SOCIAL ASSISTANCE. - It is difficult to find a satisfactory definition of s.a. or social service.
The definition is either too broad and ends up embracing all social, educational, recreational, trade-union and health work, or it becomes so limited as not to include even the organization of alms. Perhaps it is better, rather than persisting in the search for an a priori definition, to follow s.a. in its historical and concrete evolution. In this way it will be possible to identify certain aspects that characterize and specify these activities and their differentiation from similar and complementary forms of social activity. In the evolution of s.a. three periods can be distinguished: the first period comprises Christian antiquity and the Middle Ages; the second, shorter, runs from the 16th to the 19th century; the third is the contemporary one.
2nd period. - The first Christian communities immediately concerned themselves with meeting the needs of their members, the occasional victims of the struggle for life. This activity is that of the neighbor who helps his own neighbor; it is a direct and personal activity. Very soon, however, a certain organization can be seen taking shape. Assistance is also given at a distance and through an intermediary; as is the case with the collections organized by St. Paul among the wealthier churches in favor of the poor of Jerusalem. Even the personnel charged with the management of ecclesiastical goods and the distribution of alms becomes, in some way, specialized (deacon or rector), and is called "dispensator in rebus pauperum."
The gifts that serve the poor are due to donations, bequests, but also to a certain legal imposition. The Christian genius discovers with the passage of time that, in most occasional necessities, there exist certain groups with constant needs that find no suitable social organs. Thus arise the hostels for pilgrims (xenodochia), the hospices for the poor and the sick and orphans (ptochia); the works for prisoners (for these works the councils even authorize the sale of sacred vessels). Later there would be the Monti di pietà, the lazarettos, the free schools, etc.
Moreover, the medieval guilds and confraternities organize assistance for their sick members and the widows and orphans of their own members. It has even been hypothesized that the great cathedrals that arose here and there at that time were not only built in a spirit of worship, but in the desire to find work for the growing number of the unemployed, which would correspond, in a certain sense, to modern public works. What characterizes this long period is that s.a. develops on the margins of a stable and fundamentally healthy agricultural and rural economy. Normal social organisms provide more or less satisfactorily for the needs of men. Society has its victims, but they seem rather occasional victims than victims of the system. Where social life causes more serious harm, it is still thought that the evil is only "moral" and that a simple progress of moral conscience will eliminate all the drawbacks. S.a. is therefore strongly marked by a moralistic character. It is enough to awaken in all members of society the spirit of love and justice for the social machine to function satisfactorily. But one must not force these statements too far: in the face, for example, of the spread of usury, despite the canons of the councils, theologians and moralists analyze the economic structures of the enterprise, and the Franciscans institute the first Monti di pietà.
If at the beginning of the Christian era there was some abuse among the poor, the control exercised was usually enough to distinguish the idler from the true poor; but with the passage of time, with travel made easier from place to place, troops of beggars are seen wandering from hospice to hospice and the need is felt to legislate to discourage false poor. An English ordinance of 1348 says: "Since voluntary beggars refuse to work, being able to live on alms, abandoning themselves to idleness, vice, theft and other abominations, no one shall give them help by reason of alms." In England and elsewhere, workhouses are founded which, however, smack more of forced labor than of hospices for the poor. At the end of this first period, therefore, the awareness makes headway that s.a. can become counterproductive; that alms can contribute to making the poor immoral: this discovery is decisive for the evolution of s.a.
2nd period. — Great economic and social changes are maturing. St. Thomas More in his Utopia notes: "In one way or another they must abandon their village, poor wretches: men, women, children, orphans, widows with their little belongings in a bundle, they go off leaving their hovel to go no one knows where. They wander without a goal: what can they do but steal or beg? They are thrown into prison because they do not work: and yet they would work so willingly; but in no way is there work for them." This problem worsens with the industrial revolution. The old institutions, such as the guilds, can no longer organize work and production satisfactorily. The industrial machine becomes like a monster that crushes men, women and children. It keeps them, when they work, in misery and throws them onto the street at every crisis. It begins to be seen that unemployment and misery are no longer phenomena against which a "moralizing" attitude is enough; the inevitable incidences of economic evolution on individuals and on determined classes of workers are discovered.
S.a. thus enters its second phase, in which the accent is placed above all on the legislative reforms necessary to prevent man from being suffocated by society in his struggle for life. In all countries, with more or less good grace (rather less than more) social laws are promulgated to protect the working woman, minors, the minimum wage. To remedy cyclical crises and to regulate the health organization of industry, insurance is organized against unemployment, workplace accidents, etc. It is no longer the individual poor man, it is society that interests s.a. It is discovered that society can become an organism in which the circulation of goods becomes defective, that certain categories are no longer admitted to benefit from them, or participate in them to a very reduced degree. Society produces within its own bosom the "pariahs." The proletariat is within it, but not in communion with it. S.a. seeks to identify the defects of the system that produce these wretches, no longer as an occasional product, but almost as a constant by-product; it seeks, sustained by other forces, to influence and rectify existing structures or to found new social structures. But while the new s.a. concerns itself with the objective factor, the old one survives: effective when it came to the aid of the occasional victim, it is no more than a caricature of itself when it turns to the victims of the system.
3rd period. — It is necessary to wait for the discoveries of contemporary psychology, pedagogy and psychiatry for s.a. to enter its third phase of development. A deeper knowledge of man, of the influences exercised by his environment, by the large and small collectivities in which he is inserted, makes it possible to understand that man can receive mental distortions, become a "pariah" in the civilization in which he lives, even when in certain respects his economic life is satisfactory.
In reaction against the overly simple "moralism" of the past, another simplism had been fallen into during the 2nd period, believing that economic and legislative reforms were the only necessary ones. It is discovered anew that social assistance cannot be limited to problems of employment or wages; it must bear in mind that there exist certain moral and psychological factors which must be taken into account. One sees, for example, the harm done to a man's psychology by living as if lost in an organism too vast, where he cannot exercise his responsibilities. It is likewise understood that public housing cannot be mere cheap dormitories; that a way must be found to create living communities in the great cities, etc.
The same problem exists in large-scale industry: it is not enough to give the worker security and work; man must once again be given the possibility of a conscious and responsible insertion into the productive process. In this period social assistance resumes, from this point of view, the study of all welfare bodies and laws. It is seen that even smaller and more natural communities, such as the family, can produce a kind of "pariah" or "proletarian," that is, a member not inserted into the social organism. Thus there arise welfare works that are no longer strictly organized for material assistance, such as pedagogical and moral clinics, etc. Having reached this point in its development, social assistance has become conscious of its reason for being and of its method of work. Its purpose is to reintegrate the "economic pariah" or the "cultural pariah" into the social group to which he belongs. Its method is the psychological, economic or administrative analysis that makes it possible to identify those individual and collective defects which induce man and society to break away from one another. In the light of these considerations one sees how-
Love does not impede justice and does not seek to replace it: «No one — says Pius XI — can give out of charity what is owed out of justice» (encycl. Divini Redemptoris). Justice does not eliminate love: St. Augustine writes: «We should not desire that there be unfortunate people in order to allow us to perform works of mercy. But with the suppression of works of mercy, would the fire of love be extinguished? More authentic is a love that you give for a happy being whom you cannot help in any way; purer this love and far more genuine. For when you help a poor man, you desire to raise yourself before him and that he be below you. Desire that he be your equal». Likewise there is no conflict between state and private social assistance: both are necessary: certain problems can be solved only on a national scale, others are solved more effectively by small groups. Finally, there is no conflict between religious and secular social assistance, if by secular one does not mean a vision of the world that prescinds from human rights and dignity.
If one prescinded from these ethico-religious values, social assistance would become simply the «long arm» of production and public order. Social assistance cannot be carried out prescinding from a humanistic and Christian concept; it can, without doubt, be exercised by those who, not fully possessing such a concept, do not know how to explicitly justify the dignity of man in a broader metaphysico-religious vision of the universe. But there is no conflict between implicit and explicit and no one can deny that an explicit awareness gives more strength and bite to action.
Social assistance is the competence of the Church because it invests man and is essentially educational; it is the competence of the State since, as Toynbee notes, no community can survive when it produces within its own bosom «proletarians of its own civilization». When a community includes groups of men who do not largely attain the material goods and culture available in it, it runs the risk of disintegrating, and St. Thomas Aquinas notes that it falls among the responsibilities of a good government to provide for a good distribution and circulation of these goods. And social assistance, as we have seen, consists precisely in ensuring this circulation of goods. It works, then, to find the techniques and practical achievements that provide prompt relief when this is necessary and to insert into the fabric of social and economic life organizations that promote social justice and help the dispossessed to receive their just share of goods, of culture, of beauty.
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