It is easy to dismiss good deeds as virtue-signalling self-flattery. The student who spends their first year at university talking about the school they helped build in Zambia on their gap year is good grounds to doubt moral sincerity, which I can red-facedly speak to.
Though you can’t always distinguish saint from signaller, it’s harder to argue with results.
Since 2013, the Order of Malta’s work with London’s homeless has boomed. The work that began with the Thursday-night Companions’ Café in the church hall of St James’s, Spanish Place, in Marylebone and the now defunct Monday sandwich runs at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, has added another half-dozen operations across the capital which see a roster of regular guests fed from Monday to Thursday every week.
