Religio Philologi: Social Justice I & II
In the recent debates over national health care, some anti-Christian socialists and some Catholics invoked the term "social justice" in their arguments for socialized medicine. In fact, the expression "social justice" is frequently heard from the lips of Catholic traditionalists (including distributists), Marxists, and Greens. Are they talking about the same principle or different principles? Does the expression have any usable meaning? Then, before going on to sketch out some basic principles of a Christian's duties to his fellows, we might begin by examining this much (ab)used phrase.
The Term Social Justice
Let us begin by looking at each word separately and simply, without reference to any body of theology or philosophy. Justice is derived from Latin iustitia, which the Romans used as the equivalent of the Greek dikaiosune. It is both a set of principles of how a human being is to behave rightly towards others and the virtue that informs such conduct. Social comes from Latin socius, comrade or ally. Thus a social relationship is one between soldiers, workmates, political or military allies, and between allied or confederated peoples. But, since social is also related to society, it has also taken on the meaning of "pertaining to society," whether that society is particular (as in American society) or the general/universal sense of global society. Then what is social justice? Is it the justice that men owe each others as members of an army or profession or which allied nations owe each other or what we owe each other generally as human beings or which is owed by us to society or by society to us or to others?
Antony Flew has argued quite cogently that social justice is a contradiction in terms, because justice is by definition a virtue or action that I possess or owe to other persons and not some generic obligation owed by some fictive collectivity. One does not have to be a liberal individualist to find some wisdom in this argument. We shall take this up later, when we discuss charity, but for the moment let us just raise the question of whether, when, we feel a collective obligation that is discharged by the state using the money it has taken from us, we are really disposed to accept a personal responsibility for performing the acts of charity commanded by Christ and His apostles.
Perhaps Prof. Flew is wrong about social justice. Perhaps it means something quite wholesome and real. Unfortunately, the expression "social justice" is not at all self-explanatory. Let us look at a little history. According to the fount of all misinformation, Wikipedia, the term "social justice" is found in both Gibbon and The Federalist. This is obviously an irrelevant fact because neither Gibbon nor Hamnilton could possibly have meant the same thing as either Fr. Coughlin or the Greens. The phrase comes up in Federalist 7, apparently written by Hamilton. The subject is on what conditions the separate states might go to war against each other. Hamilton lays it on fairly thick in order to make his case for a more unified central government. After listing the delinquencies and digressions of various state legislatures, Hamilton rises to a fever pitch, predicting "a war not of parchment but of the sword would chastise such atrocious breaches of moral obligation and social justice." In other words, social justice means the moral and legal duties owed by confederate allies to each other, just as the expression Social War referred to the war between Rome and her Latin allies. Gibbon uses it in a slightly extended sense to mean something like the international law of warfare.
Setting aside Wikipedia's (and other pop historians') red herrings, we can turn to the 20th century. Catholics usually point to Fr. John A. Ryan as the originator of the concept of both a living wage and more generally of social justice. Ryan said he was inspired by Pope Leo XIII's Rerum novarum, but in his book A Living Wage, I read more about the principle of natural rights found in the decidedly unCatholic thinkers Locke, Rousseau, and Jefferson. I have not read enough to know in which book Ryan actually used the expression, and this is not an article about Ryan. It is enough to say that whatever utility there might have been to his ideas, he utterly destroyed in supporting the national-socialist regime of Franklin Roosevelt, to whom he became a close advisor. But social justice find the term used several times by Walter Rauschenbusch in his once famous A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917). Rauschenbusch was among the pioneers who equated do-gooding and progressive-style Marxism with the message of the Gospels.
Catholic proponents of "social justice" refer constantly to Rerum novarum, but I do not find the phrase there and it is only a tendentious reading that could insert the ideas of Ryan and Rauschenbusch into Leo XIII's grave encyclical. Consider only this paragraph:
"From all these conversations, it is perceived that the fundamental principle of Socialism which would make all possessions public property is to be utterly rejected because it injures the very ones whom it seeks to help, contravenes the natural rights of individual persons, and throws the functions of the State and public peace into confusion. Let it be regarded, therefore, as established that in seeking help for the masses this principle before all is to be considered as basic, namely, that private ownership must be preserved inviolate. With this understood, we shall explain whence the desired remedy is to be sought."
Thus, when Pope Pius XI uses the term iustitia socialis, as he does in Quadragesimo anno, and repeats Leo XIII's condemnation of socialism in very explicit terms, his language cannot justly be twisted to justify state socialism. A few passages (supplied by a friend) should be enough to make this point clear. First, Pius XI explicitly uses the term social justice to mean no more than pursuit of the common good, which is a position that goes back to the New Testament:
"To each, therefore, must be given his own share of goods, and the
distribution of created goods, which, as every discerning person
knows, is laboring today under the gravest evils due to the huge
disparity between the few exceedingly rich and the unnumbered
propertyless, must be effectively called back to and brought into
conformity with the norms of the common good, that is, social
justice.” (Quadragesimo Anno, 58.)
Quadragesimo anno also condemns all forms of socialism, both Marxist revolutionary socialism and the more seemingly benign forms that seduce some Catholics:
"And therefore, to the harassed workers there have come “intellectuals,” as they are called, setting up in opposition to a fictitious law the equally fictitious moral principle that all products and profits, save only enough to repair and renew capital, belong by very right to the workers. This error, much more specious than that of certain of the Socialists who hold that whatever serves to produce goods ought to be transferred to the State, or, as they say “socialized,” is consequently all the more dangerous and the more apt to deceive the unwary. It is an alluring poison which many have eagerly drunk whom open Socialism had not been able to deceive.”
and
“Socialism, against which Our Predecessor, Leo XIII, had especially to inveigh, has since his time changed no less profoundly than the form of economic life. For Socialism, which could then be termed almost a single system and which maintained definite teachings reduced into one body of doctrine, has since then split chiefly into two sections, often opposing each other and even bitterly hostile, without either one however abandoning a position fundamentally contrary to Christian truth that was characteristic of Socialism.”
“The more degenerate form is communism, but even the less virulent strain, while it often reaches toward Christian truth, only accidentally shares ideals common to many philosophies and seduces Catholics into believing it is harmless. Nonetheless, he concludes: “Whether considered as a doctrine, or an historical fact, or a movement, Socialism, if it remains truly Socialism, even after it has yielded to truth and justice on the points which we have mentioned, cannot be reconciled with the teachings of the Catholic Church because its concept of society itself is utterly foreign to Christian truth.”
Finally, to exclude all possibility of confusing Christian charity and justice with socialism, he says: “If Socialism, like all errors, contains some truth (which, moreover, the Supreme Pontiffs have never denied), it is based nevertheless on a theory of human society peculiar to itself and irreconcilable with true Christianity. Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist.”
This very brief and cursory survey has not got us very far except to the point that we can conclude that the concept of social justice as used by Pope Pius IX is only shorthand for Christian social ethical teachings that can be found in the Scriptures and repeated and refined over the centuries. This must be sharply distinguished from the theory of social justice developed by Ryan and Rauschenbusch and invoked by Catholics today. This new-fangled soft socialism is not ancient, does not have the authority of Pius IX or Leo XIII or Pius XI, andit is all too frequently confused with the theories of Marx and the policies of the New Deal.
To see the dangers posed by repeated use of this phrase, let us turn to a Catholic writer who is neither a Marxist nor a New-Dealer, Fr. John Hardon. In his Modern Catholic Dictionary, Fr. Hardon describes social justice as first, "the virtue that inclines one to cooperate with others in order to help make the institutions of society better serve the common good. While the obligation of social justice falls upon the individual, the person cannot fulfill the obligation alone, but must work in concert with others, through organized bodies, as a member of a group whose purpose is to identify the needs of society, and, byt the use of appropriate means, to meet these needs locally, regionally, nationally, and even globally."
This definition, which began so well, turns sour rathe quickly and, as we shall see, the sourness turns to a bitterness that has a hint of poison. Let us begin with the good stuff. Justice is a virtue, perhaps the virtue, so if there is social justice it must be a virtue. Like other virtues, the burden falls upon persons—Hardon should have avoided the liberal language of individualism—but it is exercised in groups acting for the common good. Church parishes, the Boy Scouts, Food Pantries, Musical Societies are groups that come to mind. The problem begins, though, with that tricky word society. Hardon reveals how dangerous such an expression is by extending it to the entire human race. Surely, this notion of a philanthropic obligation to humanity is contradicted by the teachings of the Church and by common sense. We shall take this up later, but there is a line of thought from Paul to Augustine to Thomas that goes decidedly in the other direction.
Fr. Hardon justifies this break with tradition by adding: "Implicit in the virtue of social justice is an awareness that the world has entered on a new phase of social existence, with potential for great good or great harm vested in those who control the media and the structures of modern society. Christians, therefore, are expected to respond to the new obligations created by the extraordinary means of promoting the common good not only of small groups but literally of all humanity."
It is only my great respect for Fr. Hardon that prevents me from describing this globaloney (to use a term coined by a great Catholic laywoman) in condign language. The argument that mass media and commerce have created a global society requiring global solutions has been used by every crackpot, including Adolf Hitler, for over a hundred years. What, the Roman Empire did not pose similar challenges and opportunities? We are really living in a new moral universe? Should we try to control the networks, picket the UN, create an imperium to impose peace and justice. Let me betray my semi-Anglican background:
Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.
Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.
Dostoevksy argued that although Marxism and the Catholic Church were at odd, the do-gooding propensities of the Church would one day lead Catholics to embrace socialism. The language of social justice has been one very important mechanism that has encouraged this fatal embrace. In seeking to understand our Christian obligations, then, let us dispense with this troublesome expression.
II Charity
In order to gain a clearer perspective on social justice in both the good and the bad senses, we have to look at this expression in the light of Christian charity. Is either state socialism or global philanthropy enjoined by the New Testament or by the important fathers of the early Church? Later I shall examine the meaning of Christian charity both in the Scriptures and in the works of Augustine and Thomas. First, however, I want to talk more generally about the fallacies of philanthropic globalism. Here are some paragraphs from The Morality of Everyday Life in which I took up the notion of an international system of philanthropy, whether through global taxation or other means.
Practically speaking, a system of the most minimal international compassion would have to be a matter of state compulsion; it could not be left up to individuals. For good or ill, few people are willing to sacrifice the second car, much less ride the bus to work, in the interest of either charity or justice. But, if alleviating hunger and poverty is a duty that the individuals of advanced nations must discharge, not in the name of charity or compassion, then simple justice requires an automatic transfer of wealth between nations, and neither individual citizens nor individual nations have sufficient wisdom or impartiality to make the right decisions in the common interest of the world.
On the face of it, the argument seems paradoxical: How can a person be just, if he is acting out of compulsion? If I rescue a drowning man only because his friend has a gun aimed at my head, no one will laud my heroism. But what if I am a member of a large group whose representatives, elected by a small minority of the membership, votes to hire a lifeguard who saves the drowning man? My group (or nation) might be praised for its public spirit or the good sense it showed in picking its representatives, but if, while the lifeguard was off duty, the members stood by and watched a child drown, their public spirit or good sense would not excuse their indifference.
Most people believe that moral actions, to be really moral, must be freely undertaken, and we deserve only limited credit for good works done generally in the name of governments or international agencies. It is the soldier risking his life on the battlefield who wins medals, not the voters and taxpayers who support the government that sent him to fight and die.
We run serious risks in speaking the language of justice and not charity. It is not for nothing that the ancient pagans put the ultimate courts of justice in the land of the dead. "Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?" Christians have always believed that human nature, at its best, is too frail and corrupt to deserve, under the law of justice, anything but condemnation and death. Man's salvation did not come as an act of justice but as a supreme gesture of divine charity.
Charity, caritas, agape, love--the various words have different emphases, but a central point connects them all. Under the Law, all are condemned, but the spirit of love gives salvation. Therefore, for any kind of Christian, the requirements of justice--however exacting and grave--must take second place to the obligation to perform works of charity. The responsibility for love cannot be delegated or reassigned; it must be discharged by individuals who, in doing good, are becoming, while not good in themselves, more nearly good. In this sense, the charitable man receives more benefits than he confers.
The Jewish and Christian scriptures command us to look after ourselves and our dependents and to practice charity. As Augustine put it, charity is the "virtue that joins us to God in love," and it is, as St. Paul tells us, a greater gift of the spirit even than faith. But charity under the duress of taxation is not charity at all, even if the taxes are voted by a majority.
One of the worst effects of national welfare systems is that they diminish our capacity and our desire to do voluntary works of charity. Until modern times, the rulers of Europe provided relief to the poor only in times of great necessity or to the widows and orphans of veteran soldiers. The Roman emperors, it is true, distributed grain and bread within the capital, but this was a sure indication that the population of Rome had lost its independence and looked up to the emperor as its ultimate patron.
In Christian Europe, it might be supposed, rulers would be tempted to exercise charity toward their peoples, and, in cases of emergency, a prince might open his granaries to his subjects--as did the Egyptian pharaoh who, on the advice of Joseph, sold the grain at a profit. The Christian Gospel commands those who accept it to do good, as we are able, to widows, orphans, and the destitute, and throughout Christian England, before Henry VIII nationalized the Church, parishes provided charity to the needy.
What we might now call welfare--food, clothing, shelter, medicine--was distributed by the Church to members of the local parish. The monasteries, on the other hand, gave emergency relief to strangers and beggars. The Church in medieval England can be seen as a vast network of non-political associations providing relief and welfare to those in need. On the eve of the Reformation, at least three percent of monastic income was devoted to relief of the poor, and the wills of well-to-do Christians specified what moneys should be spent on food and clothing for the poor. These were often quite significant, although few could match Richard II's scheming uncle, John of Gaunt, whose will provided 50 silver marks a day for 40 days after his death, 300 more on the eve of his funeral, and 500 on the day of his burial--a staggering fortune.
The religious arguments for charity are significant, because even nonbelievers, in making a case for national and international poverty relief, have appropriated religious language. On the other hand, it is obvious that theological arguments will carry little weight with non-Christians who accept neither the authority of Scripture nor the duty of charity (as opposed to social justice). However, many philosophers who are not orthodox Christians have insisted upon the moral autonomy of human individuals. A follower of Sartre or Kant, as much as St. Paul and St. Augustine, would have to reject any argument that transferred moral decisions from individuals to vast impersonal agencies. For good or ill, free men and women must make their own decisions, commit their own blunders, discharge their own obligations. To surrender the power to do good or ill, right and wrong--even if the surrender is only in the mind--is to give up an essential part of our humanity.
.....
The humane person does have other options. One might, for example, practice charity closer to home, where it is possible to become personally involved and where it is much easier to monitor the honesty and effectiveness of relief programs. Mother Teresa, when a Milwaukee woman volunteered to come and assist her in India, told the woman to do good in her own hometown, to find Calcutta in Milwaukee.
Unfortunately, the private efforts of charitable individuals in their own neighborhoods and cities will never attract newspaper headlines or have the effect of a television special or the photographic image of an emaciated child. Newspapers and advertising have a legitimate object, the communication of information to interested persons, but for several decades the primary point of the various "media" has been the arousal of strong feelings in their audiences. These feelings are not directed toward familiar objects--a reader's mother, girlfriend, child, or neighbor--but toward complete strangers.
The Pornography of Compassion
The passion most commonly appealed to is sexual desire. The attempt to arouse desire or stimulate passion for strangers by use of words and images goes by the name of pornography. In origin, the word pornographia refers to the depiction of prostitutes and acts of prostitution, and pornography is the esthetic or imaginative dimension of prostitution, a business devoted to promoting the illusion that one human being is having an erotic relationship with another. The reality of the "relationship" is simpler: a cash transaction without emotional or moral attachment. Indeed, the very meaning of porne (prostitute) in Greek suggests a commercial transaction.
Money "can't buy me love," but the man who hires a prostitute can buy the illusion of love or passion or innocence, and it is this illusion that men are willing to pay for, not the mere act of fornication. If a discharge of surplus erotic energy were the only point, a man might find safer and less costly alternatives. No, at least part of what he is paying for in hiring a prostitute is the illusion of attachment, and, on a lower level, the purchaser of pornography is pursuing the same fantasy.
There are other desires, other interests, other passions: pity, fear, anger, and hatred, to name only a few. Aristotle believed that the object of tragedy was the purgation or discharge of pity and fear from those who participated as observers in the experience. However, the object of pornography and of the "trash" journalism produced by the television networks and the great newspapers is not purgation but merely stimulation, and while the stories on Oprah, Jerry, and Jennie may be as fictional as the ancient Greek tale of the witch who murders her rival and her own children in order to punish her lover, we read and watch these fables as if they were real events whose participants are known to us. Someone else's child, trapped in a well, monopolizes the attention of millions of Americans who neglect their children or entrust them to the care of strangers, and an airline disaster is celebrated as a major news event, even though the 200 people killed represent only a tiny fraction of the people who die, from various causes, every day throughout the world. This is information only in the sense that an exact count of the pop bottles found on the sand of Myrtle Beach in a given day is information.
Even the terrible slaughter of several thousand innocent people on September 11, 2001, was insignificant, when compared with such grisly figures as traffic fatalities and abortions. Even in NATO’s little war against Yugoslavia inflicted more civilian deaths as a percentage of population. Americans cared about the victims of the World Trade Center attacks not because they were generic human beings but precisely because they were Americans. Nonetheless, there was something unsettling about the apparently unending series of celebrity memorial concerts. What began as sincere mourning seemed to degenerate into an orgy of compassion in which showmanship too precedence over grief.
Recent films have portrayed the degradation of the news business as something new, but already in the 1960's Billy Wilder's film The Big Circus portrayed a cynical reporter, who not only exploits a tragedy--in this case, a man trapped in a mine--for his advancement but even helps to create it. Anyone might reach a similar, if unintended conclusion, from seeing any of the versions of Front Page or from a cursory scan of the 19th century yellow press, which Thackeray and Trollope (especially in his two Phineas Finn novels) and ridiculed. In fact, the illegitimate manipulation of sentiment has been the object of the press for as long as there has been a press.
Many, if not most "human interest" stories are reported without any other object than the arousal of passions for strangers, and to that extent they are pornographic. Although there is a fine line between the nightly news programs and the commercial interludes that pay for them, most advertising is overtly pornographic, even in the ordinary sexual sense. Advertising depends for its success on powerful images that stir the emotions of greed, envy, sexual desire, and compassion, but the success comes at a price. Commercial ads, whether they are celebrating detergents or starving Somalis or aborted babies, are always fantasies that distort our perception of reality. In reality, most people in underdeveloped nations are not starving to death, nor are they the helpless victims of natural disaster or colonial exploitation. They are men and women and children, struggling to make a life for themselves under sometimes adverse circumstances. "A steady diet of images of passive and helpless people" is an insult to the dignity of people in other cultures."
Charity Begins at Home
The mark of genuine charity is (in Greek) storge, or loving-kindness, and while such love may be bestowed upon objects that seem utterly alien to the giver, it is not the strangeness that attracts but the recognition of some common bond, if it is only common humanity or, in the case of lower animals, of some resemblance to human qualities.
Charity does begin at home, and the burden of charity is most easily discharged towards those with whom we are already connected by bonds of blood and experience. Charity toward strangers requires effort, and the more foreign the stranger, the greater the effort required. I am speaking, now, of that natural charity, which grows and expands with maturing conscience of the individual, in distinction from what is generally meant in politics by "compassion," which is the artificial sense of benevolence we are taught to feel in doing good deeds by long distance. In this case, the reverse is true. People who will not take a bowl of soup to a sick neighbor will weep over the fate of starving Albanians whose pictures they have seen on television, and even in their own country their concern with poverty or family dissolution is inevitably limited to the black family or to the poor of the Appalachians; their desire to propagate the Gospel confined to Asians and Hispanics; their zeal to improve public education directed primarily at minority advancement.
All these goals are laudable in themselves, and worthy men and women may well choose to devote themselves to pursuing the welfare of foreigners as a sort of special vocation, but what seems to be far more common is the telescopic philanthropy of Dickens’ Mrs. Jellaby (in Bleak House), whose eyes--so far-sighted that "they could see nothing nearer than Africa" overlooked the needs of children, friends and neighbors.
Telescopic philanthropy is not charity. Call it social justice or anything else you like, but not charity, a virtue that springs from the loving character of the giver. Where the cause is guilt or national self-hatred or only a formal duty learned by rote in catechism, the impulse springs from sources quite distinct from charitable love, and while we may admire the cold sense of duty that calls people to send checks into telethons, we cannot, in most cases, attribute their zeal to charity.
St. Thomas puts the question of charity in the context of both grace and natural obligation. As a gift of the Holy Spirit, charity connects us to God. Rather than lavish our wealth on the evil (e.g., thieves, confidence men, and child molesters), Thomas tells us that we should will the greatest good to those who are closest to God. But from the natural perspective--and much charity concerns the satisfaction of natural necessities--closeness to ourselves must also affect the degree of our charity: "In what concerns nature we should love our kinsmen most, . . . and we are more closely bound to provide them with necessities of life."
If there is a natural priority of obligation toward our kinsmen and neighbors, then charitable assistance to foreign countries would be at the bottom of the scale. Until modern times, this was certainly the common perception. Wealthy Greeks (and the Hellenized non-Greeks of the ancient Middle East) took it for granted that they should spend some of their surplus on their native polis. The system of “liturgies” was institutionalized in Athens, but it is observable even in the later Roman Empire. One of the Greek complaints against Jews was that they did not contribute money locally to build theatres or assist the poor but sent it to Jerusalem. For a good Jew, however, such a decision had nothing to do with a desire to practice international philanthropy and everything to do with their sense of primary obligation to their own people. Greeks, thinking exclusively in terms of the city, could not or would not understand the nature of Jewish loyalty, which was, in fact, very like their own.
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Thank you, Dr. Fleming. I am going to give this a re-read, as well as some time to settle before commenting.
Dr Fleming,
This distinction is a major loss to our country. Three recommended Christians for our age, who illustrated this difference between charity and social work, have been Vilmos Apor (1892 - 1945), a Hungarian bishop with a reputation for his service to the poor, especially during WW II, spoke out against persecution of the poor, his motto was "The Cross strengthens the weak and makes the strong gentle" He was murdered by Russian troops on Holy Saturday in 1945 when he refused to turn over 100 women hiding in his episcopal residence. Giovanni Battista Scalabrini (1839-1905), ordained Bishop of Plaisance in 1870, known for a major commitment to the poor, sold many of his own possessions (including his pectoral cross) to help the poor, founded an order of missionary nuns to minister to migrants. Maria Vicenta de Sainte-Dorothee Chavez Orozco 1867-1949, was born in Mexico and founded the Congregation of Servants of the Holy Trinity and the Poor in 1902; in 1914, when anti-clerical persecution began in Mexico, she refused to discontinue her charitable work among the poor, the aged, and the sick, established seven hospitals, clinics, and dispensaries.
One can compare this type of charitable work to the work of of “social justice” as conceived and preached by folks like Christopher Hitchens in say, Hell's Angel, that was shown on the British television, channel 4. The documentary was written by Christopher Hitchens, who co-produced it with his comrad, Tariq Ali. Their major complaint is that christian charity is not social work and they are right. Another illustration is The Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s, objection of his Government's decision to grant Mother Theresa a state funeral because as the secretary Giriraj Kishore, said "her first duty was to the Church, her social service to the state was only incidental.” This of course is absolutely true, as Mother Theresa never failed to teach her own disciples. “One of the first things that attracted me then was not the person of Mother Teresa, but the kind of life that she was living—what she described to us—and the apostolate she performed. I told her how impressed I was with her “social work” and told her I wanted to help “She said, ‘We are not doing social work; this is God’s work.’ And then she explained to me, back in 1966, what she meant by doing God’s work.”
I hope I have not jumped ahead in this discussion but a culture's "social work" is always and everywhere grounded in its theology and faith. Separating them has been the biggest victory for secular liberals and the largest defeat for our old, decimated, Protestant, culture.
The concept was popular among the mildly-socialist-type Englishman of the 19th century. The 1928 BCP (and an 18?? version I have at home) has a specific prayer for social justice.
The American BCP of 1928 has such a prayer but not the previous edition. The current shorter English BCP does not have it nor did the version proposed by the Church but rejected by Parliament in 1928. The American 1928 edition also adds rather militaristic prayers for army and navy and a fair amount of unmemorable other prayers and thanksgivings.
In Part II, I am going to take up charity and the range of obligations it imposes.
Promoting social justice around the world through the Church, or through the relatively benign American government of the 50s, must have been what Fr. Hardon had in mind, and nothing like the coercive totalitarian urge that apparently motivates Wallis and his kind.
Today's coercive utopians who still call themselves Christians seem to fit the description of modern gnostics whose loss of faith is matched by their zeal to get the job done in the here and now. Hitchens, on the other hand, seems to think that the nonexistence of God follows from His not measuring up to Hitchens's idiosyncratic notions of social justice on the one hand, and the claims of scientism on the other, so the only question is who or what gets to take the place of God. Hitchens should look at a photo collage of the scientists he'd entrust humanity to before he gets too far out on a limb.
The arrogance of these people always reminds me of Kirk when he said something like, When the donkey no longer follows the carrot, out comes the stick. The anger of these Christian social justice types and New Atheists makes it clear that's just what they have in mind for us donkeys. No need to knock down our doors with rifle butts quite yet, since the IRS will now conveniently enforce health care and subsequent rounds of social justice by simply withdrawing money from our bank accounts.
Much as I hate to say it, I believe the over emphasis of 'social justice' type social work was later used in part by the progressivists at the Second Vatican Council to try and transform our Holy Church into a universalistic, humanist charitable organization.
One question for you Dr Fleming. What do you think of distributism ?
I have written in excessive haste and without sufficient reflection in order to put this issue squarely on the table, and my little sketch can benefit from your contributions. A friend has written the following note, which I reproduce:
"Your recent article on social justice is, as usual, quite
thought-provoking. If I might play devil's advocate, I would point out
that the term "social justice" is even found in the encyclicals, and
not just since Vatican II. For example:
"To each, therefore, must be given his own share of goods, and the
distribution of created goods, which, as every discerning person
knows, is laboring today under the gravest evils due to the huge
disparity between the few exceedingly rich and the unnumbered
propertyless, must be effectively called back to and brought into
conformity with the norms of the common good, that is, social
justice." (Quadragesimo Anno, 58.)
The Latin of the same passage is:
"Sua igitur cuique pars bonorum attribuenda est: efficiendumque, ut ad
boni communis seu socialis iustitiae normas revocetur et conformetur
partitio bonorum creatorum, quam hodie ob ingens discrimen inter
paucos praedivites et innumeros rerum inopes gravissimo laborare
incommodo cordatus quisque novit."
Doesn't the use of "socialis iustitiae" here at least show that the
term has some basis in theological language?"
Before taking up these questions in detail, I do wish to point out that Quadragesimo anno was issued in 1931 during a period in which the term social justice had begun to be used commonly. As Pius XI uses it, that is to be a synonym for the common good---the English is slightly misleading, by the way--it is a harmless and wholesome term, though here in the States it was already acquiring the New Deal socialist overtones or even dominant tones that are inconsistent with QA. Note also that like Leo XIII, whose encyclical he commemorated, Pius XI repudiated both liberalism, that is classical liberalism/libertarianism and socialism. Take this paragraph, for example:
"And therefore, to the harassed workers there have come "intellectuals," as they are called, setting up in opposition to a fictitious law the equally fictitious moral principle that all products and profits, save only enough to repair and renew capital, belong by very right to the workers. This error, much more specious than that of certain of the Socialists who hold that whatever serves to produce goods ought to be transferred to the State, or, as they say "socialized," is consequently all the more dangerous and the more apt to deceive the unwary. It is an alluring poison which many have eagerly drunk whom open Socialism had not been able to deceive."
and
"Socialism, against which Our Predecessor, Leo XIII, had especially to inveigh, has since his time changed no less profoundly than the form of economic life. For Socialism, which could then be termed almost a single system and which maintained definite teachings reduced into one body of doctrine, has since then split chiefly into two sections, often opposing each other and even bitterly hostile, without either one however abandoning a position fundamentally contrary to Christian truth that was characteristic of Socialism."
"The more degenerate form is communism, but even the less virulent strain, while it often reaches toward Christian truth, only accidentally shares ideals common to many philosophies and seduces Catholics into believing it is harmless. Nonetheless, he concludes: "Whether considered as a doctrine, or an historical fact, or a movement, Socialism, if it remains truly Socialism, even after it has yielded to truth and justice on the points which we have mentioned, cannot be reconciled with the teachings of the Catholic Church because its concept of society itself is utterly foreign to Christian truth."
It is precisely for these reasons that I suggest that the term social justice invites confusion and tends these days almost inevitably to lead people astray. For the purpose of this discussion, I strongly urge that it be dropped and that it be avoided except when it can be defined in the terms set forth by QA.
I am a great admirer of both Chesterton and Belloc as well as their American counterparts, the Agrarians--again, a term that creates great confusion around the world, since it seems to mean the state's forcible redistribution of land. One of the many reasons I prefer to avoid the slogans and brickbats of the 20th century is that it takes so much time to clear the air of misunderstanding and misrepresentation.
I should also have added this from QA:
"If Socialism, like all errors, contains some truth (which, moreover, the Supreme Pontiffs have never denied), it is based nevertheless on a theory of human society peculiar to itself and irreconcilable with true Christianity. Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist."
Do I read this to understand that there is no "sociability" which embraces all mankind? That such talk is "globaloney"? In which case, can there be either a "catholic" church or a Body of Christ?
This is the dangerous and slippery sort of thinking that led to my conclusions. First off, the confusion is between globalism--global consciousness, global politics, global government--and human sociability; then the confusion of such phrases with the reality of the Catholic Church and Body of Christ. It is in fact a great leap from Pius XI to Al Gore, but note how easily the modern mind is able to make it. Before closing off this line of discussion--not appropriate until we have established what charity is and what are its obligations--let me ask how a person in, say, Des Moines, Iowa, is to attend to the needs of people in Haiti in any real or practical way. Let us further suppose that the person is a father, who owns a business that employs several or even hundreds of people. Of course, he could deduct money from his employees pay and send it to strangers. He could disinherit his children or even cut down his support for them. Or, he could join a political party or global agency promoting world government that robbed all local communities or their social, ethical, and economic autonomy, making common cause with multi-national businesses that support abortion and gay rights--which is, in fact, what globalism amounts to these days. It is very easy to watch a video about starving children and engage in fruitless handwringing. It is quite another to do something to help. And if in helping strangers we harm those who depend on us or transfer authority in violation of the well-known principle of subsidiarity, are we serving Christ or Anti-Christ? It is very self-gratifying to claim higher moral ground, especially one has not begun to think through the issue.
no “sociability” which embraces ....all mankind?
No, there is no such thing as a "sociability that embraces." There is a God that loves, parents that may or may not love, siblings, cousins, members of the tribe and the fact we share these realities with other humans. But the abstract existence of something like a "sociability that embraces" is only in our imagination. Living wills acting on other living wills, yes. We have evidence of a living God who has a will and ample evidence of human beings who have wills perverse and otherwise, no evidence whatsoever of anything like a :sociability" that embraces us. When Aristotle described man as a political animal he was speaking of known realities such as parents, family, neighborhods and communities. Nothing at all about being embraced by theories or politcal abstractions.
Sociability, properly speaking, is the natural affection or propensity of human beings to live in family and community, thus it would be quite mistaken, as Robert observes, to use the word in this way. And how we can be "sociable"--that is prone to form bonds--with strangers on the other side of the globe is a mystery that borders on being a contradiction in terms. I had thought about taking up a discussion of Dickens' Bleak House, in which "telescopic philanthropy" is exposed to a withering attack not at all characteristic of Dickens, who was too often a sentimental humanitarian.
let me ask how a person in, say, Des Moines, Iowa, is to attend to the needs of people in Haiti in any real or practical way. Church teaching (which I follow) is not in doubt about this issue. I wear clothes made by these people; I create (through legislators I help elect) the trade and economic and environmental conditions which affect these others, no matter how remote. I am (in the words of Laborem Exercans) the "indirect employer." While there is legitimate debate and discussion about what this entails, the conversation is not limited to charity, but includes justice (as Benedict makes clear in Caritas in Veritate.) But I still don't see how you can deny a common sociability, and still maintain the catholicity of the Church. I fail to see how you can avoid reducing justice to a cultural artifact. Have we fallen into the errors of the Enlightenment here?
It is perhaps worth adding to this magnificent discussion a little reminder that in modern times, the advocates of social justice almost always mean that they are to enjoy the exercise of their charity at somebody else's cost. One might say that absentee moralism is one of the chief curses of the last several centuries.
Mr. Maxwell is correct. Vatican council 2, which was incidentally non-dogmatic and the novelties of which are not binding upon any Catholic, ended with the exhortation of Paul 6 to help "man" build a new world. Its documents contain sometimes breathless references to "modern man," his progress, his new media, his present day triumph and possibilities. Fr. Hardon, like the last 2 popes, was a most worthy priest, basically sound on dogma -- especially moral dogma, but "conservative" only as viewed within the realm of the post-councilar regime, its possible range of opinions and its program--at least as that program existed in the documents themselves (as distinquished from the "spirit" of the council, which no one can define). I am certain Dr. Fleming knows this, but it is worth pointing this out explicitly to non-Catholics for several reasons, chief of which is that many assume both a uniformity of belief among churchmen, and that any pronouncement from any source must be dogmatic.
Dr. Fleming is entirely correct that Leo 13's Rerum Novarum, cited ad nauseum by American Catholic activists, does not support any program of a broad vague "social justice," whatsoever. Fr. Ryan's statement that he was "inspired by" the encyclical gives away the game. That is all any of them could say, assuming they even felt they any longer needed to cite anything. Most modern American Catholics, like others of our day, simply look inside their "hearts" or empty heads for any impulse to justify their actions as either moral, in a general sense, or even as the very word of God.
In point of fact, the de-facto schismatic American church establishment has been a major, if not a key player in the ascendancy of the present administration and its flagship program, just enacted into law. It was swept away by Alinskyism while Alinsky was still alive, many prominent priests, bishops, educators, and lay leaders becoming his very public and very willing stooges. Largely because of the work of American Catholic churchmen, reference to documents like Federalist 7 is now of historical or philosophical interest only. It is about as relevant in praxis (big Vatican 2 word for the next pop quiz) as the Hammurabi Code.
No authoritative source of Roman Catholic dogma such as the Catechism of the Council of Trent, Dr. Ludwig Ott's Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, nor the 13th edition of Henry Denziger's The Sources of Catholic Dogma mandates "do-gooding." Dostoevsky is thus talking about certain churchmen, not the Church, as Dostoevsky is prone to do. As Dr. Fleming properly terms Fr. Hardon, he is a "Catholic writer," in other words a churchman. His views on social justice, like the principle of distributism, are for Catholics a matter of opinion, open to debate.
Care for the poor is another matter, rooted in the gospel itself and Catholic tradition. So is the discreet issue of a living wage in an urban world divorced from the land, which as far as I can tell from encyclicals of Leo 13 and Pius 11 (Divini Redemptoris, Denziger at pp. 610-611) is the only authoritative way the term social justice has been used. No authoritative Catholic text mandates any philanthropic obligation to humanity. Paul 6's exhortations and the documents of Vatican 2 are simply not authoritative statements of Catholic dogma, just dizzyingly confusing and (in praxis) revolutionary. And the fact that busloads of liberal/quasi-Marxist American priests, nuns,and lay busybodies may say otherwise may be a scandal, and is certainly a cause for great shame, but does not constitute either a dogma nor a propensity of "the Church." And the fact is, what such nitwits presently "embrace" is far beyond mere socialism. Dr. Fleming is correct to carefully point out that serious confusion on these issues also emanates from self-styled "Catholic traditionalists."
Mr Medaille does not appear to have grasped either the purpose or the nature of this discussion his discourse is so suffused with the pseudo-catholic socialism condemned by the popes I have cited that he is apparently unable to grapple either with basic principles--is it an exercise in charity to take a man's money and spend it on other people's children?--or the reality that global philanthropy often does far more harm than good. If he supports trade policies that benefit strangers at the expense of neighbosr, as he seems to be saying, then he may be following the principles of Marx and Engels in their Manifesto but not the teachings of Christ. the Apostles, or the Fathers of the Church. If he is a man of courtesy and humility, he will wish to exercise patience and wait for the argument to develop. But if he only wants to shout down rational discourse with sentimental tirades, he will find himself excluded
Michael, thanks for your very helpful comments. We are going out for my wife's birthday and best wishes to your lady. More tomorrow.
We interrupt this thread to announce that David Frum has been purged from AEI. Ha ha ha!
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2010/03/25/2242655.aspx
Now back to social justice.
Red Phillips,
To paraphrase an old commentary of Mr. Frum's: "Health Care was a great clarifier. It forced people to take sides. The Democrats chose one side and AEI chose another. In a time of political controversy, Mr Frum turned his back on AEI and now AEI has turned its back on Mr. Frum."
Robert II, that's great. Can I use that?
I have revised my piece to include a brief discussion of Quadragesimo anno and added the following section, drawn from The Morality of Everyday Life:
II Charity
In order to gain a clearer perspective on social justice in both the good and the bad senses, we have to look at this expression in the light of Christian charity. Is either state socialism or global philanthropy enjoined by the New Testament or by the important fathers of the early Church? Later I shall examine the meaning of Christian charity both in the Scriptures and in the works of Augustine and Thomas. First, however, I want to talk more generally about the fallacies of philanthropic globalism. Here are some paragraphs from The Morality of Everyday Life in which I took up the notion of an international system of philanthropy, whether through global taxation or other means.
Practically speaking, a system of the most minimal international compassion would have to be a matter of state compulsion; it could not be left up to individuals. For good or ill, few people are willing to sacrifice the second car, much less ride the bus to work, in the interest of either charity or justice. But, if alleviating hunger and poverty is a duty that the individuals of advanced nations must discharge, not in the name of charity or compassion, then simple justice requires an automatic transfer of wealth between nations, and neither individual citizens nor individual nations have sufficient wisdom or impartiality to make the right decisions in the common interest of the world.
On the face of it, the argument seems paradoxical: How can a person be just, if he is acting out of compulsion? If I rescue a drowning man only because his friend has a gun aimed at my head, no one will laud my heroism. But what if I am a member of a large group whose representatives, elected by a small minority of the membership, votes to hire a lifeguard who saves the drowning man? My group (or nation) might be praised for its public spirit or the good sense it showed in picking its representatives, but if, while the lifeguard was off duty, the members stood by and watched a child drown, their public spirit or good sense would not excuse their indifference.
Most people believe that moral actions, to be really moral, must be freely undertaken, and we deserve only limited credit for good works done generally in the name of governments or international agencies. It is the soldier risking his life on the battlefield who wins medals, not the voters and taxpayers who support the government that sent him to fight and die.
We run serious risks in speaking the language of justice and not charity. It is not for nothing that the ancient pagans put the ultimate courts of justice in the land of the dead. "Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?" Christians have always believed that human nature, at its best, is too frail and corrupt to deserve, under the law of justice, anything but condemnation and death. Man's salvation did not come as an act of justice but as a supreme gesture of divine charity.
Charity, caritas, agape, love--the various words have different emphases, but a central point connects them all. Under the Law, all are condemned, but the spirit of love gives salvation. Therefore, for any kind of Christian, the requirements of justice--however exacting and grave--must take second place to the obligation to perform works of charity. The responsibility for love cannot be delegated or reassigned; it must be discharged by individuals who, in doing good, are becoming, while not good in themselves, more nearly good. In this sense, the charitable man receives more benefits than he confers.
The Jewish and Christian scriptures command us to look after ourselves and our dependents and to practice charity. As Augustine put it, charity is the "virtue that joins us to God in love," and it is, as St. Paul tells us, a greater gift of the spirit even than faith. But charity under the duress of taxation is not charity at all, even if the taxes are voted by a majority.
One of the worst effects of national welfare systems is that they diminish our capacity and our desire to do voluntary works of charity. Until modern times, the rulers of Europe provided relief to the poor only in times of great necessity or to the widows and orphans of veteran soldiers. The Roman emperors, it is true, distributed grain and bread within the capital, but this was a sure indication that the population of Rome had lost its independence and looked up to the emperor as its ultimate patron.
In Christian Europe, it might be supposed, rulers would be tempted to exercise charity toward their peoples, and, in cases of emergency, a prince might open his granaries to his subjects--as did the Egyptian pharaoh who, on the advice of Joseph, sold the grain at a profit. The Christian Gospel commands those who accept it to do good, as we are able, to widows, orphans, and the destitute, and throughout Christian England, before Henry VIII nationalized the Church, parishes provided charity to the needy.
What we might now call welfare--food, clothing, shelter, medicine--was distributed by the Church to members of the local parish. The monasteries, on the other hand, gave emergency relief to strangers and beggars. The Church in medieval England can be seen as a vast network of non-political associations providing relief and welfare to those in need. On the eve of the Reformation, at least three percent of monastic income was devoted to relief of the poor, and the wills of well-to-do Christians specified what moneys should be spent on food and clothing for the poor. These were often quite significant, although few could match Richard II's scheming uncle, John of Gaunt, whose will provided 50 silver marks a day for 40 days after his death, 300 more on the eve of his funeral, and 500 on the day of his burial--a staggering fortune.
The religious arguments for charity are significant, because even nonbelievers, in making a case for national and international poverty relief, have appropriated religious language. On the other hand, it is obvious that theological arguments will carry little weight with non-Christians who accept neither the authority of Scripture nor the duty of charity (as opposed to social justice). However, many philosophers who are not orthodox Christians have insisted upon the moral autonomy of human individuals. A follower of Sartre or Kant, as much as St. Paul and St. Augustine, would have to reject any argument that transferred moral decisions from individuals to vast impersonal agencies. For good or ill, free men and women must make their own decisions, commit their own blunders, discharge their own obligations. To surrender the power to do good or ill, right and wrong--even if the surrender is only in the mind--is to give up an essential part of our humanity.
.....
The humane person does have other options. One might, for example, practice charity closer to home, where it is possible to become personally involved and where it is much easier to monitor the honesty and effectiveness of relief programs. Mother Teresa, when a Milwaukee woman volunteered to come and assist her in India, told the woman to do good in her own hometown, to find Calcutta in Milwaukee.
Unfortunately, the private efforts of charitable individuals in their own neighborhoods and cities will never attract newspaper headlines or have the effect of a television special or the photographic image of an emaciated child. Newspapers and advertising have a legitimate object, the communication of information to interested persons, but for several decades the primary point of the various "media" has been the arousal of strong feelings in their audiences. These feelings are not directed toward familiar objects--a reader's mother, girlfriend, child, or neighbor--but toward complete strangers.
The Pornography of Compassion
The passion most commonly appealed to is sexual desire. The attempt to arouse desire or stimulate passion for strangers by use of words and images goes by the name of pornography. In origin, the word pornographia refers to the depiction of prostitutes and acts of prostitution, and pornography is the esthetic or imaginative dimension of prostitution, a business devoted to promoting the illusion that one human being is having an erotic relationship with another. The reality of the "relationship" is simpler: a cash transaction without emotional or moral attachment. Indeed, the very meaning of porne (prostitute) in Greek suggests a commercial transaction.
Money "can't buy me love," but the man who hires a prostitute can buy the illusion of love or passion or innocence, and it is this illusion that men are willing to pay for, not the mere act of fornication. If a discharge of surplus erotic energy were the only point, a man might find safer and less costly alternatives. No, at least part of what he is paying for in hiring a prostitute is the illusion of attachment, and, on a lower level, the purchaser of pornography is pursuing the same fantasy.
There are other desires, other interests, other passions: pity, fear, anger, and hatred, to name only a few. Aristotle believed that the object of tragedy was the purgation or discharge of pity and fear from those who participated as observers in the experience. However, the object of pornography and of the "trash" journalism produced by the television networks and the great newspapers is not purgation but merely stimulation, and while the stories on Oprah, Jerry, and Jennie may be as fictional as the ancient Greek tale of the witch who murders her rival and her own children in order to punish her lover, we read and watch these fables as if they were real events whose participants are known to us. Someone else's child, trapped in a well, monopolizes the attention of millions of Americans who neglect their children or entrust them to the care of strangers, and an airline disaster is celebrated as a major news event, even though the 200 people killed represent only a tiny fraction of the people who die, from various causes, every day throughout the world. This is information only in the sense that an exact count of the pop bottles found on the sand of Myrtle Beach in a given day is information.
Even the terrible slaughter of several thousand innocent people on September 11, 2001, was insignificant, when compared with such grisly figures as traffic fatalities and abortions. Even in NATO’s little war against Yugoslavia inflicted more civilian deaths as a percentage of population. Americans cared about the victims of the World Trade Center attacks not because they were generic human beings but precisely because they were Americans. Nonetheless, there was something unsettling about the apparently unending series of celebrity memorial concerts. What began as sincere mourning seemed to degenerate into an orgy of compassion in which showmanship too precedence over grief.
Recent films have portrayed the degradation of the news business as something new, but already in the 1960's Billy Wilder's film The Big Circus portrayed a cynical reporter, who not only exploits a tragedy--in this case, a man trapped in a mine--for his advancement but even helps to create it. Anyone might reach a similar, if unintended conclusion, from seeing any of the versions of Front Page or from a cursory scan of the 19th century yellow press, which Thackeray and Trollope (especially in his two Phineas Finn novels) and ridiculed. In fact, the illegitimate manipulation of sentiment has been the object of the press for as long as there has been a press.
Many, if not most "human interest" stories are reported without any other object than the arousal of passions for strangers, and to that extent they are pornographic. Although there is a fine line between the nightly news programs and the commercial interludes that pay for them, most advertising is overtly pornographic, even in the ordinary sexual sense. Advertising depends for its success on powerful images that stir the emotions of greed, envy, sexual desire, and compassion, but the success comes at a price. Commercial ads, whether they are celebrating detergents or starving Somalis or aborted babies, are always fantasies that distort our perception of reality. In reality, most people in underdeveloped nations are not starving to death, nor are they the helpless victims of natural disaster or colonial exploitation. They are men and women and children, struggling to make a life for themselves under sometimes adverse circumstances. "A steady diet of images of passive and helpless people" is an insult to the dignity of people in other cultures."
Charity Begins at Home
The mark of genuine charity is (in Greek) storge, or loving-kindness, and while such love may be bestowed upon objects that seem utterly alien to the giver, it is not the strangeness that attracts but the recognition of some common bond, if it is only common humanity or, in the case of lower animals, of some resemblance to human qualities.
Charity does begin at home, and the burden of charity is most easily discharged towards those with whom we are already connected by bonds of blood and experience. Charity toward strangers requires effort, and the more foreign the stranger, the greater the effort required. I am speaking, now, of that natural charity, which grows and expands with maturing conscience of the individual, in distinction from what is generally meant in politics by "compassion," which is the artificial sense of benevolence we are taught to feel in doing good deeds by long distance. In this case, the reverse is true. People who will not take a bowl of soup to a sick neighbor will weep over the fate of starving Albanians whose pictures they have seen on television, and even in their own country their concern with poverty or family dissolution is inevitably limited to the black family or to the poor of the Appalachians; their desire to propagate the Gospel confined to Asians and Hispanics; their zeal to improve public education directed primarily at minority advancement.
All these goals are laudable in themselves, and worthy men and women may well choose to devote themselves to pursuing the welfare of foreigners as a sort of special vocation, but what seems to be far more common is the telescopic philanthropy of Dickens’ Mrs. Jellaby (in Bleak House), whose eyes--so far-sighted that "they could see nothing nearer than Africa" overlooked the needs of children, friends and neighbors.
Telescopic philanthropy is not charity. Call it social justice or anything else you like, but not charity, a virtue that springs from the loving character of the giver. Where the cause is guilt or national self-hatred or only a formal duty learned by rote in catechism, the impulse springs from sources quite distinct from charitable love, and while we may admire the cold sense of duty that calls people to send checks into telethons, we cannot, in most cases, attribute their zeal to charity.
St. Thomas puts the question of charity in the context of both grace and natural obligation. As a gift of the Holy Spirit, charity connects us to God. Rather than lavish our wealth on the evil (e.g., thieves, confidence men, and child molesters), Thomas tells us that we should will the greatest good to those who are closest to God. But from the natural perspective--and much charity concerns the satisfaction of natural necessities--closeness to ourselves must also affect the degree of our charity: "In what concerns nature we should love our kinsmen most, . . . and we are more closely bound to provide them with necessities of life."
If there is a natural priority of obligation toward our kinsmen and neighbors, then charitable assistance to foreign countries would be at the bottom of the scale. Until modern times, this was certainly the common perception. Wealthy Greeks (and the Hellenized non-Greeks of the ancient Middle East) took it for granted that they should spend some of their surplus on their native polis. The system of “liturgies” was institutionalized in Athens, but it is observable even in the later Roman Empire. One of the Greek complaints against Jews was that they did not contribute money locally to build theatres or assist the poor but sent it to Jerusalem. For a good Jew, however, such a decision had nothing to do with a desire to practice international philanthropy and everything to do with their sense of primary obligation to their own people. Greeks, thinking exclusively in terms of the city, could not or would not understand the nature of Jewish loyalty, which was, in fact, very like their own.
The following quote is from the late Fritz Wilhelmson in his book, No Alienated Man, which I believe is somewhat relevant to our current discussion since we are trying to find the appropriate understanding between the abstract and the particular.
"The ancients spoke of a creature having life in two worlds: his body was rooted in the earth, but his soul swept out across the horizons to a world beyond. Let us call him by his name: Man. This balance which is Man is a tension rarely maintained in the course of human existence.
Let us call the one who situates his destiny in this world, and who habituates his gaze to the things this side of the horizon, Aristotelian Man. Let us call the one who despises the limits of the horizons, and who contemplates the world beyond, Platonic Man.
This first alienation of man from himself was healed in the ancient world by the Incarnation. Aristotelian Man, like St. Thomas the Doubter, could put his fingers in the side of his Creator; and Platonic Man, like the mystic John, found the Word, but it was the Word made Flesh. Revelation restored to man the unity that was himself. Anima naturaliter Christiana. This unity was achieved as a reality both personal and corporate for a period of time in that small segment of the globe known as Western Europe.
Human unity was gradually lost, and a new man came into being. This man has his life neither in the rooted things of the world nor in a heaven beyond. Nor is he Christian Man, man reconciled to himself. This new man looks neither outward and above nor outward and round about him. He looks within, and attempts to find his salvation by a penetration and purgation of the hidden depths of his own personality. This is Modern Man, man twice alienated from himself, and he has not yet found his soul."
This philosophical reality of our contemporary condition also reflects the current psychological tension between the capacity to act and the actual doing of the act itself. Best illustrated in our own English history in the character of Hamlet – the first modern Englishman, as opposed to our forefathers Bede, Augustine and Chaucer. The tendency to practice our charity in the abstract as opposed to the particular is really a reaction against our loss of understanding for “the Word made flesh”. The Think Tank and the popular modern sculpture of “The Thinker” all contorted in a fetal position reflects this paralyisis of our age; as does the new priesthood of psychologists, counselors, and the rampant epidemic of arrogance and inability to forgive which so many people suffer from today. Alms, prayer, fasting, corporal works of mercy and Charity are usually more healthy for the provider than the receiver. Or as understood by Shakespeare , “Mercy (or Charity) is twice blessed, it blesses him that gives and him that receives.”
I'm saddened to see that Dr Fleming has decided to jump on the bandwagon of the current, well-orchestrated, smear campaign against the Church. Pope Benedict, who is entitled in a way that Dr Fleming is not to interpret his predecessors' writings, recently condemned "unbridled capitalism" and "marxism". Pope Benedict is a European. Here in Europe, we draw a very clear distinction between "marxism" and "socialism". The Pope's choice of the former term indicates that he was trying to make clear that he was not condemning what modern Europe, at least, understands by "socialism". As a matter of common sense, the present Pope's words prevail over those of earlier pontiffs, living in a differnt age, in which terms did not necessarily have the same meaning as today. In is for Pope Benedict, and for him alone, to interpret the Church's teaching in the modern world. If he doesn't condemn socialism, then the Church doesn't condemn socialism. End of story!The Catholic Church is actually quite simple!
"I’m saddened to see that Dr Fleming has decided to jump on the bandwagon of the current, well-orchestrated, smear campaign against the Church"
Where does Dr. Fleming "smear" the Church? If you're going to make an outrageous accusation like that, at least provide a quote. If I were to respond to your quote by saying "Once again, Michael Kenny has sided with Josef Stalin" without making any case whatsoever it would carry the same weight as your accusation - which is to say none.
#24 NUTS!!!
I didn't know the planet Mong was considered part of Europe. If i have jumped on a bandwagon it is being pulled by Leo XIII and Pius XI. But when was mr Kenny ever right
about anything? In fact it is in Europe where educated people know that a liberal is someone who supports capitalism and individualism, while people like pelosi and Obama are socialists. Socialism as Pius Xi so correctly observed is no more compatible with the Church's teachings than Manchester School liberalism. After lunch I shall try move the argument forward. Mr Kenny should give up his failed attempt
to interrupt a serious discussion and get in touch with M medaille. Maybe he too is fr Europe.
Sorry about the clumsy typing from the iPhone.
Let me propose a conceptual tool that might help to guide a discussion. For years it has seemed to me that the underlying logic of Just War theory could be applied to any situation where one person or society was tempted to impose upon or interfere with another. Stated most generally, there are the following tests of such an action: 1) Is it justified? In terms of war this means we are responding to an unjust attack upon ourselves or an ally. 2) Have we the authority? Again, in terms of war only the sovereign may authorize the war. 3) Are the means proportionate to the ends, for example, can we nuke villages in order to bring a government to its knees? And 4) Are we reasonably confident about the outcome, that is, there is no point in expending human life it there are no prospects of winning.
In any philanthropic act, individual or collective, we are taking upon ourselves the burden of helping others. The most obvious principle at stake here is some joke I heard on the radio: A father advised his do-gooding son to be sure to ask the little old lady if she really wants to cross the street. As for the application of a rough equivalent of just war theory, we should have to ascertain the circumstances. We would not, for example, give a killer the money to buy a gun or a crackhead mother the money for more junk. Should we subsidize idleness and thus undermine the character of the recipient? I am not saying we should let him starve, but might he actually fend for himself? In general, there is a set of questions then about the situation, whether or not it invites philanthropic intervention.
Second is the question of authority. As private persons, do we really have the authority to intervene in another man's family? As a nation, do we always have the right to change the way of life of another nation? If so, where do we get this authority?
Third, have we really assessed the impact of our charitable act, either on the recipient or on our family, friends, and neighbors? Should I impoverish my family in order to help strangers?
Fourth, we should have a reasonable means of estimating the results. Here victory means improving the lot of the poor, but what if my help actually causes more harm than good. Am I not to blame? If I help Bosnian Muslims by feeding their children, what if they use their extra cash to buy weapons with which to kill Christians?
These tests are crudely expressed, but they give us an avenue to assessing charitable decisions, both individually and collectively. To illustrate one of the problems, I recall a statement made by Pope John Paul II early on in his papacy. He said that well-off countries should give not just of their surplus but of their substance. Now let's suppose we did that at the rate of just 5% per year. We would soon have to surplus or substance to share. A businessman, to take a small example, would go bankrupt and have to seek charity for himself, his family, and his employees, whereas a prudent program of charity would go on forever? I am sure the Pope meant well, but you do not have to be a Misesian to see the absurdity in such a position, which is the common coin of the redistributionist left. Dr. Johnson, a far wiser moralist than the last Pope, once observed that the rich did more good buying luxury items than by giving alms, because of the work they gave to cooks, chariot-makers, jewelers, miners, and flunkeys. Now, Johnson was among the most generous alms-givers of his day, moving troublesome bums into his own house, where they drove him to distraction, and spending at least half his disposable income on relieving the poor. He was known to have picked up a sick and dying prostitute from the street, slung her over his back, taken her home and nursed her back to health. And yet, he also understood the importance of giving employment to those who want work. I write in haste and assume that no one will want to accuse me of a) repudiating the authority of the Pope, 2) lusting after Anglicanism, 3) defending the greedy rich, or 4) picking up prostitutes.
Among Eastern rite Catholics that I am familiar with, public identification of the name of the person giving support to the church or, through the church to the poor, is simply not done. This was a surprise, given a lifetime exposure to often times very public, showy giving and social work among American Roman rite Catholics, and to secular "philanthropy" generally. It seems much more akin to the works of Dr. Johnson described, which itself seems much in the spirit of the early Church.
For purposes of analogy to the just war theory, either definition of a Christian "just war" or definition of "Christian social work" would have to exclude a person (or a nation) from engaging in such based on purely subjective conclusions and assertions. It would have to include at least some objective criteria or analysis such as Tjf sets forth.
In the case of philanthropy, if it were some sort of "duty" -- civic, religious, or otherwise (as the JP2 quote seems to imply) -- is it then charity? Charity would seem to include discretion and choice, and reasonable choice not outweighed by other considerations. If a virtue, it would implied have to be an entirely free act. But duties, such as those to spouses and family, would seem to be some sort of ultimate check on the degree, amount, or even possibility of philanthropy one ought to engage in. Support of family is a primary duty. In business or professional life, clients' welfare is also a primary duty. As for civic duties, it is at least common sense that the closer geographically and personally one is to others, the less abstract the relationship of any nature. And the more abstract and distanced the relationship, the greater the odds in favor of folly, abuse, self-delusion -- and the less the odds of being meaningfully checked or called to account. Doubtless this is illustrated by Dr. Wilson's dictum that it is quite easy to be charitable at somebody else's cost.
The other great delusion of the modern world, of course, is that "speaking out" (ie about social "good") in itself is tantamount to doing something worthy, when often the very opposite would be true. This of course is encouraged by mass media culture which has reached a point with the internet, twitter, youtube, facebook etc constitutes, in Norman Mailer's phrase, a walking "Advertisement for Myself." I recently attended a high school graduation in rural Iowa, of all places, featuring approximately 160 such advertisements, each of which were bound for something called a "college." No. 161, the sole exception, was a girl who got up for her diploma, the principal/emcee embarrassingly announcing that "she plans to stay home and give birth to her child." At which point the entire house stood to its feet and applauded.
The JP2 quote reminds me of an observation of Dr. James Patrick that he was much more comfortable with the Borgia popes and their personal swinishness, which popes nonetheless pronounced no doctrinally incorrect or ambiguous decrees, than he was comfortable with the present very pious popes who drown us in papers, conferences, speeches, dialogues, etc. Squaring the majority of all that with anything objectively considered in even a secular sense, much less with the nugget of dogma, is an impossible dream.
Mr. Morow raises an interesting point when he writes:
"[D]uties, such as those to spouses and family, would seem to be some sort of ultimate check on the degree, amount, or even possibility of philanthropy one ought to engage in. Support of family is a primary duty." A father not only has a duty to support his wife and children, he also has a duty to be an example to them and to instruct them in their charitable (and other) obligations. So how much support is necessary? Is providing the necessities of life (however we agree to define what those necessities are) sufficient to fulfill that fatherly obligation, or does a father need to provide additional support beyond the necessities before he gives money or time or any thing else of value to his less fortunate neighbors? If he needs to provide support to his family beyond the necessities (providing he is able to do so), how much or what kind of additional material support is he obligated to provide?
Can we develop some general guidelines (or do they already exist)? A father wants to provide the best for his family, but might that do more harm than good? It probably would benefit most children if they had to expend some personal effort to possess more than the necessities. Then again, maybe none of us should aspire to have more than the necessities; we should give everything else to the less fortunate. (I'll have to go back and reread Dr. Fleming's book to see if he has shed any light on this issue.)
There is a portion of Catherine of Sienna's Dialogues wherein God instructs her that in the Mystical Body of Christ, in other words the Church, persons are arbitrarily distributed different talents in different amounts, and that the growth of the Mystical Body comes from persons making their gifts of use to others. This is certainly not dogma, but it is consistent with the Catholic view of charity and with common sense.
I do not believe a father has a duty to instruct his children, personally, in charitable obligations either generally or by any formula -- any more than he has a duty to instruct them in the theory of relativity or to read Moby Dick. Catherine's locution, which I accept though I do not have to, includes an observation that comports with nature: that there are many things which individuals simply cannot do. The father's Christian duty is to put his children within the life of the Church where they may presumably be instructed in all virtues, including charity. His personal obligation is to practice virtues, including charity -- and his concerns for his childrens' welfare may in particular cases be hindered, not helped, by what might seem to be trumpeting his virtues.
I would note that I believe the modern illusion, breaking families and communities down into small "nuclear" groups, often highly mobile, combined with the atomization of American society into discrete personal universes (according to Sandra Day O'Conner, the invention of same is our most fundamental right) leads to a schizophrenia where Everyman is required to be everything, a preposterous and impossible burden. Presumed duties to "advance society" and "help mankind" fall into this illusion -- concepts quite ridiculous when viewed objectively, also really arrogant and presumptuous -- besides being cheap and hypocritical.
Now if Dr. Johnson, in Tjf's example, brought home a prostitute not to his bachelor pad but to his family, suddenly an act of Christian charity is most likely converted into a moral outrage highly tending not to instruct, but to destruct. The same, I think, as to what constitutes wants and needs in a particular family. In any event, no system of ethics secular or religious can compel impossibilities at odds with basic human nature and natural law. Which, of course, has hardly stopped us from attempting to enact, as concrete reality, More's satiric Utopia. Perhaps if a present day Christian father has any pressing duty in the way of instruction, it would be rather to instruct his children that Utopias constitute not only an impossibility, but a heresy.
Mr. Morow, we will have to disagree on a father's obligation to teach his children the Christian virtues. I do agree that a father has an obligation to practice the virtues, but claiming this "might seem to be trumpeting his virtues" is not apparent to me. Practicing charity to gain acclaim is not a virtuous endeavor. What do you mean by "the life of the Church"? Where is that to be found when many of our churches have become secularized to one degree or another? Mr. Morow, do you think a father has an obligation to teach his children anything? If so, what might that be? Or do you think a father has only an obligation to place his children in the life of one of our wonderful school systems where they can be taught any number of things? (I am also not impressed by religious schools when they must comply with government-mandated standards and they employ teachers that are the products of teacher's union-controlled curricula, as most of them are.)
I cannot speak for Mr morrow but I believe he is expressing the older Christian perspective that empasized the role of Church and community in setting and impressing norms. This has little to do with government schools today but complete family autonomy can, if parents are Mormons or Muslims or libertarians produce very unwholesome results in a society that might be more generally decent. Today of course we live in a sick world but we should not let our circumstances blind us to the ideal. In other words you two though talking at cross purposes are both right.
Perhaps another perspective might be useful for the discussion as well, though it may have been hinted at already.
A decade ago, certain members of our local community got together and decided to establish a rural water system. Why? They wanted 'to help the community', because it was needed. Why was it needed? Well, it's not as if there was a water shortage here in a part of the country where wells never go dry, well water is not just safe, it's good, etc. The few building sites in the area that didn't have access to good well water did not justify what was done. They were just lying. it wasn't needed, they just selfishly wanted it. Many wanted to put a star in their crown by showing their 'virtue' and 'selflessness', while others just wanted to be 'progressive'.
So they got a loan from the fed monster, then used judicial coercion to force property owners to allow pipes to cross their land (messing up yards and restricting use of property where the lines run), then we were all faced with higher property taxes, because, obviously, since we now have a water system, our property is worth more, right?
They also used state power, through fraud, to force the closing down of an already existing water system which had served one neighbourhood, so everyone there would have to hook up to the new system, thus more revenue for them.
In addition, many people who were stupid enough to sign up for the water before the system was built are also now saddled with paying off the government loan. Wonderful! Aside from that, there's no telling how much fed money was pocketed by those in charge of the project, which those saddled with the loan will also pay for.
What kind of water does the system provide? Because of mismanagement, it comes out of the tap tasting either like bleach or a mud hole. That's no exaggeration. I have to run it through two filters just to make it drinkable.
What charity, what civic duty! My, how they have 'helped the community'! Selfishness cloaked in a veneer of faked civic virtue. Magnifiy this situation many fold and you have liberal-enlightenment 'social justice', and then project it overseas, and you have third world aide. Perhaps with some people, it may be a delusion they believe in, but for many it is pure selfishness and greed.
Regarding Mr. Van Sant’s questions. My skepticism regarding parents as teachers of Christian virtue comes from experience with both home school families and in adult Catholic education. Doubtless some men may be quite capable of teaching virtue to their own offspring, more power to them. But there is this funny thing about children. Often as not, whatever their other gifts or lack of them, they know their own parents far better than those parents either know themselves or think they do, I would daresay even more keenly than the most seasoned and able confessors now or yesterday could discern them. Thus paradoxically, the more strenuously those parents attempt to speak Christ’s voice of charity, or other virtues, only the more will those children hear Barabbas. I have seen no shortage of spectacular failure in this department, from the most able, hard working, properly catechized, and to all appearances most virtuous parents I know. And frankly, the most pernicious trait I have witnessed among home schooled children, sometimes from parents with the soundest teacher training, is a deep laziness coupled with a cynical “what the game takes” attitude – projecting the Barabbus they coolly detect in their own parents onto the entire adult world.
Where is the life of the Church? While not Tjf's central topic, it has been on the table throught this discussion, and the question is a good and most important one. It is in conversion, prayer, and the sacraments. Without them, in the Catholic optic, any “Book of Virtues” or even an encyclopedia or a university of virtues is worthless. With them, in faith, anything is possible – most especially, for the present discussion's purposes, because then the soul is awakened to locating the Church beyond mere buildings and structures (such as the schools you describe) or in an organizational chart. I doubt there ever was a perfect match between the Mystical Body and such things. There is much less now; we are certainly in this time and place back on the road to Emmaus. But the present lack, I believe, makes the apparent alternative of going it solo only a more dangerous alternative. The already ludicrous “nuclear family” becomes cult like as in the examples noted by Tjf, highly increasing the odds of raising a Barabbus yourself.
What should a father teach? In my personal opinion, the most profound thing a father can teach is who he is, and how he got to be that way. Objectively, almost coldly, without embellishment, excuses, or an appeal to either Godlike virtues or the pantheon of current idols. In the detail that is necessary, also without boasting or crudity, and in plain English. This is what the children I know need, most particularly boys. Men have a funny way of being able to live with even the worst scoundrels as fathers, but it is essential they come to know them – especially in a culture increasingly devoted to mere feelings, happy talk, “thinking globally,” all the rest. A man who does not know who his father is, and how that father sees his own life’s road, is already broken. The fact is, as compared to many failures of strenuously godly and virtuous parents I know, the only son of a convicted murderer I ever knew was a very sound, ethical, adjusted, and yes, charitable man in all respects. He knew his father.
"Where is the life of the Church? It is in conversion, prayer, and the sacraments."
Thank you Mr. Morrow. This is true for many reasons and why I agree with you about the relationship between parents and children. In the sacraments it is Christ doing the work and with parents we sometimes start believing that it is really us doing all the good work. This is not true for adults anymore than it is for children who have good habits. Poor St Augustine's mother, The Blessed Virgin, St. Joseph, who said very little if anything, the list is long and our duty is to introduce the story while not mistaking our own efforts for His. Thanks again and please play on.
Mr. Morow, we are making progress here. In an earlier entry you say, ". . .the Mystical Body of Christ, in other words the Church." Now you say the life of the Church ". . .is in conversion, prayer, and the sacraments." We can agree that the Church is the Mystical Body of Christ and that the Christian life is best lived through conversion of our sinful nature through prayer and by receiving the sacraments. I also agree with you in your opinion regarding the shortcomings of parents as teachers. Certainly our children (and our spouses) recognize that we fathers are sinners. But Christ created his Church for all of us, and most of us are sinners. Do our children not benefit in seeing a parent, who they know is a sinner, continuing to work at throwing off the old man through (unceasing) prayer and by receiving the sacraments (especially the sacrament of repentance - confession)? You have been very thorough in identifying the failures of our human-created organizations and our own human failings. Please forgive me if I gave the impression that I favor “going it solo.” The reason I joined the discussion is because I recognize the danger in that path. We are discussing a father’s obligations to his family, especially to his children, and how a father can further the spiritual welfare of his family. We need help, but where do we find it? You have identified an important truth when you write that “. . . in faith, anything is possible.” I think that is the answer to how a father can further the spiritual welfare of his family. It is through remaining faithful to Christ and His Church. We must teach our children that we are all sinners and that Christ created His Church to help us overcome our sinful nature. We must teach them that we, and they, will fail at times, but so did the Saints. It is important that our children understand that the people who make up the Church are sinners trying to be Saints and that some, maybe many, of them will not be successful. Our children need to know that the Saints were not born Saints and didn’t become Saints by never sinning. They became Saints by overcoming their sins, by continuing to live the Christian life, by praying and receiving the sacraments. I think our children need to know this otherwise there is a great danger that they will lose their faith in Christ and His Church.
Mr. Van Zant,
Thank you for the beautiful explication. It has been a delight to follow this conversation and your contributions to it. My thanks again.
Much thanks for the article and thoughtful comments -- very instructive and clarifying.
Coincidentally, I have been debating the healthcare bill with some friends of mine over email the past few days. One of my good friends, who is a great guy said, "I don't mind paying more taxes so we can provide healthcare for 30 million more people."
Our instincts are still healthy, they have just been mapped by our "culture" and "education" to unhealthy actions.
A footnote on the pursuit of virtue in the western Christian tradition. Solo journeys on the road to perfection have long been recognized to have the same probable danger as solo mountain climbing, death. This is etched for all time in the Conferences of Saint John Cassian, who went into the 4th century desert to seek out, in his youthful zeal, heroic hermits. He came back with hair-raising stories of spiritual self-destruction that became the very foundation of Benedictine communal monasticism, supplanting the hermit way. Communal Benedictine monasticism proliferated not into the desert but into the hearts of towns and cities, which in turn civilized Europe – true “social work” in the only proper sense. Benedict’s typically pity advice on the importance of Cassian’s lesson is underscored in his Rule. He advises the monk on what to read as follows: “Read the Bible and read Cassian.”
Very likely Benedict’s distaste for solo pursuits is rooted in an essential difference between Christianity and the esoteric East. Ours is an incarnated religion, rooted partially in the body and thus in society, as man – if not “a social animal” – has a high and necessary social component. The office of guru is therefore hardly appropriate in the west – and for another thing, it is headed for a train wreck with Christian humility.
Cassian’s tales suddenly have a contemporary spirit as western social and religious order go into precipitous decline, as if ancient mountains stood revealed by a sinking water line. Our political vistas are suddenly full of czars, our Christian horizons with “spiritual masters” – offices which not long ago would have been greeted with a horse laugh instead of hushed awe bordering on fear. When however it is a guru-parent who puts that much weight on his own rightness, in the intimate setting where his worst spiritual presumption is instantly seen through, the child in rejecting the guru is going to reject the guru’s entire perceived context, most likely including the faith. In divorces, for instance, people will fight to the death over the most worthless trinkets, only because they are of known value to the other.
I would not lightly assume the child or family instantly seeing the parent’s self-perceived struggle with imperfection, then, as an inspiration. It might rather be seen with a contempt already well seeded, outside the home. Like it or not, the parent is working in a media saturated culture quite beyond his control, which has already marked him down lower than the peso. You may only learn what you were fighting against, if ever, long after your personal family schism. Of course, the difficulty is that the sound “social work” of the parent, i.e. child-raising, will not admit mere brain-washing as a tactic to be employed. Making room for the free mind therefore entails the risk of rejection, not present in radical left families or groups, which depend upon the terrorism of social pressure and arbitrariness – best inflicted one on one as in a prison camp.
Better to depressurize the hot-house atmosphere, like Saint Benedict. Take the time and the trouble to seek talented others who broadly share your program, and bring them into your circle for the benefit of your children’s education and soundness. Frankly, such persons and groups are all around, if one wants to look for them. As only a “for instance,” in the American Catholic world Father John Hardon both associated himself with and started several groups which are still functioning. No, not one of them is going to be perfect, or without a component of awkwardness or even silliness, or wrongness which will then call the parent to correct and instruct. Personal compromises will be necessary, even occasionally the trading for lesser evils rather than greater ones, with adult discernment.
Robert II, you are welcome and thank you for your kind words.
"Our political vistas are suddenly full of czars, our Christian horizons with “spiritual masters” – offices which not long ago would have been greeted with a horse laugh instead of hushed awe bordering on fear. When however it is a guru-parent who puts that much weight on his own rightness, in the intimate setting where his worst spiritual presumption is instantly seen through, the child in rejecting the guru is going to reject the guru’s entire perceived context, most likely including the faith."
There are still spiritual masters but none of them are known today except by some chance meeting or providential introduction. Christ, Himself, was not recognized in the flesh. They are indeed rare, the very humility required of the narrow way demands it, and will usually be found in some isolated religious order or geographical location. The holiest man I have ever met did not receieve guests except for those entering the order. These long esatablished rules are often modified and updated to the detriment of the order itself. One of the problems in some traditionalist circles of parenting is a failure to distinguish between the religious and marital vocation. They do not normally converge until the later years of the last thousand Hail Marys when the "now and at the hour of our death" approaches atonement or at-one-ment.
All of this is very interesting and I appreciate Mr. Morrows contributions. Especially his observation that the hermitage is usually the last stage of the spiritual life and not the first. All these islolated individuals today making it up as they go along is a result of the reformation and is as deadly to the spiritual life as it has been for the cultural life of our civilization.
Late in the action, thank you, Dr. Fleming, as always, for the words of wisdom. Not long ago someone asked why we shouldn't donate money to Haiti. My response was that you must never donate money to anyone if you do not know who is going to spend it and on what. He asked, "The Church?" I could only ask if he had ever read up on Latin America, where "Catholic" charities have routinely been used as fronts for Marxist guerrilla machines.