It is expedient that the resources of the Church be possessed, and that one's own be despised out of love of perfection. For the resources of the Church are not private but common; and therefore whoever, having given away or sold all that he possessed, becomes a despiser of his own property, when he has been made a superior of the Church, becomes the steward of all that the Church has. Then holy Paulinus (as you yourselves know better) sold the vast estates that had been his and distributed them to the poor; yet when he was afterward made bishop, he did not despise the resources of the Church, but most faithfully administered them. By which deed he sufficiently showed both that one's own goods ought to be despised for the sake of perfection, and that the things which are common to the Church can be possessed without hindrance to perfection.
What of holy Hilary? Did not he too either leave all his goods to his parents, or sell them and distribute them to the poor? Yet when, through the merit of his perfection, he became bishop of the Church of Arles, he not only possessed what that Church then had, but also enlarged it by the numerous inheritances of the faithful which he received. These bishops, then, so holy and so perfect, proclaim by their evident deeds that what they did can and ought to be done. Such men, indeed, without question most learned in both secular and divine letters, if they had known that the goods of the Church ought to be despised, would never have retained them—they who had left behind all that was their own.
Whence it is given to understand that such great and such men (who, willing to be disciples of Christ, renounced all that they had) possessed the resources of the Church not as owners, but as stewards. And therefore, knowing that the goods of the Church are nothing else but the offerings of the faithful, the ransom-price of sins, and the patrimony of the poor, they did not claim them for their own uses as their private property, but distributed them as things entrusted to the poor. For this is to despise by possessing: to possess not for oneself but for others; and not out of greed for having to grasp at the resources of the Church, but to receive them out of the love of relieving others.
What the Church has, it has in common with all who have nothing; nor ought it to dispense any of it to those who have enough of their own, since to give to those who have is nothing else than to lose.