If seen both sides of the helping the poor. When I was quite young and just out of my parents home I had a brief period of counter cultural poverty, living on Vitamin C etc. Later I was a social activist, first organizing tenants and later low income workers. During long period of my adulthood, until I was 43, I did not adhere to my childhood faith, and did not see what the Catholic Church had to offer the poor. I relied on materialist philosophers like Marx to guide me. At 43 I decided to return to my faith and I left California to go back to my childhood home of Seattle. I believed, correctly, that the place I was raised could serve to nurture my return to faith. I sought restoration of relations with family members and with familiar places, and the intellectual life of what had always been a great city. I found a Dominican run parish were preaching of truth fit my intellectual temperament. Later I realized th...