The World's Debt to the Catholic Church

Christianity recognized from the very beginning that the helpless must be cared for, and though that idea had never before been put in practice the early Christians, as we have seen in the chapter on Helping the Helpless, proceeded to organize institutions of various kinds for this purpose. There are a large number of men and women, however, who though they are not helpless are quite incapable of helping themselves to make the most of life or at least to secure such happiness and contentment as makes life really worth while. The man who does things for the sick and the ailing, the lame, the halt and the blind is doing a real work of charity, and yet not more than the man or the woman who is enabling fellow men to help themselves to make more out of life. In our time this is spoken of usually as social service, but Catholic Christianity has never used any such indefinite term but has called it charity and has proclaimed it a duty owed to others. The Church has insisted that there is a definite obligation in this matter as in the caring for the helpless. This obligation is dependent not on any vague sense of fellow feeling, much less on any indefinite sentimentality, through which we feel better for doing things for others, but are left in full liberty to think that whenever we care to stop doing them we are perfectly free to do so. This duty to our neighbor is not merely a work of supererogation, a product of especially beneficent feelings flowing from a natural disposition to do good that may be called by the high-sounding term philanthropy, but it is a part of the duty of the brotherhood among men in our mutual sonship of God.

When the disciples of John the Baptist came to ask the Lord in the name of their master whether He was the Christ or whether they should wait for another, He told them to go back and tell John that they had seen the lame walk, the deaf hear, the blind see, the dead raised to life again, and the Gospel preached to the poor. Apparently the greatest miracle of all that He was working during these missionary years was the preaching of the Gospel to the poor. From the very beginning the Church has demonstrated that its principal mission is to the poor. A great many of the proud Romans and Greeks refused to have anything to do with it because it was the Church of the poor and the slaves. All down the centuries it has remained the Church of the poor.