Catholic Charities

WHEN James Cardinal Gibbons, archbishop of Baltimore, presented a paper to the World’s Parliament of Religions, convened in Chicago in 1893, on “The Needs of Humanity Supplied by the Catholic Religion,” he insisted that the Church’s strongest claim to the sympathetic interest of outsiders was its “wonderful system of organized benevolence.” The Church, he said, had always been mindful of its duty to see “in every human creature a child of God, and brother or sister of Christ.”It had been wholly natural, therefore, for American Catholics, just because they were Catholics, to build the hospitals, asylums, protectories, and orphanages that could then be seen in nearly every American city.

Gibbons failed to realize, however, that the range of institutions he rightly admired had no precise counterpart outside the United States and Canada. Christ’s command to love one another had no doubt been revered by all Catholics, everywhere, at all times, but only in America had the result been a proliferation of charitable institutions built and maintained and supervised by the faithful. Only in America had need for charity been combined with a strong popular conviction that most human hardship could be alleviated if men would only act constructively, with a political system willing to help the Church to respond in its chosen ways, and with a society that preferred to consign charitable work to denominational hands.

If Cardinal Gibbons, proudly sensitive as he was to what was uniquely good in America and in American Catholicism, failed to perceive fully what was developing in the Church, it is not surprising that other American Catholics have been often oblivious or bewildered. There have always been a few who, seeing the Church so deeply involved in institutional eflort, complain that the old, simple, direct charity of a man for his neighbor is being replaced by a do-goodism “scrimped and iced, In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ.” Other Catholics have been worried lest the Church’s charities become corrupted by compromises with the work done by state and sect out of mere philanthropy, “that pale form of altruism,” and dedicated not to the salvation of man but to the good life as defined by Freud or Kinsey.

By about 1880, a pattern of Catholic charitable activity in America was apparent. Oppressed by the parlous condition of many recently arrived immigrants, Church leaders took for granted that the poor and unfortunate they would always have with them. They noted that Christ had told the parable of the Good Samaritan in response to the inquiry, “What shall I do to be saved?”, and they concluded that the first aim of charity was to save the soul of the charitable. “A Catholic doingcharity,”one devoted worker emphasized, “is looking at the spiritual benefit flowing back to himself’ rather than to the amount of practical benefit he confers upon the dependent.”

James Roosevelt Bayley, Gibbons’ predecessor as archbishop of Baltimore, explained that God permitted poverty as “the most efficient means of practising some of the most necessary Christian virtues, ol charity and alms-giving on the part of the rich, and patience and resignation to His holy will on the part of the poor.” Catholics of this persuasion had little interest in organizing charity systematically. The funds necessary for good works were raised by special appeals in the parish church and were augmented very considerably, if unpredictably, by gifts from European Catholics. Few Catholics devoted themselves full time to charitable activity; the parish priest helped out the needy who called at the rectory, and laymen might join the local St. Vincent de Paul Society, whose mission was to bring personal friendship, spiritual aid, and material goods to members of the parish. A few religious orders did dedicate themselves to organized charitable work, but, like priests and “Vincentians,” they had little special training for the task.

YET, even in these early years. Catholic charity was being shaped by American needs and practices. The process of adaptation was sometimes embittered. In New York City, for instance, Catholics found that the most energetic and imaginative worker for the welfare of poor children was Charles Coring Brace, a Protestant minister who yearly was rescuing hundreds of youngsters by sending them off to farm communities where they could imbibe fresh air and Protestantism. For Catholics to object was natural, but not enough; the Church soon established the Catholic Protectory, which sought to shelter Catholic waifs and orphans against Protestant charity; not content with this defensive role, the Protectory was soon mounting an organized attack on the plight of city children. Most asylums and hospitals had been founded by Protestants and were still run by Protestants, even when, formally, they had become nonsectarian, and a certain obliviousness toward Catholic sensibilities was common. Catholics, in these circumstances, built an increasing number of their own institutions.

States and municipalities, aware of the growing need for charitable institutions and by no means committed to assuming responsibility for all of the cost, supported Catholic efforts from the start, usually granting not only tax exemption but also some sort of yearly subsidy in recognition of what the Church institutions saved the community. In return for such aid, the government claimed a right of inspection — as, for example, in New York through a State Board of Charities — but this supervision was too perfunctory to destroy the Catholics’ sense that the charitable institutions they built were theirs to support and control.

Furthermore, although the institutions were used primarily by Catholics, a spokesman could in the 1890s declare with some pride that the Protectory occasionally sheltered some Protestant boys; far from seeking to proselyte, the priests in charge escorted them to the nearest Protestant church each Sunday morning. The development both of charitable institutions and of patterns of tacit cooperation with the state and with nonCatholics indicated that American Catholics, despite a traditional view of the nature and scope of charity, had begun to respond to the new possibilities of American life.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, it seemed possible that Catholic charitable enterprises might eventually become indistinguishable in spirit as in structure from those maintained by Protestants, Jews, or the states. As more Catholics prospered, more began to believe that misfortune, at least in its ruder forms, was not inevitably man’s lot. Though still stressing the spiritual benefit that accrued to the charitable, Catholic leaders began to ask that good deeds benefit the recipient as well.

Monsignor William Kerby, a professor at Catholic University, whose book The Social Mission of Charity epitomized the new Catholic attitude, insisted that whatever one’s motive, a charitable man “whose methods pauperize and enervate the poor, encouraging them in laziness, deception, and fraud" was an enemy of the needy and a poor servant of Christ. Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul, Minnesota, felt strongly that charity, properly conceived and administered, could improve the repute of the Church by showing it to be the friend of progress. In 1919, the American bishops issued a national pastoral letter which re-emphasized the contention of Cardinal Gibbons before the Parliament of Religions: organized charity by Catholics was the best way to make others “see in us the disciples of Christ, and be led to Him through the power of love.”

If Catholic charity was to win converts, guarantee the progress of society, and reduce poverty, as well as redeem the charitable, the faithful could hardly afford to make virtues of haphazardness and spontaneity. The lessons learned in creating institutions like the Protectory were studied; so were the accomplishments of non-Catholics — the Charity Organization Societies, the national conferences on social work, charity, and correction, the developing university programs for training professional workers. Dioceses in the late 1890s began to designate a single priest to direct all Catholic charitable effort; the first diocesan charity board was established in Brooklyn in 1910; in the same year the National Conference of Catholic Charities was formed to help inculcate modern principles. To provide a number of priests, religious, and laymen with specialized training, Catholic colleges and universities began to set up social-work schools. Amateur volunteers like the St. Vincent de Paul societies were relegated to an increasingly subordinate position; in 1940, the Brooklyn diocese appointed a trained worker to coordinate the efforts of the societies with the more complex activities of the “new charity.” The professionals emphasized the need to replace “indiscriminate charity” with thorough investigation, detailed records, and prior consultation with other charitable agencies.

Encouraged by the willingness of the states to subsidize Catholic institutions and by the increasingly frequent signs that, except on the cultural frontiers, Protestants were abandoning their traditional anti-Catholicism, Church leaders became steadily more sure that in the future ever greater areas of cooperation would become possible with state and sectarian charities. Father Edward McSweeny, a close friend of Cardinal Gibbons, liked to suggest that there was nothing in the parable of the Good Samaritan to indicate that Christ would have been displeased if the priest or Levite had decided to cooperate with the Samaritan, so rich, so skillful, so well disposed. “Though we differ in faith,” the Cardinal had said to the Parliament, “thank God there is one platform on which we stand united, and that is the platform of charity and benevolence.”

THE American Church today, compared with the Church in contemporary Europe or the American Church of the 1880s, seems confidently activist, optimistically unwilling to accept the inevitability of most human suffering. There are always Catholics who insist that society needs saints more than social crusaders and that those ministering to the unfortunate should do so not to save but to be saved. Thus, the incomparable Peter Maurin of the Catholic Worker movement can, in fine disregard for all social justifications of charity, say to the Bowery derelict, “You give me the chance to practice Christian charity. You are an ambassador of Christ. Thank you,”

Other Catholics, out of deeply bourgeois faith in the self-sufficiency of the individual, and from fingering suspicion of the motives of social workers, Catholic and non-Catholic, write saturnine letters to the Brooklyn Tablet about “do-gooders” and “bleeding hearts.” But for each Catholic Worker or rugged individualist, there are dozens of Catholics today who insist that only organized charity can begin to cope with the bewildering variety of charitable needs. No observer, certainly, who has studied the annual reports of the Catholic Charities of the archdiocese of New York or watched on television the recent Catholic Charities show, in which Francis Cardinal Spellman and a number of professional entertainers joined efforts to appeal for funds, can believe that the Church today is willing to rely primarily on spontaneous impulse for its charity work. Efficiency, rationality, concerted planning are the watchwords.

The diocesan structure of the Church precludes a wholly functional organization of Catholic charities. Dioceses vary in wealth, and no amount of rationalization can secure for the diocese of Brooklyn what is possible for its neighbor across the East River. Inertia and organizational pride also lead to duplication of effort in adjoining dioceses. Neither the National Conference of Catholic Charities nor the National Catholic Welfare Conference, founded in the wake of World War I, has gone very far in coordinating Catholic resources and talents nationally.

As the federal government increasingly enters the field of charity work, the influence of these national organizations may be expected to increase. But so may diocesan resistance to that influence. Monsignor Raymond J. Gallagher, the new executive secretary of N.C.C.C., recently testified in Washington in favor of most provisions of the Kennedy Administration welfare bill; some of the larger dioceses, believing that the bill may give disproportionate aid to smaller dioceses, where Catholic charity work is less effectively organized and less esteemed publicly, have been unmistakably critical of Gallagher’s public stand. For Catholics, as for Quakers and other American religious groups, it has proved easier to transcend local autonomies in charity work aimed overseas; the achievements of the Bishops’ Relief Fund are a remarkable testimony to the united effort of the American Church.

Catholic charities today make use of both the volunteer and the paid worker, the amateur and the professional, and with much less sense of lurking irreconcilability than nagged at both sides during the years when the “new charity” was first bruited. This is partly because government has assumed responsibility for making most direct financial grants to the needy; Catholics are thereby freed from the old worry that limited funds were being squandered by improvident priests and laymen.

Furthermore, there is less tendency today than once to believe that all social problems require the ministrations of highly trained specialists; the decision in 1951 to reconstitute the Catholic Big Brother movement in New York and the greatly increased emphasis upon hospital visiting and upon placing children in foster homes rather than institutions indicate a restored faith in the importance of service which is above all personal, even if volunteer or amateur. Finally, in the rapidly expanding field of family service and counseling, volunteer workers have proved invaluable in helping those lor whom the number of professional social workers will in the foreseeable future remain inadequate.

Meanwhile, an ever higher percentage of Catholic charity workers are receiving specialized training. Diocesan charitable organizations are now being staffed with priests who have done graduate work in schools of social welfare (of which the Church now has six); the promotion to the episcopacy of priests with this background — Bishop Bryan McEntegart of Brooklyn and Bishop Thomas Gill of Sacramento are two recent examples — is giving a new status and prestige to scientific training.

The use in Catholic charities of priests and members of religious orders is both a strength and a weakness. The primary obligation owed by the secular and religious clergy to their sacramental duties has no doubt helped retain for Catholic charities the desired balance between natural and supernatural commitments. It is hard to imagine, furthermore, that Catholic charities could continue on anything resembling their present scale were it not for the sacrificial devotion of the sisters and brothers.

Yet Catholic charities, like most American Catholic enterprises, suffer from clericalism. Lay social workers sometimes complain that the parish priest is often disposed to be sentimental toward those seeking his help and authoritarian toward the social workers. Despite the rising number of skilled laymen and the deeply felt shortage of priests and sisters, the archdiocese of New York includes no laymen among its 21-man administrative staff; of the 158 specialized agencies it maintains, only 33 are headed by laymen. Lay social workers must live with the expectation that they will not rise above the rank of casework supervisor; the large number of them now employed in positions of great responsibility by public and nonsectarian institutions constitutes a loss to Catholic charities, if a gain to society generally.

In the nineteenth century, Catholic maids and hod carriers were notoriously generous contributors to the Church, and there is no reason to doubt that the flow of gifts has abated now that more Catholics are richer. As every fund raiser knows, Catholics, like Jews, tend to contribute while they are still alive rather than write a generous will or establish a foundation. This pattern of giving has encouraged Catholic leaders to expend current income cither on current expenses or on new construction. Few Catholics would probably contend today that this precarious financial policy is especially beneficial either to the needy or to Catholic charities. On the other hand, they are inclined to view somewhat wryly invitations that come from heavily endowed Protestant or nonsectarian agencies to take part in joint campaigns for current expenses, without any merger of endowment or endowment income.

Catholic charities today enjoy generally good relations with the government, which has proved to be neither the ogre many immigrant Catholics were convinced a non-Catholic government must be nor the completely dutiful exemplar of the natural law which optimists like Gibbons and Ireland anticipated it would become. Some Catholics were annoyed when federal programs like Aid to Dependent Children, authorized by the Social Security Act of 1935, were not delegated to the administration of church charities wherever possible. But they have found little to quarrel with in the daily work of public charitable agencies; Catholic leaders, at least, have shown little sympathy for Newburghism.

Courts of justice have been glad to refer to Catholic social workers and Catholic institutions those delinquents of Catholic background. And the states and municipalities have continued to contribute a very large part of the income received by charitable institutions in return for services which the government does not try to perform. St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York (like Mount Sinai and Presbyterian) depends heavily on government subventions without experiencing any substantial government control.

Occasionally, it is true, there have been protests by non-Catholics. In 1948 Paul Blanshard found a good many Americans ready to resonate to his complaint that the government, by aiding Catholic hospitals, was supporting Catholic proselytisrn (because of the practice of baptizing all newborn children) and Catholic medical ethics (which seemed to jeopardize the life of a pregnant mother rather than commit infanticide). But neither the public as a whole nor the government became very distraught that Catholic hospitals were adhering to Catholic principles, which did not seem idiosyncratic enough to violate the ground rules of American pluralism. The great majority of Americans, who neither went to Catholic hospitals nor avoided them, could not apparently see that state aid, which had been extended to the hospitals before, should not continue.

A more lasting consequence of Blanshard’s attack was a heightened doubt that cooperation between Catholic and non-Catholic charities was possible. Many Catholic leaders, resenting Blanshard’s criticism and assuming that his neonaturalism was characteristic of all non-Catholic charity, began to stress that only Catholic charity was animated by more than an “ephemeral love of man for the sake of man.” A good many Protestants and Jews, becoming exasperated, in turn, with the increasing Catholic contentiousness, began to argue that Catholic charities were so preoccupied with the Church’s position against divorce, artificial birth control, and sterilization as to be indifferent to the worldly welfare of their clients. Where, as in New York City, this increasing mutual inclination to disagree over first principles was exacerbated by the organizational pride of strong Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and nonsectarian charities, a real retreat from previous patterns of cooperation occurred; the Health and Welfare Council, a federation of charitable agencies, broke up when in 1953 some Catholics insisted that no support be given Planned Parenthood work. Cooperation has by no means disappeared among New York charitable agencies, however.

Catholic charities, simply because they coexist with a variety of competitors, may be expected to emphasize what seems to them distinctive in their work, and outsiders may be expected to continue to note how much all American charities have in common. Catholic social-work schools and leaders in fact frequently ask themselves what is uniquely Catholic in their approach. The answers they find satisfactory clearly differentiate them from followers of Freud and Marx, but not from most American social workers. And, in the meantime, Church authorities strain to provide complete psychiatric services in their hospitals and insist that without food, clothing, shelter, and a job the delinquent can hardly be expected to develop either social or spiritual grace.

In other words, the alienation between the principles of Catholic charities and those of the world should not be overemphasized. Catholics continue to inveigh against “child-murder,” but the second edition of American Freedom and Catholic Power, issued in 1958, found little in the obstetrical practice of Catholic hospitals with which to quarrel; a recent issue of the Pobulation Bulletin showed that important Catholic spokesmen, though still no friends of Margaret Sanger’s, are sympathetically exploring how Catholics may enjoy the spiritual benefits of marriage and parenthood without producing more children than they — or, ultimately, society — can properly raise.

From the more immediate perspective, however, how closely Catholic charities come to espouse ideals congruent to those of non-Catholic charities is not the central question, and will not be so long as non-Catholics adhere to the tradition of supporting charities of their own. The more pressing question, and one far more difficult to answer, would seem to be how efficiently Catholic charities perform the services they elect to offer. Given the short history of the American Catholic Church, its diocesan autonomies, and the great diversity of resources in time and money, it is not surprising that the record appears mixed.

“In New York City,” a social-work expert said recently, “if I needed help, I should prefer to be a Jew; if not a Jew, then a Catholic — unless I had to go to a hospital.” He acknowledged that in other cities Catholic hospitals were among the best, and that in New York a few, like St. Vincent’s, were making rapid strides; and he echoed the all but universal opinion that Catholic sisters make superb nurses. But Catholics generally turned to hospital construction only after they had built churches and schools; as a result, most Catholic hospitals today lack the accumulation of money and medical experience that a modern hospital needs.

In the field of child care, Catholic charities do a superior job; none have worked harder or more imaginatively to preserve family ties wherever possible. Catholics have also been in the forefront in developing homes for the aged which are not merely custodial but seek to give the elderly a sense of purpose. Probably, on the whole, Catholic charities have been less successful in helping those who, neither young nor old, nor needing institutional care, still find dilficulty in coping with life. Though family service and community work have been increasing, the Church has tended to rely for this kind of aid on the parishes, which, because of their territorial organization, are theoretically more inclusive of American society than their Protestant or Jewish counterparts. But the frequently expressed discontent with the social functioning of the parish, and especially with the meaningfulness of its myriad voluntary organizations, is perhaps all the evidence needed of Catholic shortcomings in this area.

Cardinal Gibbons did not exaggerate the services Catholic charities performed and still perform. However much they are used by nonCatholics, they are amply justified, in a society committed to religious pluralism, by the freedom they bestow upon 43 million American Catholics to avoid a choice between life in their faith and relief from the more intolerable exigencies of this world.