of the Roman Empire. The mere frequency of the collapse of one Roman government and the cobbling together of another serves in itself as a unique news cycle. But the fact that one must travel to Italy to behold eighty percent of the world’s art treasures reveals the true genius of the Italians.
“Man does not live on bread alone” could serve well as the motto for artists of all kinds, as well as the Artist who, in creating everything out of nothing, continues to inspire every good and beautiful expression of the human mind and spirit. The Italians have fed the world for millennia with food spiritual and cultural.
Everyone has the capacity to taste and see beauty, rich or poor. It serves as a sustenance which is inexhaustible because capable of being handed down faithfully from generation to generation through conservation and preservation.
“The poor you will always have with you,” our Lord counseled. Whether capitalism or Communism, with whatever mix of control or freedom under which one labors, it is rather how we treat the poor by which we will be judged, not upon whether we have discovered the perfect system for finally and fully eradicating poverty itself from the face of the Earth. Perhaps our Lord here warns against seeking utopias which only ever exist in the mind. And the zeal which, in seeking the “final solution,” inflicts horrors and evils which are, in fact, an attack upon the human person himself, the very antithesis of sustaining with bread daily or otherwise.
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