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Sin is Sin, Even if You’re Rich

Sin is Sin, Even if You’re Rich

Last updated on: March 7, 2025 at 10:26 am by Mary Pezzulo

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Sin is Sin, Even if You’re Rich 2025-03-07T10:26:52-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

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a pile of dollar bills

If anything, the rich are to be held to a higher standard. They’re the ones who will have more trouble getting to Heaven than a camel going through the eye of a needle. | image courtesy of Pixabay

I just want to remind everyone that there is no “rich person” exception to the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule. That doesn’t exist.

If something would be wrong, underhanded, and immoral for a poor or middle-class person to do, it doesn’t suddenly become okay if you’re rich. That’s never been how our Faith works.

Pride is a sin in any income bracket. Pride is the root of ALL sin. Narcissism and arrogance don’t suddenly become funny and masculine traits if you make seven to nine figures. They remain sinful.

Avarice is wrong when a man who makes six figures won’t donate any money to help the local poor. And avarice doesn’t suddenly turn into prudence if a man with billions of dollars won’t help the world’s poor. It’s still avarice. It’s the same sin.

Lust is a sin, and it remains a sin if you’re rich. If you would shame a scraggly-looking poor man with rotten teeth for going around impregnating several different women who are not his wife: it doesn’t suddenly become a good thing if a rich man who can afford a dentist does the same. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong all the time.

Sexual assault is a mortal sin, and it’s not something that becomes a funny joke if the p*ssy-grabber lives in a penthouse.

If going back on a promise is immoral for a person who makes sixty thousand dollars a year, it doesn’t suddenly become prudent if the promise breaker makes a thousand times that much. If, for example, a country gave up all their nukes in the 90s in exchange for a promise from the United States that they’d remain an independent country, the United States yanking the rug out from under that country as a nuclear power tries to conquer them is despicable. It doesn’t make it non-despicable if the president who did the yanking is a wheeling-dealing playboy businessman. Wheeling-dealing playboy businessmen are held to the same standard as everyone else.

You’re not supposed to excuse the rich for their sins.

If anything, the rich are to be held to a higher standard. They’re the ones who will have more trouble getting to Heaven than a camel going through the eye of a needle. Look through the Gospels and the writings of the great saints, and you won’t come away with the idea that rich people get a pass. You’ll find the opposite.

Being wealthy isn’t a virtue. You’re allowed to make prudent choices to make a comfortable life for your family if that’s your vocation, but hoarding up resources that could be used to help others is a vice. It’s a sin. Neglecting the poor whom you could have helped out of your abundance is sin.

Jesus didn’t talk about hell too much in the Gospels. It IS in there, and His warnings about it are serious, but it’s there less often than you’d expect. When he does speak about hell, he’s clear that hoarding your riches could damn you. When He tells a parable about a man in hell, the man is there because he was rich and ignored the poor man on his doorstep. And in His prophesy in Matthew 25, He states that the sins that will send people to hell are the sins of having the means to help the poor and refusing to do so. Wealth is dangerous.

I have been trying for the past several years to describe the two different types of Christianity that I see in America.

There seems to be a movement that actually wants to worship and imitate Christ, and there are Christians of all denominations in that movement. But there seems to be another movement, with Christians of all denominations participating, that only wants an empire. I’ve said that the opposite of Christ isn’t the devil, the opposite of Christ is empire, and that everywhere you find a Christian movement that seeks to be an earthly power, you’re actually seeing an anti-Christ movement. I’ve also said that these anti-Christ Christian movements condemn empathy, which seems to the the opposite of what Christ did as well. Now, here’s another aspect of that other, anti-Christ, Christianity. That type of Christianity thinks rich people are good.

Christianity that’s actually attempting to follow Christ, will serve the poor and hold the wealthy to a high standard.

The Christianity that worships empire instead of Christ does the opposite.

The anti-Christ Christianity is awfully loud and insistent in America just now, so it’s hard to remember. But sin remains sin, even and especially if rich people do it.

If you find yourself assuming that because someone is rich, that makes their vices acceptable, you’ve been seduced by that anti-Christ Christianity.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows an d Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, donate to “The Little Portion” on paypal or Mary Pezzulo on venmo

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