Charity and Justice

Notre Dame philosopher John O'Callaghan passes on some thoughts about our recent discussion about charitable giving:

While I support taxation that, among other things, puts wealth to the use of ameliorating poverty, it is important to distinguish the apple of taxation from the orange of charitable giving.  The discussion has tended to throw taxation and charitable giving into the same basket, in order to ask, "who does more for the poor, liberals or conservatives?".  But the government's use of the wealth of my neighbor to ameliorate poverty is not a charitable act on the government's part, or my neighbor's part simply because of his participating in it.  It may be an act of justice--but it certainly isn't in any ordinary sense a charitable act.  And when I place my wealth at the service of the common good through taxation I may be participating in an act of justice.  But as such it is no more a charitable act on my part than it is for my neighbor, even if I do it willingly and he unwillingly.  Government putting the wealth of the community to the use and service of the common good, even wealth that is possessed privately according to human law, is a primary task of government required in justice by the natural law.

Charity, on the other hand, is an infused theological virtue--the love of God and the love of neighbor in God.  Acts of charity need not be conceived of along strictly individualist lines, as if individual persons cannot enter into voluntary communities, and act charitably in common.  And being an act of charity does not necessarily exclude being an act of justice.  So, perhaps as an individual citizen, informed by that theological virtue, one can participate in the just acts of government.  But given the condition of our modern desacralized political communities, to equate the just acts of government with charitable acts would be to attribute grace to the activities of government in pursuit of justice.  But that would appear to resacralize the modern state in a way that I suspect most of your readers, even your liberal readers, would want to avoid.  To entrust the gift of charity to the managers of the modern state empties it of its supernatural power, a practical argument for subsidiarity if there ever was one.

So it would still seem to be the case that conservatives, according to the study mentioned, are indeed more charitable than liberals, charitably assuming of course that those acts identified by the author of the study do in fact proceed from the theological virtue of charity.  And as you pointed out, conservatives also pay their taxes.  But in the end, does it matter who has the upper hand in serving the needs of the poor, the conservatives or the liberals?  Consider the words of St. Robert Bellarmine: "it matters little whether one goes to hell for lack of justice or from lack of charity."