Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is

by Michael Novak

  Caritas has a special place among the virtues, even the theological ones. As Geach points out, following Aristotle, it would be vulgar to praise God as if he had certain human virtues. What would it mean, for example, to ascribe to the Divine Nature cardinal virtues such as temperance and courage or, for that matter, the theological virtues of faith and hope? But Love or Caritas is just what God is. God as Love is prior to and independent of any of his creations, and he does not need them to be Love. “God is Love,” Geach argues, “because, and only because, the Three Persons eternally love each other.”10 As Michael Novak puts it above, in chapter five, in describing the principles of Catholic social teaching, “Caritas is the propelling drive in which Catholic social doctrine begins, toward which it aims, and under whose searing judgment it falls short or, at times, does well.”

  The Christian understanding of caritas as a human virtue stems from the complete self-giving of God as man and for humanity, and from Christ’s call to us as creatures in his image to love him with all our hearts, souls, and minds . . . and, in consequence, our neighbors as ourselves (Mt 22:36). As Benedict XVI exhorts the Church’s own charity workers: “The consciousness that, in Christ, God has given himself for us, even unto death, must inspire us to live no longer for ourselves but for him, and, with him, for others.”11

  Caritas, thus, is about self-giving, a love that, like God’s, is superabundant rather than calculating. It is a matter of will, not simply emotion—for I can choose to love someone despite my emotions, for the love of God. But intensity and self-sacrifice are not enough to define the virtue of caritas. Intense commitment, as in the case of the most dedicated Nazis, may involve great self-sacrifice in the cause of evil. “Love can be thought of as a commitment of the will to the true good of another,” suggests Deirdre McCloskey.12 The word “true” implies that caritas, though superabundant, cannot be blind. Caritas is first and foremost the friendship of human beings for God, to which God invites us. The “love for God above all and love for neighbor because of God is the most important virtue of the Christian life.”13

  Origins of Christian Charity

  Caritas, like justice, is not just a quality or abiding state of the individual character; it also finds expression in social activities and arrangements. Caritas as a virtue, and still more as definition of God, cannot be reduced to the altruistic practice, which we currently describe by the term “charity” and which is too readily associated, not with poor cobblers but with upper-middle-class women and clergy in the nineteenth century. Charity is the practice of providing relief for those in poverty. The focus on those in need distinguishes charity from the wider practice of philanthropy that includes giving to scientific research, universities, opera and symphony organizations, and museums. Still, charity as activity focused on the poor and vulnerable may or may not be infused with the Christian virtue of caritas, as selfless self-giving out of friendship for God and neighbor.

  Nevertheless, charity was from the Church’s beginnings an organized ecclesial activity. Christians’ giving of their own time, treasure, and talent to aid those who were sick, in prison, poor, homeless, and strangers or outcasts rested on a new social ethic that sharply differentiated the Christian revolution’s norms from those of the prevailing pagan world.14 Charity as a Christian practice therefore took on a different form and rested on different relations of love among providers, recipients, and God.15

  The historical sociologist Rodney Stark has shown how different the Christian response to the great plagues of the late Roman Empire in the second and third centuries was from that of the pagans.16 That difference, he argues, was of immense importance for the rapid growth of the Church. Like David Bentley Hart in Atheist Delusions, Stark emphasizes the revolutionary impact of Christian doctrine in the ancient pagan world in which it took root.17 He shows the importance of that doctrine, and especially the centrality of a God of Love who held individuals accountable for their love, in enabling Christianity to thrive and grow rapidly at the expense of traditional pagan religion.

  In both theological and practical terms, the second- and third-century plagues overwhelmed the resources of the pagan tradition. The pagan gods required placatory sacrifices but did not love humanity or expect humans to love one another. The pagan response, as described by both pagan and Christian writers, was to flee for the hills, to avoid all contact with families where a member had been infected. The sick and dying were abandoned without nursing care—even food and water—or religious consolation, and they died at an enormously high rate. Something like a third of the empire’s population and two-thirds of the population of the city of Alexandria were wiped out in the first plague, which broke out in 165 A.D.18 The great pagan physician Galen abandoned Rome for a country estate in Asia Minor until the epidemic was over.

  The Christian response was different. As Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, and Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, explained, the plague was a time of terror for the pagans, who had no loving God and no hope of eternal life with God. Christianity offered explanation, comfort, and a prescription for action. The Christians did not abandon their sick, and they nursed pagans too as they could. Many sacrificed their own lives to care for others.

  This contrast between pagan and Christian charity was clear even to those most hostile to Christianity, like the apostate emperor Julian, who wrote, “The impious Galileans [i.e., Christians] support not only their poor, but ours as well, everyone can see that our people lack aid from us.”19 Julian made energetic efforts to organize the pagan priests to emulate the Christians and develop their own charitable activities.20

  All this points to the revolutionary character and depth of the Christian commitment to a new social ethic. Today it takes an effort of historical imagination to appreciate the power of this new morality in those first centuries of the Church’s history. Christ’s teaching of the equal worth and dignity of the human person as imago Dei—eventually to be adopted in secular form as a core social-work value—had a force not yet moderated by centuries of familiarity. Both pagan and Christian writers recognized that love and organized charity were central duties of Christian faith, not only in its scriptures but also in the everyday practice of the Church and its members.

  The Christian understanding of the relation of religion to the virtues was fundamentally different from that of the pagan world. In emulating Christian charitable work, which he saw as the religion’s one admirable feature, Julian tried to root his new pagan charity in Hellenistic rather than Judeo-Christian tradition. But that pagan culture lacked the moral resources for the social ethic of love that was, by contrast, so central to the Christian faith.21

  In the context of what Gibbon, himself no admirer of the Christians, described as a pagan “religion which was destitute of theological principles, of moral precepts, and of ecclesiastical discipline,” Julian achieved what could only be a superficial and ineffectual imitation of Christian charity.22 Christianity, however, was rooted in a very different Jewish tradition in which, because God loves humanity, we cannot please God unless we love one another. This thought was—with the possible, partial exception of xenia, the Greek concept of hospitality toward strangers—alien to pagan ideas of the relations between human and divine.23 Mercy—and so works of mercy like helping widows, orphans, the impoverished and downtrodden—was, in the eyes of the Greek philosophers and their Roman followers, not a virtue but a character defect.24 Some moderns, like Nietzsche or Ayn Rand, who were nostalgic for paganism and contemptuous of the Christian social ethic, revived this ancient view.

  Christian and Secular Charity Today

  Christian charity was important to the growth of the Church and continues to be at its heart. Christians have not always behaved as well in subsequent plagues as they did in those first centuries. But we find in every century examples of heroic self-giving, such as that exemplified by Saint Damien of Molokai in nineteenth-century Hawaii.25 A missionary from Belgium, Father Damien de Veuster (1840–89) asked his bishop in
Honolulu for permission to serve the leper colony to which many of his parishioners were being sent. Men, women, and children who had contracted the disfiguring and debilitating disease of leprosy (Hansen’s disease) were quarantined on a remote, isolated part of the island of Molokai. Like those third-century Christians who nursed the plague-stricken, Father Damien tended and ministered to the sick, heedless of the danger to himself, until eventually he contracted and died of the disease.

  Or consider in our own day the men and women of Christian religious communities who serve the people of South Sudan, at great risk to themselves.26 Much charitable activity is organized through dioceses and parishes—AIDS apostolates, prison ministries, food pantries, and the like, as well as in the form of contributions to larger efforts like Catholic Charities, Catholic Relief Services, Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, and other charitable activities of all kinds of Christian communions across the globe.

  From its earliest days, the Church understood charity as one of its essential organized activities, along with administering the sacraments and proclaiming the Word.27 Charity was the responsibility of each individual member and of the entire ecclesial community at every level. From the original group of seven deacons, the diakonia, the well-ordered love of neighbor has been understood as involving both concrete and spiritual service, corporal and spiritual works of mercy.28 Through its institutions and individuals, saints and sinners alike, the Church has been engaged in helping the poor and downtrodden. It is a record that extends through the work of deacons, monasteries, dioceses, and parishes, to the social-service organizations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the development of modern social work.

  Professionalizing Charity

  Social work emerged as a profession out of the Charity Organization Societies (COS) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was an effort to adopt “scientific charity” in place of the disorganized efforts of the “sentimental” givers of alms. Social workers, like scientists in the same period, became professionals, and also like them, distanced themselves from amateurs and from their long historical association with the Church.29 The COS movement aimed to replace “sentimental” with scientific, organized charity and to bring back personal concern and friendship to the relation of giver and receiver in charity. In a world where charity had become either a formal, impersonal, and demoralizing system of public poor relief supported by taxation, or else casual and random handouts, the COS aimed to bring the ordered love that Christian charity entails, charity infused with caritas.

  The various existing societies for giving aid to the poor were uncoordinated, readily abused, and lacked ongoing help based on a real understanding of the specific needs of the poor families involved. It was disorganized charity. The COS offered individualized assistance to the poor “client” (COS leader and social-work pioneer Mary Richmond’s term). They provided clinical assessment or social diagnosis, case conferencing, and intervention in the form of “friendly visiting” (later “social casework”). They conducted research and coordinated charitable giving in the community (from which the community chest and eventually the United Way evolved).

  How did professionalization change approaches to helping those who were poor and downtrodden? Scientific charity required a more thoughtful, data-based, organized approach to helping. It recognized the Christian duty of charity, personal caring, and neighborly concern for the person and family, including subjective as well as material needs.30

  But in growing industrial cities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, neighborliness of the affluent and the poor could not arise organically as part of a network of relationships in a shared neighborhood. The large social and, increasingly, physical distance between friendly visitor and client prevented ordinary neighborliness and rendered their relationship awkward and uncomfortable. The friendly visitors, forerunners of the professional social worker, were typically women of the business and professional classes seeking, as volunteers under auspices of the Charity Organization Societies, to help the poor by offering them, in the slogan of the COS, “not alms but a friend.” It was not the friendship of an actual neighbor whom you could ask for a cup of sugar without fear of being refused and being offered instead—as the COS’s “friendly visitors” were wont to do—advice on managing the family budget.31

  Charity means friendship, but friendship implies a degree of equality between the friends.32 Love between God and humans is possible only because of God’s “condescension,” but condescension among humans is not the stuff of friendship and so is incompatible with the virtue of caritas or Christian charity.

  This is a paradox in that condescension in its sublunary form is precisely what charitable activity came to involve. It was the gratuitous, arbitrary activity of the business and professional classes and the clergy, often marked by motives other than self-giving love and commitment to the true good of the other—motives involving social status or display or the complacent self-satisfaction of the giver. Such activity by definition is not Christian charity or caritas, though called by the same name. Rather, it is the kind of activity of which Paul speaks when he says that without charity, the giver neither counts as nor gains anything.33

  Professionalism offered a solution to this awkwardness, a way of understanding the helping relationship as more akin to that of lawyer and client than that of Good Samaritan and person in need of help.34 Professionalism required a body of knowledge, formal organization, and a code of ethics. It was a path to ensuring quality of service. If not yet an evidence-based practice, at least it offered the informed and educated judgment of a competent professional. It was also a path to the legal recognition, improved status, and funding of professional social workers.

  No one would belittle the importance of knowledge and competence on the part of those whose noble aim, in the words of the social-work code of ethics, is to “enhance human well-being and help meet the basic human needs of all people, with particular attention to the needs and empowerment of people who are vulnerable, oppressed, and living in poverty.”35 The point, rather, is that the striving for a more scientific, professional approach to helping carried with it the potential failure of the challenge of Christian charity, out of which the effort arose in the first place. The full impact of secularization in social work would not be felt for decades, when the more education a social worker had, the greater the distance between her beliefs and those of her clients, not least in matters of faith. The gap is probably most apparent in social-work education, where in public or other secular universities and colleges, students who share the evangelical Christian beliefs of the profession’s founders report feeling isolation and the scorn of their professors.36

  Professionalization of charity in the form of social work required a specific body of knowledge, skills, and values, a code of ethics, and the quest for licensure by the state. All of this required a distancing from the very word “charity,” whether meaning poor-relief, sentimental giving, or even organized charity.

  If the new professionals came to cringe at the term “charity,” charity’s reputation also suffered precisely from the attempt to organize it and make it more scientific and professional. As the poet John Boyle O’Reilly put it in 1886:

  The organized charity, scrimp’d and iced,

  In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ.37

  Charity thus came under fire from all sides. Socialists criticized it for promoting an alternative to their own class struggle for a different order. The settlement houses were seen as competitors with the Socialist Party in Chicago and elsewhere. Social casework claimed, in the words of the London COS, to be “the only real antidote to Bolshevism,”38 and Marxists criticized it accordingly. The supporters of “sentimental charity” criticized the organized kind for going cold and scientific. And as social workers became professionalized, they distanced themselves from the very term “charity,” viewing it as an embarrassment. As they became activists for social change, they
absorbed, in varying degrees, the socialist and Marxist critiques.

  Charity and Justice

  One of the challenges to charity as an organized activity of the Church has come from those, especially Marxists and Rawlsian liberals, who object to charity precisely as the gratuitous self-giving for the benefit of another in need of help. Works of charity, whether as almsgiving or personal service, are seen as intrinsically arbitrary, being free gifts to which the recipient has no specific or legal claim.

  Among Christian writers, there is a range of approaches to the question. In Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII emphasizes almsgiving as charity not justice, while also describing it as a Christian duty. He says of almsgiving,

  It is a duty, not of justice (save in extreme cases), but of Christian charity—a duty not enforced by human law. But the laws and judgments of men must yield place to the laws and judgments of Christ the true God, who in many ways urges on His followers the practice of almsgiving—“It is more blessed to give than to receive”; and who will count a kindness done or refused to the poor as done or refused to Himself—“As long as you did it to one of My least brethren you did it to Me.” To sum up, then, what has been said: Whoever has received from the divine bounty a large share of temporal blessings, whether they be external and material, or gifts of the mind, has received them for the purpose of using them for the perfecting of his own nature, and, at the same time, that he may employ them, as the steward of God’s providence, for the benefit of others.39

  Nicholas Wolterstorff, on the other hand, offers a strong biblical argument for an emphasis on justice—and hence, he concludes, on individual rights as claims on the state—precisely at the expense of charity as Christians have traditionally understood it.40 His work increasingly takes on the Christian tradition of the virtues in the name of rights and justice.41 He thus provides a scholarly and biblical defense of a social-democratic theory of rights and social welfare, a theory that in practice may tend to crowd out charitable giving with government programs.42