“This is how you fight poverty: person to person,” they write.

To illustrate their point, they tell the story of The Joseph Project, a job assistance program run by the Greater Praise Church of God in Christ in Milwaukee. Ryan and Johnson praise The Joseph Project for providing vans that drive Milwaukeeans to Sheboygan County, where they can earn $15 an hour working a factory job. In Milwaukee, by contrast, these workers would likely earn just $8 or $9 an hour.  The drive is an hour commute each way, but Ryan and Johnson assert: “That van represents the difference between poverty and opportunity.”

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While it’s important that The Joseph Project is assisting these folks, it’s disingenuous for the Speaker and the Senator to lift up this kind of program as the key to fighting poverty—and even a justification for overhauling our safety net.

The reality is that supporting an adequate minimum wage could also be the difference between poverty and opportunity for these workers. By supporting a minimum wage raise, Ryan could help put an end to poverty wages and save those same workers the two hours they spend each day riding in that van—giving them back some of the family time that Ryan cherishes so much in his own life.

To help the Speaker understand why his take on fighting poverty is so flawed, I suggest he return to the source he often cites as inspiration for his anti-poverty proposals: Catholicism.

In Sunday school classrooms across the country, young Catholics are taught the simplest versions of the Catholic Church’s complicated theology: God’s love is represented by loving parents, Bible stories are boiled down to picture books, and stewardship of creation is taught by tending to one’s own little plant.  And one Sunday school classic, “The Two Feet of Love in Action,” makes it clear that larger systemic solutions are integral to fighting poverty.

“There are two different, but complimentary, ways we can walk the path of love,” the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops explains. “We call these ‘The Two Feet of Love in Action.’” One foot is charity: direct service to help meet the immediate needs of individuals. The other foot is social justice: structural change to end the root causes of poverty.

The van is charity; the minimum wage hike is social justice.

Like Ryan, the Catholic Church values charity and applauds the commitment of faith communities like Greater Praise Church that provide direct assistance when people are in need. But, with its commitment to social justice as well, the Church might have some questions about why Ryan is trying to step with just one foot to end poverty. The bishops might even ask why the Speaker hasn’t joined a living wage campaign—one of the examples of social justice on their Two Feet flier.

It serves Ryan’s politics (and budgets) to let charity and other local efforts subsume broader anti-poverty initiatives, to diminish the work of the federal government in curbing poverty, and to pretend we can make meaningful change without making systemic change. But when people who are struggling turn to WIC, the EITC, or SNAP, that’s not dependence—it’s interdependence.

Giving from those who have more to those who have less on a person to person basis is charity, and it’s good. Giving from those who have more to those who have less on a systemic level—making changes to ensure our tax code is fair, passing laws to increase the minimum wage, and ensuring our anti-poverty programs are more robust, not less—is justice, and it’s necessary.

We need charity and social justice to end poverty. Any Sunday school student could teach Speaker Ryan that.

For much of Christian history, the Catholic Church opposed charging any interest for loans, which was regarded as sinful “usury.” In late antiquity, St. Augustine described loans as one form of charity: he assumed that the lender would charge no interest, providing a service to the needy borrower at some cost to themselves. He realized that many of those who need loans in order to get by are poor people whose needs should be at the forefront of Christian concern. Out of this same realization, some Italian Franciscans began to open pawnshops, called montes pietatis, in the 15^th century, running them as charitable organizations to help poor people access small loans. As it became clear that these local practices were helping people in need, official Church teaching changed. In 1515, Pope Leo X proclaimed that charging “moderate” amounts of interest so that loan organizations could be maintained was legitimate under church law. (Despite this acknowledgement that lending at interest could be done morally, deep-rooted stigma against Jewish moneylenders, who had historically responded to Christians’ need for loans, affects European and US culture even today.)

If you hear a Christian call out “usury” today, like theologian Alex Mikulich does here, likely they’re not decrying all charging of interest but suggesting that a certain type of loan is predatory, unjust and harmful to the borrower. Catholic groups use this tradition effectively as they fight some of the most exploitative practices of payday lenders in states like Illinois, Kentucky, and Minnesota.

A new film, Spent: Looking for Change continues the dialogue about the payday loan industry. Two things are clear from this powerful film. First, many current practices of the payday loan industry are indeed exploitative and harmful to families who already find themselves on the edge. One family in the film estimates that by the time they pay off a loan of $450, they will have paid more than $1700 in interest. Another borrower was not allowed to pay off her loan until she could pay in full—racking up more interest although she could have been making payments, and eventually losing the car that she needed for work. Second, while payday lenders and check-cashing services charge fees that could accurately be described as usurious, they fill an otherwise unmet need. As many as 70 million people in the U.S. are excluded from the traditional banking system, because of issues like bad credit, no credit (a potential result of the cautious choice to avoid credit card use), or lack of geographic access to traditional banks.

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The film is sponsored by American Express, which is announcing new financial products designed to help those underserved by the traditional financial system, like the people featured in Spent who turn to usurious lenders. This seems consistent with a trend noted in the New York Times earlier this year: in response to rising inequality within the U.S., companies are shifting their offerings to appeal to either very wealthy, or increasingly poor consumers. It’s encouraging, I suppose, that one result of this trend could be more affordable financial services for people who historically have needed them. But let’s not forget that high inequality comes with a host of other social ills.

Let’s also not assume that because the market is beginning to respond to this need, anti-poverty activists can just sit back and relax. The makers of Spent created a petition to legalize prize-linked savings accounts.  Supporting Elizabeth Warren’s plan to allow Post Offices to offer affordable financial services seems like another promising response. Watching and sharing Spent is a great way to keep the conversation going.

And I’d encourage people of faith, and everyone concerned about poverty, not to stop there. Microcredit agencies like Grameen America and Kiva Zip help individuals and groups—maybe even you, or your congregation—make interest-free loans to small-business owners in the US and abroad. Run on donations, they boast impressive repayment rates and help people in need avoid the most predatory operators in the financial system.

Call them today’s Franciscan pawnshops.