Charity Face-to-Face

The question of borders, immigration, and care for migrants is a heady one, at the moment – one where political loyalties aren’t always playing out as expected, and individual conscience is tending to come into conflict with party duty.

This First Things take, though, offers a different line, casting the question not so much in terms of politics but in terms of the virtue of hospitality. In some ways, the piece suggests, the problem isn’t so complicated, when taken in that light: we can look as far back as the classical tradition to find understandings of that virtue that help us with this larger issue. Indeed, even then, hospitality toward the stranger was regarded as a clear and nonnegotiable moral obligation. “Hosts must offer food and shelter without question to the weary traveler,” the piece notes. And yet, their generosity was not meant to be one-sided. “Guests are obliged to be courteous and grateful,” in turn, “to offer no threat to their host, and not to allow their presence to become a burden.”

Broadening that relationship out, the question of immigration appears simpler to sort out, at least with respect to some basic principles. Where there are people who are looking for a place to live better lives, or who are being forced to move, or who are in a vulnerable position, there should be a ready hand to meet them. By the same token, no society has an infinite capacity to bring in new members from different cultures without serious disturbance and conflict. There are inevitable practical limits, and the stranger also ought to be ready to be respectful and responsive to those. The rational thing to do is therefore to take the middle ground: a well-ordered society should take in those it can, and it should stand ready to make room for them, but at the same time that society ought to take care that things are handled in such a way that its stability is not put into jeopardy.

Of course, those principles may bring up practical questions when it comes to settling policy questions, but it wouldn’t seem that those questions should feel intensely insoluble: these prudential footholds are solid ones, and useful. And yet in our current political climate, those questions do feel insoluble. This article feeling like a controversial enough one is proof of the point. So why is it that this topic has gotten so hard, with people appealing to fairly common moral principles, while occupying very different political grounds?

The First Things line is a suggestive one, on such a question. When it comes to a virtue like hospitality, the Christian tradition situates such an obligation within a larger obligation to love one’s neighbor. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, teach the ignorant, welcome the stranger, and so on – the so-called corporal works of mercy. And Christians have always found ways to practice these works through broad social measures such as the founding of hospitals, orphanages, or schools.

But it has also been true that for Christians, the primary place of exercising those works of mercy is with those closest to us: specifically in our families, and in relation to our brothers and sisters in our local churches. When parents care for children, in other words, they are practicing works of mercy: they are welcoming little strangers, clothing them, feeding them, caring for them when sick, and teaching them. And then, those children do the same for their parents and other relations when the time comes – they care for them when sick, and bury them with dignity. Thus that famous dictum: “Charity begins in the home.” Not only do individual charitable acts start there, but the settled habit of acting charitably is formed through the life of the family.

Now, it’s interesting that those pushing for the most radical expressions of governmental charity – open borders, government agencies that care for all aspects of life, and so on – are also those who, statistically, are tending to have fewer, if any, children. For them, charity isn’t beginning at home, because there isn’t a typical home to speak of: no complex set of social relations to which they’re committed, and in which they’re learning what it means to care for others. As a result, it should probably come as no surprise that their orientation to caring for people tends to be exaggerated, and that it demands less active charity from each individual and more intense investment on the part of an abstracted government. It’s hard not to think that there is a kind of attempt to substitute what’s been lost in family life for the much easier road of social programs and legislation. One can feel virtuous, in supporting such programs, without having to do anything.

One of the key principles of Catholic social teaching is that the family is the fundamental unit of human society. This is not just a life-affirming ideal; it is a practically significant principle. When the family and the charity meant to happen there is diminished, things get out of whack quickly on the broader societal level. For when all is said and done, charity is always exercised by an individual person caring for another individual person. It is always ultimately personal, and it is always face-to-face. There is no such thing as governmental charity. Organized charities are only charitable if the organization is a means of bringing individual people face to face so that one can care for the other. But if individuals are not capable of that – have not learned what it means to care and sacrifice for another – then even the best charitable schemes in respect to the homeless or the sick or the migrant aren’t going to get off the ground.

So, the dream of a society in which everyone is cared for through legislation and programs, without the need for individual acts of love and sacrifice, is an illusory one. And the plan to build a society that knows how to rightly welcome and love the stranger, without knowing how to rightly build and love in the context of a family, is probably an illusory one, as well. We’re not likely to get a complex question like immigration or even hospitality right if our family lives are seriously dysfunctional. For we say that charity begins in the home. We might also say that caring for immigrants does, too.