World Development & Relief is firmly founded upon Christian faith. It is this faith that shapes its ‘what, why and how’.

Sometimes, our blog asks questions of our faith in relation to living well in this unjust world. This latest blog simply shares a thought-provoking meditation from The Center for Action and Contemplation, more specifically, Richard Rohr’s Daily meditation. It uses the example of the Roman Catholic Church but can perhaps challenge other denominations and our own personal views and behaviour. May it help us reflect and act.

Have people of faith abandoned justice for the easier option of charity? 

Father Richard explains how religious orders, positioned on the edge of the inside of the Catholic Church, have helped the church to survive: 

While the mainline Catholic Church organized itself around structural charity and almsgiving, it lost a deeper sense of solidarity, justice, simplicity, and basic understanding of the poor. Christian s were no longer called to become poor like Christ but simply to help poor people through charity. It became acceptable to get rich personally, even for the clergy, with the idea of passing on that wealth to the poor. But as good as charity is, it largely became an avoidance of a basic concern for justice.  

This is certainly a step or two removed from what Jesus lived and invited us into. We are no longer the poor ones whom Jesus called blessed; from our position of comfort, we take care of poor “others.” This is good and necessary, but not exactly what he taught.  

Even though the Catholic Church didn’t remain a church of the poor, it sometimes became a church for the poor, usually through specialized groups called religious orders. About two-thirds of Catholic religious orders were founded by wonderful women and men who saw poor boys who were not being taught, poor girls who were not being protected, poor orphans who were not being taken care of. Then one heroic Irish woman would go off and take care of them, and soon we had the Sisters of Mercy, thousands of them.  

I’m convinced that one of the only reasons Roman Catholicism has lasted is because we have these satellites of freedom on the edge of the inside—religious communities of Benedictines, Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans, Sisters of Charity, Sisters of Mercy, and many more. Bishops have their questions of concern, and we have different questions, as do most of the laity. Structurally, the church survived because the religious orders and most of the laity just got on with trying to live the gospel.  

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