How Catholic Charity Changed the World
In the early fourth century, famine and disease struck the army of the Roman emperor Constantine. Pachomius, a pagan soldier in that army, watched in amazement as many of his fellow Romans brought food to the afflicted men and, without discrimination, bestowed help on those in need. Curious, Pachomius inquired about these people and found out that they were Christians. What kind of religion was it, he wondered, that could inspire such acts of generosity and humanity? He began to learn about the faith—and before he knew it, he was on the road to conversion.1
This kind of amazement has attended Catholic charitable work throughout the ages. Even Voltaire, perhaps the most prolific anti-Catholic propagandist of the eighteenth century, was awed by the heroic spirit of self-sacrifice that animated so many of the Church’s sons and daughters. “Perhaps there is nothing greater on earth,” he said, “than the sacrifice of youth and beauty, often of high birth, made by the gentle sex in order to work in hospitals for the relief of human misery, the sight of which is so revolting to our delicacy. Peoples separated from the Roman religion have imitated but imperfectly so generous a charity.”2
It would take many large volumes to record the complete history of Catholic charitable work carried on by individuals, parishes, dioceses, monasteries, missionaries, friars, nuns, and lay organizations. Suffice it to say that Catholic charity has had no peer in the amount and variety of good work it has done and the human suffering and misery it has alleviated. Let us go still further: the Catholic Church invented charity as we know it in the West.
Just as important as the sheer volume of Catholic charity was the qualitative difference that separated the Church’s charity from what had preceded it. It would be foolish to deny that some noble sentiments were voiced by the great ancient philosophers when it came to philanthropy, or that men of wealth made impressive and substantial voluntary contributions to their communities. The wealthy were expected to finance baths, public buildings, and all manner of public entertainment. Pliny the Younger, for example, was far from alone in endowing his hometown with a school and a library.
Yet for all the benefactions thus offered, the spirit of giving in the ancient world was in a certain sense deficient when set against that of the Church. Most ancient giving was self-interested rather than purely gratuitous. The buildings financed by the wealthy prominently displayed their names. Donors gave what they did either to put the recipients in their debt or to call attention to themselves and their great liberality. That those in need were to be served with a cheerful heart and provided for without thought of reward or reciprocity was certainly not the governing principle.
Stoicism, an ancient school of thought dating back to around 300 BC and still alive and well in the early centuries of the Christian era, is sometimes cited as a pre-Christian line of thought that recommended doing good to one’s fellow man without expecting anything in return. To be sure, the Stoics did teach that the good man was a citizen of the world who enjoyed a spirit of fraternity with all men, and for that reason they may appear to have been messengers of charity, but they also taught the suppression of feeling and emotion as things unbecoming of a man. Man should be utterly unperturbed by outside events, even of the most tragic kind. He must possess a self-mastery so strong as to be able to face the worst catastrophe in a spirit of absolute indifference. That was also the spirit in which the wise man should assist the less fortunate: not one of sharing the grief and sorrow of those he helps or of making an emotional connection with them, but in the disinterested and emotionless spirit of one who is simply discharging his duty. Rodney Stark describes classical philosophy as having “regarded mercy and pity as pathological emotions—defects of character to be avoided by all rational men. Since mercy involves providing unearned help or relief, it was contrary to justice.”3 Thus the Roman philosopher Seneca could write:
The sage will console those who weep, but without weeping with them; he will succor the shipwrecked, give hospitality to the proscribed, and alms to the poor . . . restore the son to the mother’s tears, save the captive from the arena, and even bury the criminal; but in all his mind and his countenance will be alike untroubled. He will feel no pity. He will succor, he will do good, for he is born to assist his fellows, to labor for the welfare of mankind, and to offer each one his part. . . . His countenance and his soul will betray no emotion as he looks upon the withered legs, the tattered rags, the bent and emaciated frame of the beggar. But he will help those who are worthy, and, like the gods, his leaning will be towards the wretched. . . . It is only diseased eyes that grow moist in beholding tears in other eyes.4
It is true that, simultaneously with the development of Christianity, some of the harshness of earlier Stoicism began to dissolve. One can hardly read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the second-century Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, without being struck by the degree to which the thought of this noble pagan resembled that of Christianity, and it was for this reason that Saint Justin Martyr could praise later Stoicism. But the ruthless suppression of emotion and feeling that had characterized so much of this school had already taken its toll. It was certainly alien to human nature in its refusal to acknowledge such an important dimension of what it truly means to be human. We recoil from such examples of Stoicism as Anaxagoras, a man who, upon learning of his son’s death, merely remarked, “I never supposed that I had begotten an immortal.” Likewise, one can only marvel at the moral emptiness of Stilpo, who when faced with the ruin of his country, the capture of his native city, and the loss of his daughters to slavery or concubinage, proclaimed that after all he had really lost nothing, since the wise man transcended and rose above his circumstances.5 It was only natural that men so insulated from the reality of evil would be slow to alleviate its effects on their fellow men. “Men who refused to recognize pain and sickness as evils,” notes one observer, “were scarcely likely to be very eager to relieve them in others.”6
The spirit of Catholic charity did not arise in a vacuum but took its inspiration from the teaching of Christ: “A new commandment I give unto you: that you love one another, as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another” (John 13:34-35; cf. James 4:11). Saint Paul explains that those who do not belong to the community of the faithful should also be accorded the care and charity of Christians, even if they should be enemies of the faithful (cf. Roman 12: 14-20; Galatians 6:10). Here was a new teaching for the ancient world.
According to W. E. H. Lecky, frequently a harsh critic of the Church, there can be “no question that neither in practice nor in theory, neither in the institutions that were founded nor in the place that was assigned to it in the scale of duties, did charity in antiquity occupy a position at all comparable to that which it has obtained by Christianity. Nearly all relief was a State measure, dictated much more by policy than by benevolence, and the habit of selling young children, the innumerable expositions, the readiness of the poor to enroll themselves as gladiators, and the frequent famines, show how large was the measure of unrelieved distress.”7
The practice of offering oblations for the poor developed early in Church history. The faithful’s offerings were placed on the altar within the context of the Mass. Other forms of giving included the collecta, in effect on certain fast days, in which the faithful donated some portion of the fruits of the earth just prior to the reading of the epistle. Financial contributions to the church treasury were also made, and extraordinary collections were solicited from richer members of the faithful. Early Christians would often fast, consecrating the money they would have spent on food as a sacrificial offering. Saint Justin Martyr reports that many people who had loved riches and material things prior to their conversion now sacrificed for the poor in a spirit of joy.8
One could go on at great length citing the good works of the early Church, carried out by both the lowly and the rich. Even the Church fathers, who bequeathed to Western civilization an enormous corpus of literary and scholarly work, found time to devote themselves to the service of their fellow men. Saint Augustine established a hospice for pilgrims, ransomed slaves, and gave away clothing to the poor. (He warned people not to give him expensive garments, since he would only sell them and give the proceeds to the poor.)9 Saint John Chrysostom founded a series of hospitals in Constantinople.10 Saint Cyprian and Saint Ephrem organized relief efforts during times of plague and famine.
The early Church also institutionalized the care of widows and orphans and saw after the needs of the sick, especially during epidemics. During the pestilences that struck Carthage and Alexandria, the Christians earned respect and admiration for the bravery with which they consoled the dying and buried the dead, at a time when the pagans abandoned even their friends to their terrible fate.11 In the North African city of Carthage, the third-century bishop and Church father Saint Cyprian rebuked the pagan population for not helping victims of the plague, preferring instead to plunder them: “No compassion is shown by you to the sick, only covetousness and plunder open their jaws over the dead; they who are too fearful for the work of mercy, are bold for guilty profits. They who shun to bury the dead, are greedy for what they have left behind them.” Saint Cyprian summoned followers of Christ to action, calling on them to nurse the sick and bury the dead. Recall that this was still the age of intermittent persecution of Christians, so the great bishop was asking his followers to help the very people who had at times persecuted them. But, he said, “If we only do good to those who do good to us, what do we more than the heathens and publicans? If we are the children of God, who makes His sun to shine upon good and bad, and sends rain on the just and the unjust, let us prove it by our acts, by blessing those who curse us, and doing good to those who persecute us.”12
In the case of Alexandria, which also fell prey to the plague in the third century, the Christian bishop Dionysius recorded that the pagans “thrust aside anyone who began to be sick, and kept aloof even from their dearest friends, and cast the sufferers out upon the public roads half dead, and left them unburied, and treated them with utter contempt when they died.” He was able to report, however, that very many Christians “did not spare themselves, but kept by each other, and visited the sick without thought of their own peril, and ministered to them assiduously. . . drawing upon themselves their neighbors’ diseases, and willingly taking over to their own persons the burden of the sufferings of those around them.”13 (Martin Luther, who famously broke with the Catholic Church in the early sixteenth century, nevertheless maintained this spirit of self-sacrifice in his famous essay on whether a Christian minister was morally entitled to flee from a plague. No, Luther said, his place was by the side of his flock, tending to their spiritual needs even to the moment of their deaths.)
Saint Ephrem, a hermit in Edessa, was remembered for his heroism when famine and pestilence struck that unfortunate city. Not only did he coordinate the collection and distribution of alms, but he also established hospitals, cared for the sick, and tended to the dead.14 When a famine struck Armenia during the reign of Maximius, Christians lent assistance to the poor regardless of religious affiliation. Eusebius, the great fourth-century ecclesiastical historian, tells us that as a result of the Christians’ good example many pagans “made inquiries about a religion whose disciples are capable of such disinterested devotion.”15 Julian the Apostate, who detested Christianity, complained of Christian kindness toward the pagan poor: “These impious Galileans not only feed their own poor, but ours also; welcoming them to their agapae, they attract them, as children are attracted, with cakes.”16
EARLY HOSPITALS AND THE KNIGHTS OF SAINT JOHN
It is open to debate whether institutions resembling hospitals in the modern sense can be said to have existed in ancient Greece and Rome. Many historians have doubted it, while others have pointed out an unusual exception here and there. Yet even these exceptions involved the care of sick or wounded soldiers rather than of the general population. With regard to the establishment of institutions staffed by physicians who made diagnoses and prescribed remedies, and where nursing provisions were also available, the Church appears to have pioneered.17
By the fourth century, the Church began to sponsor the establishment of hospitals on a large scale, such that nearly every major city ultimately had one. These hospitals originally provided hospitality to strangers but eventually cared for the sick, widows, orphans, and the poor in general.18 As Guenter Risse puts it, Christians set aside “the reciprocal hospitality that had prevailed in ancient Greece and the family-oriented obligations of the Romans” in order to cater to “particular social groups marginalized by poverty, sickness, and age.”19 Likewise, medical historian Fielding Garrison observes that before the birth of Christ “the spirit toward sickness and misfortune was not one of compassion, and the credit of ministering to human suffering on an extended scale belongs to Christianity.”20
A woman named Fabiola, in an act of Christian penance, established the first large public hospital in Rome; she would scour the streets for poor and infirm men and women in need of its care.21 Saint Basil the Great, known to contemporaries as the Apostle of Almsgiving, established a hospital in fourth-century Caesarea. He was known to embrace the miserable lepers who sought care there, displaying a tender mercy toward these outcasts for which Saint Francis of Assisi would later become famous. Not surprisingly, the monasteries also played an important role in the care of the sick.22 According to the most thorough study of the history of hospitals:
[F]ollowing the fall of the Roman Empire, monasteries gradually became the providers of organized medical care not available elsewhere in Europe for several centuries. Given their organization and location, these institutions were virtual oases of order, piety, and stability in which healing could flourish. To provide these caregiving practices, monasteries also became sites of medical learning between the fifth and tenth centuries, the classic period of so-called monastic medicine. During the Carolingian revival of the 800s, monasteries also emerged as the principal centers for the study and transmission of ancient medical texts.23
Although the importance of caring for sick monks is duly emphasized in the Rule of Saint Benedict, there is no evidence that the father of Western monasticism imagined the monastery undertaking the task of providing medical care to the laity. Yet, as with so much else in the monastic enterprise, the force of circumstances significantly influenced the role and expectations of the monastery.
The military orders, established during the Crusades, administered hospitals all over Europe. One such order, the Knights of Saint John (also known as the Hospitallers), an early instantiation of what later became the Knights of Malta, left an especially significant imprint on the history of European hospitals, most notably with their unusually extensive facility in Jerusalem. Established around 1080, this hospice sought to provide for the poor and to render safe and secure lodging for pilgrims, of whom there were many in Jerusalem (particularly after the Christian victory in the First Crusade at the end of the century). The scope of the hospital’s operations increased significantly after Godfrey of Bouillon, who had led the Crusaders into Jerusalem, endowed the institution with a string of properties. With Jerusalem in Christian hands and routes to the city open, still more donations began to arrive from other sources.
John of Würzburg, a German priest, was overwhelmed by what he saw during his visit to the hospital. In addition to the care it dispensed, it also served as a substantial source of charitable relief. According to John, “The house feeds so many individuals outside and within, and it gives so huge an amount of alms to poor people, either those who come to the door, or those who remain outside, that certainly the total expenses can in no way be counted, even by the managers and dispensers of this house.” Theoderic of Würzburg, another German pilgrim, marveled that “going through the palace we could in no way judge the number of people who lay there, but we saw a thousand beds. No king nor tyrant would be powerful enough to maintain daily the great number fed in this house.”24
In 1120, the Hospitallers elected Raymond du Puy as administrator of the hospital, replacing the deceased Brother Gerard. The new administrator placed dramatic emphasis on service to the sick who had been entrusted to the hospital’s care, and expected the staff to make heroic sacrifices on their behalf. We read in “How Our Lords the Sick Should be Received and Served”—article sixteen of du Puy’s code regarding the administration of the hospital—that “in that obedience in which the master and the chapter of the hospital shall permit an hospital to exist when the sick man shall come there, let him be received thus: let him partake of the Holy Sacrament, first having confessed his sins to the priest, and afterwards let him be carried to bed, and there as if he were a Lord.” “As a model for both charitable service and unconditional devotion to the sick,” explains a modern history of hospitals, “du Puy’s decree became a milestone in the development of the hospital.”25 As described by Guenter Risse:
Not surprisingly, the new stream of pilgrims to the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and their testimonials concerning the charity of the Hospitallers of Saint John spread rapidly throughout Europe, including England. The existence of a religious order that strongly expressed its fealty to the sick inspired the creation of a network of similar institutions, especially at ports of embarkation in Italy and southern France where pilgrims assembled. At the same time, grateful ex-inmates, charitable nobles, and royals from one end of Europe to the other provided substantial land donations. In 1131, King Alfonso of Aragon bequeathed one-third of his realm to the Hospitallers.26
Over the course of the twelfth century, the hospital began to look more and more like a modern hospital and less like a hospice for pilgrims. The hospital’s mission became more specifically defined as the care of the sick, as opposed to providing shelter to needy travelers. At first an institution solely for Christians, the Hospital of Saint John began to admit Muslims and Jews as well.
Saint John’s was also impressive for its professionalism, organization, and strict regimen. Modest surgeries were carried out. The sick received twice-daily visits from physicians, baths, and two main meals per day. The hospital workers were not permitted to eat until the patients had been fed. A female staff was on hand to perform other chores and ensured that the sick had clean clothes and bed linens.27
The sophisticated organization of Saint John’s, coupled with its intense spirit of service to the sick, served as a model for Europe, where institutions inspired by the great hospital of Jerusalem began to pop up everywhere, in modest villages and major cities alike. The Hospitallers themselves, by the thirteenth century, were administering perhaps twenty hospices and leper houses.28
So impressive has Catholic charitable work been that even the Church’s own enemies have grudgingly acknowledged it. The pagan writer Lucian (130–200) observed in astonishment, “The earnestness with which the people of this religion help one another in their needs is incredible. They spare themselves nothing for this end. Their first lawgiver put it into their heads that they were all brethren!”29 Julian the Apostate, the Roman emperor who made a futile, if energetic, attempt in the 360s to return the empire to its earlier paganism, conceded that the Christians outshone the pagans in their devotion to charitable work. “Whilst the pagan priests neglect the poor,” he wrote, “the hated Galileans [that is, the Christians] devote themselves to works of charity, and by a display of false compassion have established and given effect to their pernicious errors. See their love-feasts, and their tables spread for the indigent. Such practice is common among them, and causes a contempt for our gods.”30 Martin Luther, as inveterate an enemy of the Catholic Church as ever lived, was forced to admit: “Under the papacy the people were at least charitable, and force was not required to obtain alms. Today, under the reign of the Gospel [by which he meant Protestantism], in place of giving they rob each other, and it might be said that no one thinks he has anything till he gets possession of the property of his neighbor.”31
Speaking about the Church, Simon Patten, a twentieth-century economic thinker, observed: “It provided food and shelter for the workers, charity for the unfortunate, and relief from disease, plague, and famine, which were but too common in the Middle Ages. When we note the number of the hospitals and infirmaries, the bounties of the monks, and the self-sacrifice of the nuns, we cannot doubt that the unfortunate of that time were at least as well provided for as they are at the present.”32 Frederick Hurter, a nineteenth-century biographer of Pope Innocent III, went so far as to declare: “All the institutions of beneficence which the human race this day possesses for the solace of the unfortunate, all that has been done for the protection of the indigent and afflicted in all the vicissitudes of their lives, and under all kinds of suffering, have come directly or indirectly from the Church of Rome. That Church set the example, carried on the movement, and often supplied the means of giving it effect.”33
The extent of the Church’s charitable activity sometimes became clearest when it was taken away. In sixteenth-century England, for example, King Henry VIII suppressed the monasteries and confiscated their property, distributing it at rock-bottom prices to men of influence within his realm. The pretext for the suppression was that the monasteries had become sources of scandal and immorality, though there can be little doubt that such contrived accusations merely concealed royal avarice. The social consequences of the dissolution of the monasteries must have been substantial. The Northern Risings of 1536, a popular rebellion also known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, had much to do with popular anger at the disappearance of monastic charity, and a petitioner to the king observed two years later:
[T]he experience which we have had by those houses that already be suppressed shows plainly unto us that a great hurt & decay is thereby come & hereafter shall come to this your realm & great impoverishing of many your poor obedient subjects, for lack of hospitality & good householding that was wont in them to be kept to the great relief of the poor people of all the [areas] adjoining the said monasteries.34
The monasteries were known to be generous and easy landlords, making land available at low rents and for leases of long duration: “The monastery was a proprietor that never died; its tenantry had to do with a deathless landlord; its lands and houses never changed owners; its tenants were liable to none of the many. . . uncertainties that other tenants were.”35 Thus the dissolution of the monasteries and the redistribution of their lands could only mean “ruin to scores of thousands of the poorest of the peasantry, the breakup of the small communities which were their world, and a future that was truly beggary.”36
The favorable terms on which people had once worked these lands by and large disappeared in the wake of the monasteries’ dissolution. According to one historian, “The new owners [of these lands], shopkeepers, bankers or needy noblemen, had no attachment to the rural past, and they exploited their lands in a spirit that was solely business-like. Rents were increased, arable land converted to pasture and large areas enclosed. Thousands of unemployed farm hands were thrown on to the streets. Social distinctions became accentuated and pauperism increased in an alarming fashion.”37
The effects of the dissolution were also felt in charitable provision and the care of the truly needy. Until relatively recently, the historical consensus regarding Catholic charitable activity in England took for granted a frequently heard Protestant criticism—that monastic poor relief had been neither as quantitatively substantial nor as qualitatively beneficial as its Catholic defenders had claimed. To the contrary, went this argument, monastic charitable provision had been relatively scant, and what meager amounts of charity the monasteries did dispense were distributed recklessly and without sufficient care to distinguish the genuinely needy from the chronically improvident and the merely lazy. In effect, then, they rewarded (and thereby tended to increase the instances of) the very condition they claimed to alleviate.
Modern scholars have at last begun to overturn this gross distortion of the historical record, a distortion that can be traced as far back as the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with the Protestant bias of Gilbert Burnet and his History of the Reformation of the Church of England.38 According to Paul Slack, a modern researcher, “The dissolution of the monasteries, chantries, religious gilds and fraternities in the 1530s and 1540s radically reduced existing sources of charity. The real aid which they had provided for the poor was no doubt concentrated geographically, but it was more substantial than has often been supposed, and its destruction left a real vacuum.”39
Likewise, Neil Rushton gives substantial evidence that the monasteries were indeed careful to direct their aid to the truly needy. And when they did not, explains Barbara Harvey in her revisionist study Living and Dying in England, 1100–1540, the culprit was not the conservatism or soft-heartedness of the monks but rather the constraints that donors placed on how the monasteries were to disburse their funds. Some donors endowed a distribution of alms in their wills. In other words, they gave a monastery a sum of money that was to be distributed to the needy as alms. But while part of the purpose of such endowments was to alleviate the suffering of the poor, they were also intended to reach a great many people, in order to win the prayers of as many people as possible for the repose of the soul of the benefactor. Such endowments therefore tended to encourage indiscriminate almsgiving. But over time the monasteries did tend to be more cautious and discriminating with their ordinary revenues.40
During the several centuries following the death of Charlemagne in 814, much of the care of the poor, until then mostly the province of the local parish church, began to migrate to the monasteries. In the words of France’s King Louis IX, the monasteries were the patrimonio pauperum—the patrimony of the poor; indeed it had been customary ever since the fourth century to speak of all of the Church’s possessions as the patrimonio pauperum. But the monasteries distinguished themselves in particular. “In every district,” according to one scholar, “alike on towering mountain and in lowly valley, arose monasteries which formed the centers of the organized religious life of the neighborhood, maintained schools, provided models for agriculture, industry, pisciculture, and forestry, sheltered the traveler, relieved the poor, reared the orphans, cared for the sick, and were havens of refuge for all who were weighed down by spiritual or corporal misery. For centuries they were the centers of all religious, charitable, and cultural activity.”41 Monasteries distributed alms daily to those in need. W. E. H. Lecky wrote of monastic charity: “As time rolled on, charity assumed many forms, and every monastery became a center from which it radiated. By the monks the nobles were overawed, the poor protected, the sick tended, travelers sheltered, prisoners ransomed, the remotest spheres of suffering explored. During the darkest period of the Middle Ages, the monks found a refuge for pilgrims amid the horrors of the Alpine snows.”42 The Benedictines, Cistercians, and Premonstratensians, as well as the mendicant orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans later on, distinguished themselves in their attention to charitable work.
Poor travelers could rely on monastic hospitality, and the records indicate that even well-to-do travelers were often made welcome as well, in conformity with Saint Benedict’s instruction in his Rule that the visitor was to be received as the monks would receive Christ. But the monks did not merely wait for the poor to come their way in the course of their travels. They sought out the poor who lived in the surrounding area. Lanfranc, for example, gave the almoner (the distributor of alms) the responsibility of discovering the sick and the poor near the monastery and providing them with monastic alms. In some cases, we read of the poor being given lodging, at times even indefinitely, in the monastic almonry.43
In addition to more institutionalized giving, the monks also provided food for the poor from their own leftovers. Gilbert of Sempringham, whose own leftovers were rather substantial, placed them on a plate he called “Lord Jesus’ dish,” in clear view of his fellow monks and with the obvious intent of urging them to emulate his generosity. It was also traditional for food and drink to be set out in commemoration of deceased monks, and distributed to the poor at the conclusion of the meal. This practice would be observed for as few as thirty days or as much as a full year following a monk’s death—and in the case of an abbot, sometimes even in perpetuity.44
Just as the sixteenth-century attack on the monasteries by the Crown debilitated the network of charity that those institutions had supported, the French Revolution’s eighteenth-century attack on the Church likewise struck at the source of so much good work. In November 1789, the revolutionary French government nationalized (that is, confiscated) Church property. The archbishop of Aix en Provence warned that such an act of theft threatened educational and welfare provisions for the French people. He was right, of course. In 1847, France had 47 percent fewer hospitals than in the year of the confiscation, and in 1799 the 50,000 students enrolled in universities ten years earlier had dwindled to a mere 12,000.45
Although you’d never know it from reading the standard Western civilization text, the Catholic Church revolutionized the practice of charitable giving, in both its spirit and its application. The results speak for themselves: previously unheard-of amounts of charitable giving and systematic, institutionalized care of widows, orphans, the poor, and the sick.