Substituting Charity for Justice

Last updated on: May 6, 2016 at 2:50 pm by Daniel Schwindt

Substituting Charity for Justice 2016-05-06T14:50:31-05:00 Daniel Schwindt

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In an address delivered today, Pope Francis observed that, “The just distribution of the fruits of the earth and human labour is not mere philanthropy. It is a moral obligation.”

There is also a passage from Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate that runs as follows:

Charity goes beyond justice, because to love is to give, to offer what is “mine” to the other; but it never lacks justice, which prompts us to give the other what is “his”, what is due to him by reason of his being or his acting. I cannot “give” what is mine to the other, without first giving him what pertains to him in justice. If we love others with charity, then first of all we are just towards them. Not only is justice not extraneous to charity, not only is it not an alternative or parallel path to charity: justice is inseparable from charity[1], and intrinsic to it. Justice is the primary way of charity or, in Paul VI’s words, “the minimum measure” of it…

This principle is a refutation of the common attempt in some political circles to avoid dealing with social justice by insisting that it is fulfilled by carrying out acts of so-called charity, by which they mean voluntary acts of service to the poor and their fellow man. This sort of action also goes by the name of “philanthropy.” The transition from the old scheme, which taught that justice was a bare minimum, to be complemented by acts of charity, to the new one in which charity is proffered as an alternative to justice, or as if acts of charity encompassed justice and automatically satisfied its requirements, is outlined very thoroughly in Jeremy Beer’s The Philanthropic Revolution. I reviewed the book sometime ago here.

These attempts to circumvent justice were noticed by others too. The text cited below is one example of this, which I stumbled upon recently. It was written by a John R. Lawson as part of a statement before the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, 1915. The writer was the representative of the miners in charge of the Colorado strike, and went to work as a pit-boy at the age of eight.

THERE is another cause of industrial discontent. This is the skillful attempt that is being made to substitute Philanthropy for Justice. There is not one of these foundations, now spreading their millions over the world in showy generosity, that does not draw those millions from some form of industrial injustice. It is not their money that these lords of commercialized virtue are spending, but the withheld wages of the American working-class.

I sat in this room and heard a great philanthropist read the list of activities of his Foundation “to promote the well-being of mankind.” An international health commission to extend to foreign countries and peoples the work of eradicating the hookworm; the promotion of medical education and health in China; the investigations of vice conditions in Europe; one hundred thousand dollars for the American Academy in Rome, twenty thousand a year for widows’ pensions in New York, one million for the relief of Belgians, thirty-four millions for the University of Chicago, thirty-four millions for a General Education Board. A wave of horror swept over me during that reading, and I say to you that that same wave is now rushing over the entire working-class of the United States. Health for China, a refuge for birds in Louisiana, food for the Belgians, pensions for New York widows, university training for the elect—and never a thought or a dollar for the many thousands of men, women and children who starved in Colorado, for the widows robbed of husbands and children of their fathers, by law-violating conditions in the mines. There are thousands of this great philanthropist’s former employees in Colorado today who wish to God that they were in Belgium to be fed, or birds to be cared for tenderly.

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

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