Why the poor belong to us.

The Catholic Church has always believed in caring for the poor as a means of encountering God. For much of U.S. history, that meant caring for its own.

EIGHTH IN A 10-PART SERIES ON CHURCH HISTORY

The poor you have with you always," Jesus informs Judas in the Gospel of John (12:8). "But you will not always have me." Jesus-sayings cast in this "either/or" mode have always caused problems for Catholics. We are, after all, the quintessential Christians of the "both/ and." We insist on retaining both sides of the divine dialectic: grace and nature, faith and works, revelation and reason, Roman and Catholic, and so on.

Thus, the church typically refused to choose between contemplation of Christ, on the one hand, and concern for the poor, on the other. Instead, Catholics have insisted that the two commitments go hand in hand: One who presumes to love and serve the Lord encounters him in the destitute.

For, in the manner of his life and certainly in his ignoble death, the crucified Messiah not only embraced but embodied the dregs of humanity. He became "one of us," not only human but lowest-common-denominator human: bowery bum, disgraced criminal, deranged madman with messianic delusions. The Lord God did not disdain the soiled but irrepressible dignity of the poor but revealed it to be the abode of the sacred. In so doing God stretched the dialectic to the breaking point of paradox: Divinity is most fully revealed in humanity, a humanity at its most vulnerable and impoverished.

Catholics are hardly the only Christians to place commitment to the poor at the heart of their religious mission. But we rank second to none in our sacralization of poverty, in our insistence that the poor have a special, even mystical, relationship to God. The conviction that the poor actually have something to teach the rest of us, as well as a leg up in the race for heaven, can be seen in everything from the vows of poverty taken by Roman Catholic religious to the identification of sainthood with "Holy Mother Poverty," as Saint Francis of Assisi called his particular approach to the imitation of Christ.

For two thirds of the history of Roman Catholicism in the United States, placing the poor on a pedestal came naturally: We were the poor!

From 1820 to 1920, the United States attracted 33.6 million immigrants, the majority of whom were Catholic (including approximately 4 million Irish Catholics, 2 million German Catholics, 2 million or more Italian Catholics, and about the same number of Polish Catholics). Not all Catholic immigrants were poor in body, but most were poor in spirit. If not financial hardship, they experienced loneliness, social alienation, and political marginalization. Few first-generation immigrants received adequate health care or other social services. As early as 1866, the U.S. Catholic bishops acknowledged the indigence of their flock, confessing the "melancholy" and "very humiliating" fact that "a very large portion of the vicious and idle youth of our principal cities are the children of Catholic parents."

That began to change in the last quarter of the 19th century, as American Catholics developed an extended network of institutions and services aimed at taking care of "their own." Bishops, priests, and communities of men and (especially) women religious were galvanized into action by the encroachments of Protestant "child savers"--home missionaries and WASP social reformers who attempted to "rescue" Catholic children from the poverty and presumed degeneracy of their parents, as well as from the anti-democratic Catholic Church and its "absolutist" pope. Nuns focused their efforts on establishing and staffing institutions that housed and/or educated thousands of infants and children in New York and other major cities--not only orphans, but offspring whose parents could not support them.

"The leading motive was to save the souls of the children and their parents, but the importance of material provision and service was never undervalued," write historians Dorothy M. Brown and Elizabeth McKeown. "Salvation and social security blended seamlessly in the rhetoric of Catholic leaders, who were also aware that left unattended, the situation of the poor would be charged against them as a failed civic responsibility and would exacerbate anti-Catholic and nativist sentiments in the culture."

Charity thus became synonymous with the growing public presence of Catholics in the United States. As hospitals, parochial schools, orphanages, settlement houses, industrial schools, and remedial institutions grew in number and effectiveness, Catholics found that public service also carried political clout. By the first decade of the 20th century, they had won a voice in local, state, and national policy-making and were gaining access to public funds earmarked for meeting social needs.

To guide their thinking, Catholic leaders studied Rerum novarum ("On the Condition of Labor"), Pope Leo XIII's ground-breaking 1891 encyclical that set forth the basic principles of Catholic doctrine on the social and economic order. These included the right of individuals to own private property (denied by the socialists) and the right of laborers to organize for "a just wage" (opposed by the "robber baron" capitalists of the day).

In 1919, the newly organized conference of U.S. Catholic bishops promulgated their first social document on the American economy, the "Bishops' Program of Social Reconstruction." Drafted for them by Father John A. Ryan, a Minnesota priest whose doctoral dissertation ("A Living Wage") applied Leonine principles to the American setting, it anticipated the New Deal by calling for a minimum wage, aid to dependent children, workingmen's health and unemployment compensation, and a host of similar measures that would eventually come to constitute the national government's comprehensive response to the Depression.

When that crisis arrived a decade after the bishops pastoral, Catholics were poised to debate and help shape the provisions of the New Deal, including the role of the church in administering social services and relief aid. Some were worried that "big government" (or Protestant elites manipulating it) might take advantage of the economic crisis to poach on Catholic territory. Brown and McKeown took the main title of their history of "Catholic Charities and American Welfare" from a proprietary claim of this sort, uttered by Bishop Aloisius Muench of Fargo, North Dakota. "The poor belong to us!" he insisted at a 1935 meeting of the National Council of Catholic Charities. "We will not let them be taken from us."

That clarion call articulated the age-old Catholic conviction that social workers must minister to the soul and form moral character even while healing and nourishing the body. It echoed throughout the 20th century as Catholic charities and social-justice organizations steered a consistent, if complicated, course as both a partner in government-funded programs and institutions, and as an advocate for the poor.

By the 1990s, Catholic Charities U.S.A. had built an extensive network of 1,400 charitable agencies, serving more than 18 million Americans. The Catholic Health Association staffed 600 hospitals and 300 long-term care facilities, serving 20 million people annually. In the majority of the nation's dioceses and parishes, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development funded more than 200 local antipoverty groups striving to improve policies, practices, and laws affecting low-income individuals. All in all, the U.S. Catholic Church runs the largest system of private social services in the nation.

In accomplishing this feat, American Catholics drew upon, and contributed to, a century's worth of Catholic social tradition that elaborated the principles underlying the Catholic commitment to "the common good" and specified methods of empowering the economically and socially marginalized.

A group of Latin American bishops, meeting in Medellin, Colombia in 1968, put a name to this worldwide Catholic imperative, and it stuck. The church's affirmation that, as a later synod put it, "action on behalf of justice and participation in the transformation of the world fully appear to us as a constitutive dimension of the proclamation of the gospel" was called a "preferential option for the poor."

As every saint or sinner this side of Francis of Assisi will recognize, this eloquent formulation was merely a case of pouring old wine into new wineskins. The poor have always belonged to us.

By R. SCOTT APPLEBY, professor of history and director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.