The need the welfare state can’t meet
SIR – The question by Matthew Schmitz’s friend, Tom Holland – “What is the Church offering that can’t be done by the welfare state?” – is intriguing because it points to an unresolved paradox of history (Feature, July 1). That is to say that before the brutal dissolution of the monasteries, the Church was the welfare state, where destitution was rare even if poverty was ubiquitous.
For as Desmond Seward points out in The Last White Rose, after the dissolution a desolate landscape appeared, a country that “swarmed with beggars once fed by such houses, now joined by starving monks and nuns”. So Holland’s point that Catholic charity, like the hymn-singing soup kitchen of Soho parish, reflects in a contemporary way what was no doubt commonplace in pre-Reformation days: the synergy of both the corporal and spiritual works of mercy nourished by communal prayer.
