By David G Bonagura, Jr., The Catholic Thing - Pope Leo XIII, in extolling Christopher Columbus’s evangelical zeal in Quarto abeunte saeculo, put this truth more bluntly: “Miserable it is to live in a barbarous state and with savage manners: but more miserable to lack the knowledge of that which is highest, and to dwell in ignorance of the one true God.”... Our preferential love of the poor has to include the spiritually poor. But as with charity to the materially poor, when it comes to the spiritual order, we cannot give what we do not have. If any Catholic does not believe firmly that faith in Christ is a matter of eternal life or eternal death, then he is the one who is spiritually poor and needs charity.