The Practice of Charity; Individual, Associated and Organized - Tapa blanda

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1904 edition. Excerpt: ...that Catholic interests might not suffer. We should not quarrel with either of these motives. The faith of their fathers is to Catholics, as to others, a priceless heritage and they would not willingly have any family and especially any child lose it because of destitution alone. And in this they are entirely right. This point of view is tersely expressed by Mr. Thomas M. Mulry in an address before the Catholic Social Union. Urging the members to become active workers in the charity organization society, he made it plain that where non-Catholics were favorably disposed it would increase the good that could be done; where they were unfavorably disposed it would lessen the evil likely to be done, for it would enable them to care for the interests of their own.1 This may be an example of enlightened selfishness from the denominational point of view, but it certainly is enlightened and no objection to it can be urged from any secular agency which courts investigation of its work. Objection would arise only if this were to go so far that the representatives of the religious bodies were to devote themselves exclusively to espionage, and to the attempt to discover evidences of an unfavorable disposition, and if as a result they were to neglect the charitable, or the spiritual work which devolves upon them. Charity rightly understood is not so much secular as it is interdenominational. It is not unsectarian 1 St Vincent de Paul Quarterly, May, 1900, p. 129. so much as it is all-inclusive. A public speaker once pointed out that between nations there are sometimes, bonds, affinities, and affections which are not international, but supernational, just as certain phenomena are supernatural as transcending the ordinary processes of nature. There is a...