THE CHARITIES OF A GREAT CHURCH

New Zealand Tablet, 9 January 1913, Page 15

THE CHARITIES OF A GREAT CHURCH

Under the above heading, the Philadelphia North American , a daily paper of wide influence in the State of Pennsylvania, had the following editorial in a recent issue: The National Conference of Catholic Charities, held last week in Washington, should serve to remind the country that the Church which saved to the world the Christian ideal still cherishes the . early spirit of brotherhood, which had its inception in the catacombs and its fruition in the feeling of the serfs of western Europe. From the earliest ages the Catholic Church has preached and practised a doctrine of charity. When there were no charity organisations and no relief funds, when the sick were considered a burden and the physically enfeebled a curse, when lepers were driven from habitations and herded together like cattle, the Church opened hospitals and founded asylums. Its women of wealth and aristocratic birth devoted their lives to the care of the sick and the injured, to the protection of the aged and the young. Every monastery and convent had its time for the service of the poor, and monks and nuns - prescribed for the sick and distributed alms to the needy. The hunted criminal found refuge in the sanctuary of the church. ... The Catholic Church has never relinquished her claim upon the broken and the afflicted. She has never lost the attitude of the mother toward the suffering child. The Hotel Dieu, of Paris, has been the model for thousands of hospitals in all parts of the world, where Sisters of hundreds of religious Orders pass from bed to bed, from ward to ward, in quiet ministration. There are institutions for the aged, under the care of nuns who to-day go out as the medicants did of old, begging for their charges. You see-them on the streets like ghosts of medieval saints, almstaking instead of almsgiving. There is no physical or spiritual need that the sons and daughters of the Church, dedicated to the service of religion and humanity, are not meeting to-day. But besides the army of religious devotees who are carrying on a splendid work of relief, the Catholic Church has a sturdy band of ' lay workers who supplement their efforts, and who, in their broad contact with the world, reflect the later spirit of fraternity^ To them charity is not only the dispensing of alma as it was long ago. It is a tedious work of reconstruction. It attacks the economic and social ills that underlie poverty. It grapples with low wages, with juvenile crime and parental delinquency. It deals with the feeble-minded child and the broken family, and cares for the woman and her children who have been left to face starvation while the wage-earner pays the penalty of crime in jail. ... The dispensers of Catholic charities in the past have concealed their light beneath a bushel, and have maintained a secretive silence about the amount and extent of their work. They have been - chary of red tape and card indexes. They have feared to make their giving too scientific and their good deeds too well known. Consequently has come from time to time the criticism that the Catholic institutions are not cooperative, and that the older spirit of giving, not the newer spirit of fraternity, prevails in their methods. But this charge must be swept aside by the facts revealed at the Washington conference, . where every phase of modern sociological work was discussed openly, with a view to its bearing on the individual and the community, and in its co-operative aspect, where noted specialists made valuable contributions to such problems as that of the family income and child labor, the pensioning of widows and their families, the causes of desertion and non-support, the care of the defective child and the prevention of delinquency. It is an encouraging sign when the inexhaustible resources of Catholic charity, behind which lie unmatched traditions of self-sacrifice and enthusiasm for humanity, are put in accord with the great forward movement of social betterment.