Can you be a Christian and a millionaire? This may seem an exaggerated question, but the growing prosperity in the countries of the West makes it one that Christians ought to be able to answer without hedging. Many of them flnd it difficult to relate Christ'S teachings on poverty to their own comfortable world and its preoccupation with material security and status. The idea that the poor are blessed, the traditional works of mercy and the notion of God's providence don't seem to fit in with the Welfare State and wage demands. This book faces up to the predicament. It examines what our Lord said and meant in the Gospels when he talked about rich and poor, why the early Christian community's attempt to share goods in common in Jerusalem was a failure, what the Fathers thought about poverty and how the great monastic orders put it into practice yesterday and today. The new difficulties peculiar to our own times and the teaching of the popes on labour and capital, private and public ownership, are fully discussed in a way that will make many Christians think hard and long about their way of life and the standards they conform to.