The Inheritance Trap: How Catholic Families Are Thinking About Wealth the Wrong Way
There's a conversation I have with Catholic families more often than I'd like to admit. It usually starts with estate planning: wills, trusts, legacy, etc. and somewhere in the middle of it, almost as an aside, someone mentions they wish they saw their grandchildren more (or frankly that they wish they had more of them). Or that their adult kids are stretched thin, living too far away, struggling to get a foothold.
And yet the plan I often see people building is designed to deliver a check after they are gone.
I want to challenge that. Catholic families, in particular, have been given a rich theological framework for thinking about wealth and stewardship that actually argues against the "store it up, pass it on" model most of us default to. We have just forgotten to apply it.
What the Parable Actually Says
In Luke 12, Jesus tells the story of a rich man whose land produced abundantly. Rather than use the surplus generously, he tears down his barns, builds bigger ones, and says to himself: "Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, be merry." God's response is blunt: "Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?"
Many families are living this parable without realizing it. They are optimizing for an inheritance no one will see for decades, while their kids are driving a car that does not fit the family they are trying to build, or living in a zip code that puts an hour of highway between grandparents and their grandchildren.
The indictment is not against wealth. It is against wealth accumulated for its own sake, hoarded for a future that is not guaranteed. Sometimes this is driven by fear of the unknown, sometimes by greed and love of an ever growing balance sheet, but mostly it just happens by accident or a lack of intention or planning.
The Church Has Always Said You Are a Steward, Not an Owner
This is not a new idea. Pope Leo XIII stated it plainly in Rerum Novarum: whoever receives from God a large share of temporal blessings receives them both for the perfecting of their own nature and to employ them, as stewards of God's providence, for the benefit of others. He quotes St. Gregory the Great directly: "He that hath abundance, let him quicken himself to mercy and generosity."
Not eventually. Not posthumously. Now.
St. Basil the Great was characteristically blunt: "The bread you store up belongs to the hungry; the cloak that lies in your chest belongs to the naked; the gold you have hidden in the ground belongs to the poor." St. Augustine was equally direct: "The great wealth of a Christian are the needs of the poor, if we understand where we should store what we possess."
The Grandchildren Problem
Here is the practical edge of this theology: Catholic families tend to value large families, proximity, and the transmission of faith across generations. But those three things require infrastructure, and that infrastructure costs money.
A young couple trying to have four children needs a bigger house, not in fifteen years when they inherit one, but now when the kids are small. They need a vehicle that fits the family they are building. They need to be able to afford the neighborhood close to you, where faith formation, family dinners, and the relationship between grandparent and grandchild can actually happen.
Waiting until you die to fund that is not estate planning. It is subtraction.
The family that helps a son or daughter with a down payment on a home in the same parish, now, gets to watch the grandchildren grow up. They get Sunday dinners. They get to be present for the moments that shape a child's faith and character. That is a return on investment no financial instrument can replicate.
Wealth for Money's Sake Is Spiritually Dangerous
St. John Chrysostom cut to the heart of it: "Give Christ the honor prescribed in his law by giving your riches to the poor. For God does not want golden vessels but golden hearts."
There is something corrosive about wealth that sits and compounds without purpose beyond itself. It tempts us toward the very mentality the Rich Fool embodied, the illusion that accumulation equals security, that a larger number on a statement is equivalent to a life well lived.
Catholic social teaching has always insisted on what Centesimus Annus calls the "universal destination of goods," the principle that while private property is legitimate and good, all possession is ultimately ordered toward the common good. Your wealth is not finally yours. It is held in trust. The question is not just how much you will leave behind. It is what you are doing with it while you are here.
A Different Planning Framework
None of this means abandoning careful planning or giving to children in ways they cannot handle. That is an article for another time.
The question we should be asking alongside "how do we pass this on?" is: "What can we do now that will shape the next generation while we are still here to shape it?"
That might look like helping a child afford a home close to the extended family. It might be funding a reliable vehicle for a family with young children. It might be contributing to a grandchild's education while you can see the results. It might be structured gifts that reduce your taxable estate while putting capital to work in your family's life today.
This is what multi generational planning actually means, not simply passing a number from one generation to the next, but actively deploying resources across generations in ways that build the kind of family life you want to see. A life that gets you all closer to heaven.
The Church has always understood that wealth well used is a profound good. The tragedy is not having it. It is waiting too long to let it do what it was meant to do.