Today (February 5, fifth Sunday in Ordinary time) the first reading was from the prophet Isaiah:
Sharing your bread with the hungry, sheltering the oppressed and the homeless; Clothing the naked when you see them, and not turning your back on your own. Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your wound shall quickly be healed; Your vindication shall go before you, and the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer, you shall cry for help, and he will say: Here I am! If you bestow your bread on the hungry and satisfy the afflicted; Then light shall rise for you in the darkness, and the gloom shall become for you like midday; (Isaiah 58:7-10)
This and similar passages in the Old Testament are very powerful ones, reminding us of our responsibility to the poor. But while I was on vacation I started reading Mollat’s The Poor in the Middle Ages, and one point he stresses in his analysis is how frequently the Church in the Middle Ages had risen in the defense of the poor, both individually and as a class, but how infrequently it challenged or even questioned the social order which created the poor, or at least raised significant obstacles to their becoming “not poor”. (Maybe this changes later on in the book: I’ve only read the first four chapters.)
Now the passage above, and ones like it lend themselves naturally to a personalist interpretation, since they are cast in terms of what you (the reader) are to do in response to God’s call. And, in a rural, agricultural civilization in which most people never travel more than a few days’ walk from their village, a personalist approach makes sense. Society is essentially horizontal in nature (though with class inequalities already appearing) and the poor are your neighbor and known to you by name?
But is a personalist reading sufficient given the present size and complexity of our economy? First, the poor are very often no longer are neighbors in the sense of proximity in terms of geographic or social space. When I teach my first year seminar on this topic, I am repeatedly struck by the fact that many of my middle class students have never had any significant contact with someone who is poor. They are an undifferentiated other, living somewhere else. They remain, however, our neighbors in the specific Christian sense.
Second, the problem is vast. Current charitable contributions by both individuals and corporations are approximately 310 billion per year. This covers the whole gamut of giving, including gifts to support universities, museums, etc. and not just “charitable” gifts in the narrow sense. Based on 2004 data, only about 5-10% went directly to human services. This is not easy to measure, since gifts to “religious organizations” (the largest category) must yield at one remove substantial amounts that aid the poor in some way. In the same way, some portion of the gifts given to higher education must provide scholarships to help students. So for purposes of discussion, let me estimate the total amount of direct and indirect “charitable” giving to the poor at 1/3 of this amount, or 100 billion dollars. Total government spending (federal, local and state) on “welfare” (income-tested benefits, not including social security and medicare) is in excess of 500 billion dollars a year. (The most recent figures I could find were for 2000, when the total was 436 billion.)
Third, is charitable giving (either directly by individual/corporate gifts to charity or indirectly via taxation and government programs) an adequate solution, or do we need to challenge the social structures that are part of the problem? Asking this question often puts people on the defensive, and perhaps it should, since it implies that the structures which make them able to give generously to the poor are really part of the problem. In this context I am very fond of an acerbic quote attributed to Dom Holder Camara of Brazil: “When I give bread to the poor, they call me a saint; when I ask why there are so many poor, they call me a communist.”
These are mostly questions to which I do not have clear answers. I am partial to the personalist solution: as someone in the Catholic Worker movement put it, at the Last Judgment Jesus is going to say, “When I was hungry you gave me to eat,” not “when I was hungry you helped me apply for foodstamps.” But I am realist enough to know (or cynical enough to suspect) that charitable contributions are not going to more than double overnight (even given massive tax cuts or subsidies in the form of tax credits) to cover the portion of welfare funded by government spending. Therefore, for a significant amount of time (barring a massive change of heart by most of the American population) government is going to have to be part of the solution. But I also realize that any government solution is going to institutionalize many of the same structures that are at the heart of the problem. Thus I am in a conundrum from which I do not see a clear exit. Thoughts on the matter?
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