About twenty years ago, a local mother heard God asking her to do something to help. She knew that many women facing unexpected pregnancies sought an abortion because they felt they had no better options. With the support of her husband and children, she began helping pregnant mothers with whatever they needed, up to and including letting them stay in a spare bedroom in her home during pregnancy and beyond. A few years later, the outreach organized legally as a nonprofit and it is today a thriving charity receiving five to ten calls per day for assistance with everything from diapers to transportation to adoption.
The same kind of story has repeated itself throughout history countless times. In the vast majority of cases, the people whose initiative created charitable institutions had no relevant expertise, financial resources, or organizational experience. Often, they didn’t even envision an institution at all. A government clerk, Clara Barton, saw wounded Civil War soldiers in Washington, D.C., helped them, and the Red Cross was born. A university student, Frederic Ozanam, saw beggars on the streets of Paris, helped them, and the St. Vincent de Paul Society was born. What they had was attentiveness to an unmet need and a willingness to address it. In other words, they cared.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, industrialization and modernization in the world’s advanced economies gave rise to the professionalization of welfare provision. In fields such as nursing, mental health, and social work, the emergence of university programs, professional associations, and legal certification requirements gradually crowded out the amateur, spontaneous charity that had been the norm. This development brought some advantages. To make full use of scientific and technological progress in medicine, for example, it was necessary for certain kinds of treatments to be managed by highly trained professionals.
But there were also drawbacks. The very rules and norms that provide order and standards to the professions can also stultify and prevent innovation. Where care for the suffering ill or destitute is the duty of paid staff rather than the passion of a volunteer caregiver, there is the danger that routine will replace attentiveness to need, and that financial reward will replace charity as the primary motivation.
In our massive, modern, complex economy, largescale provision of poverty-relief and healthcare, delivered by trained professionals, has its place. But the need for small-scale, spontaneous provision has not disappeared—and never will. In the same vein, obligations to help those in need can never be completely discharged by transferring those responsibilities to government agencies. “There is no ordering of the State so just that it can eliminate the need for a service of love,” Pope Benedict XVI wrote. “We do not need a State which regulates and controls everything, but a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need.”
So let’s make sure that we always preserve a culture in which the caring and entrepreneurial mother who sees a need is able to respond. Let’s make sure that the legal and policy environment does not preclude the activity of the noninstitutional or the nonprofessional. And let’s consider how we can act personally, as volunteers and donors, to encourage such initiative. Caring doesn’t depend on a government program, nor does it require a degree. It only requires caritas—a commitment to the good of another.
