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In a radio message on September 11, 1962 (a few months before the opening of the Second Vatican Council), John XXIII defined the Church as the “Church of the poor.” It was an expression borrowed from Cardinal Suenes, who in the meantime had sent the Pope a “project for the Council.” Then came Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro, who in December 1962 gave a programmatic speech in the Council Hall on the theme of poverty. An essential, militant poverty, which should have accompanied the mystery of the Eucharist and the sacred hierarchy in a dogmatic way. Lercaro praised poverty as a “sacramentum magnum,” that is, “as a sign and a preferential way of presence and of the operative and saving power of the incarnate Word among men.” In his opinion, the first place in the work of the Council should be given to the formulation of the evangelical doctrine of the divine poverty of Christ in the Church. In reality, all this has had as its predominant effect an impoverishment of the Gospel and of evangelization. We always seek a more accommodating way of announcing the Word of God, freeing ourselves not only from superfluous goods but also from uncomfortable doctrines. It is no mystery that many of the most popular preachers have psychologized the Gospel with the excuse of poverty, which from material and social has in the meantime become existential. Sin is normal and human, because it is the most extreme human poverty. And so the Gospel languishes, in the jumble of controversial doctrines.