Guest Columnist
Father Stephen Perzan
Has your 401(k) suddenly gone south? Are you concerned about your finances and future well being? Then I have the book for you. It’s Frank J. Hanna’s, “What Your Money Means and How to Use it Well.” The book makes great common and spiritual sense out of a subject most of us really know little about yet encounter daily.
While the book seems directed at those who are well off it is really meant as a primer for anyone who is trying to understand what money means in their life, and that is all of us. In a humbling way Hanna reminds us that our first calling is to love God with our whole heart and soul, our neighbor as ourselves – and then go out and spend our money as you darned well please!
The book itself is a self revelation of Hanna’s calling to the vocation of making money. In the book he forthrightly talks about such questions as: “Exactly how much money is enough? Whose money is this anyway? Fundamentals, bare necessities and genuine needs.” But the biggest concentration of his book is a religious and philosophical treatise on non-essential wealth and what to do with it.
The motivation behind Hanna’s book comes from his Catholic faith and a questioning of how to use the millions of dollars of “non-essential wealth” that he is saddled with. Sounds like a problem that most could only dream about, but Hanna sees personal responsibility having universal and eternal consequences.
Taunted and troubled by St. Ambrose’s words: “It is the hungry man’s bread that you withhold, the naked man’s cloak you store away. The money you bury in the earth is the price of the poor man’s ransom and freedom,” Hanna battles for his very soul. The eventual avenue for what he is to do with his wealth comes in a dictum from John D. Rockefeller: “I believe the power to make money is a gift from God … to be developed and used to the best of our ability for the good of mankind.”
Hanna, as CEO of Hanna Capital, LLC, has been an extraordinary witness to the philanthropy he espouses in his book. Among the various causes and charities that he supports is Catholic education. He is personally responsible for establishing three independent Catholic schools in the Atlanta area.
With great cartoons and a generous sprinkling of pithy sayings, the book makes a great read for people of all incomes and timely advice for anyone who is prayerfully considering a donation to our Archdiocesan capital campaign: “Heritage of Faith – Vision of Hope.”
Father Perzan is parochial vicar at St. Helena Parish in Philadelphia.
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