Saint Peter's is a tithing parish. It’s easy to say, “I trust in God;” harder to put that trust into practice. But if you never give God an opportunity to come through for you because you never make yourself vulnerable to needing him, you’ll never experience how well he can come through for you. Tithing is an obvious way of making yourself vulnerable—which is why people find it so hard: we’d rather be self-sufficient . . . even when, time after time, it’s been proven to us that we aren’t. If my intention is to rely on honest means to support myself and my family, when those honest means are not proving up to the task, I can do one of three things: have recourse to dishonest means (never a winner), go on the dole, or finally turn to God in desperation. It’s a tribute to God that he won’t spurn us even when we consider him only as a last resort. Better by far, however, is to have relied on him from the beginning and thus never to have gotten ourselves into such straits in the first place. God can provide for us better than we can.

If you’ve never seriously given to the Church, it can indeed be scary in the beginning. The main purpose of tithing is to take care of God’s needs. And yes, while he can see to it that that chapel gets built in India without your contribution, he’d rather do it with your contribution, and that’s because of the second purpose of tithing (like unto the first): to increase your trust in him in monetary matters so that when other, more important matters come up, you’ll already have a history of seeing how well he provides for you—even in ways you’d never have thought of—and will trust in him once again.

In the Catholic vision, tithing (the word means a tenth) works like this: of the ten percent of your monthly income that you give away, five percent goes to supporting your local parish (usually by means of the first collection) and five percent goes to supporting God's charitable work--either the monthly second collection or any charity or charities whose work you like. One of the nice side effects of tithing is that once you've decided on what charity (or charities) you'll support, you can toss out all those direct-mail appeals you receive almost daily without even opening them--because you are already giving seriously.