The solution to corrupt systems in developing countries is not to tell the poor person to kill his child so that we rich Westerners can have carbon credits. It is to demand that the rich Westerner, Third World tyrant, or exploitative corporate system give the poor man what is rightly his: enough food to eat. This is not Marxism. Indeed, it is not even a “work of mercy.” This is Church teaching on mere justice:
St. John Chrysostom vigorously recalls this: “Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life. The goods we possess are not ours, but theirs.” “The demands of justice must be satisfied first of all; that which is already due in justice is not to be offered as a gift of charity”:
When we attend to the needs of those in want, we give them what is theirs, not ours. More than performing works of mercy, we are paying a debt of justice.3
Perhaps a better way to phrase that is “Less than performing works of mercy, we are paying a debt of justice.” For of course, mere acts of justice are not superabundant works of mercy; they are the bare minimum expected of us as functional moral beings. Obeying the Ten Commandments is not heroism; it’s the very least we can expect. The Ten Commandments essentially say, “If you can’t love your neighbor, at least don’t beat him to death with a baseball bat, steal his stuff, or run off with his wife.” Similarly, Jesus tells us:
If you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? (Matthew 5:46–47).
Merely doing the just thing, then, is not really the goal. Merely not robbing the poor of what is rightfully theirs is not heroic sanctity. What is called for is not mere fairness but love that goes above and beyond.
I don’t like hearing that any more than you do. I feel the economic pinch too. I fret, as do you, about how much I can afford to go the extra mile and give generously. And truth be told, I sometimes cut corners.
But for all my faults and hypocrisy, the simple fact is, I’m not making this stuff up. I didn’t invent the tradition. I merely report it. And the tradition has always been emphatic: Feed the hungry to the best of your ability.
Don’t make much? Feed the hungry anyway, even if it’s just a bit.
Do you, like me, battle the temptation to eat like a pig and often find yourself losing ground? Feed the hungry and kick yourself for your failures afterward.
Resentful of the shiftless poor? Jesus didn’t say, “Feed the deserving.” He just said, “Feed the hungry.”
Peter, do you love me? Then feed the hungry! If your name is not Peter, do it anyway.
We are to feed the hungry for two basic reasons that I can detect in the Catholic tradition. First, because the hungry are hungry, and second, because the hungry are Jesus. Medieval thinkers understood the idea that we know lesser truths more surely and greater truths less surely, just as we can see a candle clearly but not the sun. Similarly, the way we know we have fed the hungry is when they burp and pat their tummies. The way we know we have fed Jesus is purely because he tells us it is so. It is a classic example of the way God supernaturally reveals things we could not possibly know on our own. The presence of Jesus Christ in the poor is no more evident to the senses than is the presence of Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist. It is purely a matter of faith in his word.
And indeed, one of the ironies of our present culture of New Atheist hostility to the Faith is that those who routinely sneer at the Real Presence in the Eucharist imagine that once faith is gone, we will see the dignity of the poor more clearly. This delusion will, in fact, vanish should the Faith really be excised as people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens wish. Without the dignity Jesus gives the poor, the first response of an icy rationalist will be to judge the poor on the empirical evidence alone: the smell of alcohol, pot, urine, and vomit; the schizophrenic rambling; the addictions; the violence; the ignorance; the ratty clothes, toothlessness, and appalling hygiene; the child abuse––all clusters of social, economic, and psychological pathologies that swarm around the poor like maggots. These will be the only “facts” about them. Their dignity will be dismissed as mere sentimental projection, a holdover from the bad old days when people believed all that superstitious Jesus junk. And the quick, easy, and rational response of a society that has been carefully instructed to dismiss the presence of Christ from its mind will be not charity but the same solution that cold clinicians always propose— namely, to cull the herd of the unfit and eliminate contagion from the breed. Should Christianity ever successfully be extirpated from the public square, expect the extermination of the poor, not their exaltation.
Against this, the faith has always proposed the wildly impractical fact that Jesus really is present in the poor as (in a different mode) he is present in the Eucharist. Therefore we must feed the hungry or face the doom: “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food” (Matthew 25:41–42).
The demand of Jesus to feed the hungry is challengingly open-ended. In a world of starving people, our tradition says to live within our means, take care of our families—and be as generous as God, a terrifying prospect. “Love your enemies…. Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:44, 48, emphasis mine). In a word, do not act from Minimum Daily Adult Requirement stinginess, which asks, “What’s the least generosity I can get away with and still make the cut?” Instead, like Christ, ask, “How can I give my life away in love for God?”
I have no clear program for that any more than most people, so I toss in my little copper coins as I can. I have my charities I support, as do you.4 I pray that when I share my worldly goods, it will be enough to help and that Jesus will receive it. I ask for light, and when our Lord sees fit, he gives it.
I’m also aware that there is no resting on laurels when it comes to works of mercy. God’s project of salvation is so crazy and huge that only he could attempt it. We puny mortals chip in our two bits and help a family here and there with a gift. Now and then some bright meteor like Norman Borlaug pitches in and dramatically rescues a billion souls. Meanwhile, we live in hope that our faith will be honored where our ability to save a billion lives is lacking. After all, Jesus was able to do a lot with five loaves and two fish.
(For more information, see my book THE WORK OF MERCY: BEING THE HANDS AND HEART OF CHRIST (available here, signed by me, or in Kindle format here, or as an audiobook here).
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