Charity is a whole different virtue from justice

In philosophy they counsel against the good warring with the better. While something might be good in itself, it does not have to suffer because there is something better. Both can be valued. Why say we have to reject rap music because there is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony? So it is with the hierarchy of virtues. Some seem more important than others. Punctuality is fine even though there is another virtue called honesty. If you could only have one, which would you want?
Justice is a virtue considered basic and minimal, at the foundation of a pyramid of good qualities. It has to do with every person getting his or her just due, what is owed to each because of basic humanity. In justice we all are owed a list of things enumerated by the United Nations Bill of Rights, which Pope John XXIII borrowed for his encyclicals. We all have human rights to food, shelter, safety, employment, a decent standard of living and more. If someone campaigns for social justice, he or she wants groups in society like women or minorities or whole nations to enjoy all to which individuals are entitled. That is a simple transfer from the one to the many.
Charity, however, is a whole different virtue from justice. It can claim to occupy the top of the pyramid of virtues. Medievalists called it the queen of virtues. It does not deal with courtroom claims of law and justice. It freely gives because of the very dignity of every person. Another word for it is love. Real love values the other without fixing a condition that the love be returned. Parents do it all the time.
Justice and charity should not war, but I contend they do. And usually justice loses. We know that a billion people subsist on a dollar a day. We are staggered by Third World poverty, especially when we find it here in the United States where for some, hunger is a way of living – or non-living. We feel so helpless in the face of U.N. statistics about places like sub-Sahara Africa, or fellow humans like the “untouchables” of India. And that helplessness hits home when we are barraged at times like Christmas by appeals more than we can support. With good reason we suspect that they sell each other their mailing lists.
So, in the war, we anoint charity the winner, feeling that there is no way we can do justice to so many. We contribute admirably, proud that we Americans are called charitable even by people who dislike us. We feel good when we help the many valid appeals to our charity, and we should. We have done something very good by contributing, and the poor are grateful.
But what if I said that poverty is an unnatural state which, if eliminated, would remove the need for charity? An impossible pipe dream, you say, the kind Marxists used to use. Take the example of the upstate Pennsylvania mining town whose mining company controlled the economy and the politics of the town. It ran the company store, setting the price of groceries and clothes. It had the town council outlaw miner labor unions needed to boost unfair pay and to secure safety standards. But every Thanksgiving the company boss authorized great baskets of food, from turkeys to cranberries to pies. He too felt good at this expensive act of charity. But the miners and their families were hungry the rest of the year as coal profits rolled in to the company.
The world should never be without charity. Once we lose that, we lose every claim to be even minimal Christians, followers of the man who gave his life out of love even for the political and religious figures at the foot of his cross who mocked him. I am all in favor of charity. But what if cynics use our charity to “justify” denying justice to downtrodden poor, saying that the churches and other agencies will take care of getting the mining community through the rest of the year? What if governments, counting on the predictable charity of many, write it into their budgets to slash anti-poverty programs like Social Security and affordable health care, saying that charitable Christians will enable them to keep the taxes of the rich low?
Charity should be the icing, justice the cake. No cake, no icing. Meanwhile, since it is a safety and justice issue, let us repeal the Second Amendment.