In “Justice, Not Charity,” Wolterstorff criticizes charity for its focus on the giver rather than the receiver: “If I see myself as treating you with love, charity, benevolence, rather than with justice, it is not unlikely that I will also think of myself as morally superior, and will expect gratitude for my generosity. It happens all the time.”43 From this “justice, not charity” perspective, charity is intrinsically demeaning. The need to which charity responds, at the same time, exists because society is unjustly ordered. The social-work task, then, is one of justice, not charity. It is to work for a justly ordered society that ensures that all citizens, especially the most vulnerable, receive adequate shelter, clothing, food, and income as a matter of right, not charity.
This approach treats justice and charity as mutually exclusive. Wolterstorff dispenses with the virtue as well as the practice of charity by substituting, in the name of justice, a focus on provision by the state. Rights-based claims on the state are more just and obviate the arbitrariness and condescension of charity.
When we see the world in terms of “justice, not charity,” it is easy to reduce both terms to their material expressions, the provision of cash or services. The issue then becomes one of whether every citizen has the right to a minimum standard of economic security, education, health, or housing assured to him or her by the state as a matter of right, not charity. The welfare state is framed in just such terms. But the more holistic approach to alleviating poverty advanced by many international development experts such as Muhammad Yunus or Hernando de Soto sees that those in dire poverty do not need material resources alone. Transfers of resources—as in protection and subsidy of agriculture in Europe or North America, and the dumping of resulting surpluses in the form of aid on the poor of less-developed countries—can destroy local initiative and markets, create dependency, and trap whole communities in mean poverty. Justice for the poor involves not so much large-scale redistribution of resources from the affluent to the poor, but the removal of obstacles that prevent the poor from deploying their own God-given creative energy.
The poor of the Third World offer abundant evidence of their capacity for imaginative initiative, entrepreneurial spirit, and absorbing productive knowledge—yet are still blocked from access to wider markets and growth. The poor in most of the world are trapped in poverty because they are deprived of two essential rights that justice requires: private property and the rule of law. Without secure property rights and enforceable contracts, they remain at the mercy of the rich and powerful. Witness cities like Buenos Aires and Nairobi, where the wealthy live close to the desperately poor while excluding them from full participation in a free society.
Rodney Stark points to the extraordinary creativity and economic initiative of mere “commoners” in northern China in the late tenth century.44 They built a thriving iron industry, producing as much as 35,000 tons a year by 1018, and developed markets and uses for the iron to improve agriculture and raise living standards. What happened, Stark explains, is that the Mandarins at the imperial court concluded that the new industrial wealth undermined Confucian values such as social harmony and stability. How? Because it implicitly challenged the view that commoners should be content with their state and not seek after riches. “So, they declared a state monopoly on iron and seized everything.”45
Justice for the poor requires more than the removal of government red tape and onerous restrictions that create insurmountable barriers to building small businesses. It also requires secure private property rights and the rule of law for the poor. Only if the poor are free from fear of the loss of land, property, and the fruits of their enterprise will the initiative, creativity, and risk taking through which families and communities raise themselves out of poverty seem like a more fruitful option than that of the servant who was afraid and buried his talent in the ground (Mt 25:25).
Are the days of charity, loving personal concern, and direct voluntary helping now over? Does social justice supersede charity and render it obsolete? In the following chapter, drawing on Benedict XVI’s encyclical on caritas and the role of the Church’s own charitable workers, I show why these questions must receive a negative answer, and why caritas as love and its expression in charity remain indispensable to each other and to all of us.
[CHAPTER 20]
Charity Needs Caritas—So Does Social Justice
WHETHER AS CASUAL ALMSGIVING, TAX-SUPPORTED POOR relief, or proto–social work, charity is itself often uncharitable. Karl Jaspers captured this oxymoronic paradox in the phrase “charity without love,”1 which points to a recognizable reality and problem. Such charity clearly is not an expression of caritas, the Christian theological virtue, which is not self-regarding or morally superior in attitude, but involves a commitment of the will to the true good of another.
Efforts to help those who are poor and downtrodden may fall short of the virtue of caritas in several ways. One involves precisely an overemphasis on the giver—on good intentions and spiritual, social, or psychological benefits rather than on the outcomes for those helped.2 Caritas requires by definition willing the true good of the other as other and so also requires, in helping activities, a focus on what actually helps. It requires the cardinal virtue of practical judgment or prudence to discipline and direct the good intentions. This is the legitimate concern raised by the proponents of “scientific charity” in the nineteenth century, as well as today, by advocates of a more empowering, partnership-oriented approach to charity, such as the asset-based approach to community development.3
Charity and Social Justice
What, then, is the relation of charity as love (caritas), the highest of all the virtues, to the practice of charity as works of mercy and to the virtue of social justice? In the tradition of Christian ethics, both charity and justice are virtues and, as such, are mutually reinforcing if not necessary to each other. They are virtues of the individual in community, and both find expression in social activities and arrangements. Justice is the virtue or habit of giving others their due, which requires judgments about what is due and what social arrangements can best secure it. Charity was from the Church’s beginnings both the central virtue of the faith and expressed in an organized ministry to the poor and downtrodden, one involving both material and spiritual assistance.
When one considers it formally, as Aquinas does, justice is the highest of the moral virtues because it is ordered to the common good. But caritas is the highest of all the virtues, that without which the others are worthless. This is because caritas is the friendship based on God’s communication of his own happiness to us.4 “The soul lives through caritas, which lives through God, who is the life of the soul.”5
Charity (as distinct from caritas) and social justice are best understood as forms or subvirtues of the cardinal virtue of justice. Both deal with what we owe others. Christian charity, though gratuitous and superabundant, unlike a legal claim, is nevertheless an absolute obligation on the giver. Jesus makes this clear, for example, in the Great Assize in which the sheep and goats are judged and separated, or in the parable of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus at his gate.6 In both cases, failing in one’s charitable duty has the direst possible consequences. Though not a legal obligation, charity is what we owe others in need and is thus a matter of justice.
Social justice is more obviously a kind of justice. It directs the virtues to giving others their due, inclining individuals to join with others to achieve a purpose that serves the common good. We practice and promote it in working to overcome social injustices inherent in the legal code, cultural institutions, the tenor of public life, or elsewhere in the structures of society that frustrate our ability to fulfill our moral obligations.7
The virtues touch and talk to each other. This aspect of social justice has been neglected in modern use. In contrast, Aquinas understood legal or general justice as directing all the virtues to the common good as caritas directs all the virtues to the Divine good. This is partly a matter of order in the so
ul. That is, acting with social justice requires acting with knowledge, skill, and such virtues as prudence, self-mastery or temperance, and courage.
When a virtue becomes isolated from other virtues and overdeveloped or specialized in an extreme way, it is no longer a virtue but a vice. This is clear enough in a case like courage, which in the absence of prudence, temperance, or justice, becomes recklessness that devalues life. Such distortion makes “charity without love” a possibility, when it becomes routinized, over-professionalized, or lacking in personal concern. It is what made the COS insist on the need for friendship—friendly visiting, not alms but a friend—but made it prone to deformation when caritas seemed to dissipate so that the COS itself was accused of charity without caritas. Social justice also may become separated from the other virtues, especially caritas, and thus eventually cease to be a virtue at all. When it becomes a utopian ideal to be enforced and regulated by the state, it also becomes deformed and unjust, nourished by the vices of envy and resentment.
Taking up the justice-based argument against charity, Benedict XVI acknowledges its force as put forward by Marxism, but emphasizes the intimate relations among justice, charity, and love.8 He rejects the notion that any political order, no matter how just, will ever eliminate the need for charity. “Love—caritas—will always prove necessary even in the most just society,” he writes. “There is no ordering of the State so just that it will eliminate the need for the service of love.”9 Such a utopian program of rendering charity unnecessary leads in practice to the hypertrophy of the bureaucratic state, stifling those charitable impulses that find their natural expression in the structures—of family, neighborhood, church, and voluntary association—that mediate between individual and state.10 As Benedict puts it, “The state which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing the suffering person—any person—needs: namely, loving personal concern.”11
Benedict argues that for those who work in the Church’s charitable agencies, professional competence and effectiveness are necessary, but not sufficient. “Charity workers need a ‘formation of the heart’: They need to be led to that encounter with God in Christ which awakens their love and opens their spirits to others.”12 He has a particular concern that the Church’s own professional social workers may be infected with ideologies that deride charity as a stopgap, a substitute for justice that serves the status quo. This tendency is strong even among social workers whose own jobs depend on charitable support of their agency. “What we have” in such ideologies, Benedict states, “is really an inhuman philosophy. People of the present are sacrificed to the moloch of the future. . . . One does not make the world more human by refusing to act humanely here and now.”13 Such refusal is neither charitable nor just.
Love requires equanimity, restraint in the face of the temptation to take control of the lives of others. Benedict makes this point in noting the limits of the changes professionals themselves can effect. Social workers have a professional tendency toward what Thomas Sowell calls an unconstrained vision of what they can achieve, whether through counseling or social policy. They suffer from, in Roger Scruton’s term, “unscrupulous optimism.”14 They tend to assume responsibility for solving social problems in a way that reflects an exaggerated sense of the power they can or should have over the lives of others. Benedict, however, points out that we “are only instruments in the Lord’s hands; and this knowledge frees us from the presumption of thinking that we alone are responsible for building a better world. In all humility we will entrust the rest to the Lord.”15
Benedict addresses himself specifically to the “charity workers” who carry out professionally the Church’s ministry of diakonia. He assumes a shared purpose between the Church’s “ecclesial charity,” which is integral to its very being, and the professionals employed in carrying it out. He warns rightly (not least in light of the experience of liberation theology) of the dangers of activism in the name of parties and ideologies that are alien to that shared purpose.
How does all this relate to the profession of social work, the secular inheritor of scientific charity? The profession includes many who have chosen this field of relatively low pay and prestige precisely because of their Christian understanding and commitment to serving the needs of the poor and downtrodden. It also includes many who are nonreligious and perhaps even hostile to the Church.
Love among the Ruins: A Romance of the Near Future
This final heading draws from the evocative title of Evelyn Waugh’s 1953 dystopian novella of the welfare state, which itself prompts consideration of what it means to be both a good helper and a faithful Christian. Where does this tension between the theological virtue of love (caritas, agape) and the language of justice, individual rights, and the state leave the professional social or charitable worker who is also a faithful Christian? These issues touch on the central question for social work and social welfare, the relation of formal to informal care and control. How does professional caring relate to personal caring on the one hand, and on the other to the caring capacities within families and communities?16
Ideological, political, and fiscal developments challenge professional social workers of faith as well as religious authorities. Archbishop Charles Chaput, for example, has described the archdiocese of Denver, of which he was then leader, as being under strong secularist threat.17 Similar developments are occurring across the country, leading to the closing of high-quality Catholic adoption and foster-care services in Illinois, for example. Religious leaders are being pushed to define the limits of accommodation beyond which a Christian charity loses its soul and may as well drop its religious affiliation and become an offshoot of the bureaucratic-professional state.18
“Government cannot love,” as Chaput says. “It has no soul and no heart. The greatest danger of the modern secularist state is this: In the name of humanity, under the banner of serving human needs and easing human suffering, it ultimately, ironically—and too often tragically—lacks humanity.”19 The secularist direction of law and policy is leading to a hypertrophy of the state and its bureaucratic-professional rigidities, all increasingly inhospitable to the Christian virtue of charity (caritas) as a total self-giving aimed at the good of the other.
Although “government cannot love,” Saint Vincent de Paul in the seventeenth century, Damien in the nineteenth, Mother Teresa in the twentieth, and the early Christians in the plagues of the second and third centuries could and did. They offer models of love as a virtue of the Christian social worker. The question arises, then, of how best to preserve and cultivate in social workers the virtues of charity and caritas; and how to do this where the professionalizing, bureaucratizing, and secularizing of such work seem to render it all but impossible?
In his 2005 encyclical, Deus Caritas Est—God is Love, Pope Benedict offered some guidance for workers in the Church’s own charitable agencies that applies to social workers in any setting. His remarks offer the necessary theological starting point of this all-important virtue.
As we talk of love, we recognize knowledge and competence as the sine qua non of professional social workers. Knowledge and competence are necessary, indeed, but not sufficient. Social workers also “need a ‘formation of the heart.’”20 The two—one a matter of knowledge and skill, the other of character—do not stand in opposition. As recent empirical research has reemphasized, the quality of the client-practitioner relationship, and so the character of the social worker, as distinct from the specific theories or methods she employs, is a key aspect of professional competence and effectiveness.21 Speaking to the personnel who carry out the Church’s charitable activity, and warning them against being diverted into a radical utopian activism in the name of justice, Benedict sees that, more than anything, they “must be persons moved by Christ’s love, persons whose hearts Christ has conquered with his love, awakening in them a love of neighbor.”22
The social
worker whose character is formed in Christian love has, as a deep part of her character, a radical humility—which is necessary both to the virtue of love and to professional competence:
My deep personal sharing in the needs and sufferings of others becomes a sharing of my very self with them: if my gift is not to prove a source of humiliation, I must give to others not only something that is my own, but my very self; I must be personally present in my gift.23
Benedict invokes here the radical humility of Christ on the Cross, which in Christian understanding redeemed us and constantly comes to our aid. In helping we also receive help, Benedict says—being able to help is no merit or achievement of our own. “This duty is a grace.”24
Finally, we should highlight Benedict’s emphasis on the importance of prayer “in the face of the activism and the growing secularism of many Christians engaged in charitable work.”25 The significance of prayer does not lie in Christian social workers’ hope of changing God’s mind about particular situations or the belief that prayer is more efficacious than, or a substitute for, legislative advocacy. Rather, a personal relation with God in a Christian’s prayer life sustains love of neighbor and helps keep her from being drawn into ideologies and practices that replace love with hate, whether class or religious or ethnic hate. It also protects against burnout. Hope involves the virtue of patience, and faith leads practitioners to understand charity as participation through divine grace in God’s love of the human person. In this way, hope and faith, the other theological virtues, give rise to and sustain the queen of virtues. All are central to the formation of Christians who seek to help the vulnerable, needy, and oppressed.
Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is Page 33