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From the earliest Christian centuries men and women recognized by the Church as saints have performed significant social
action. However, few of them would have recognized or used the term, which was only popularized in the twentieth century.
For example, no entries for “social action” or “social justice” appeared in the 1908 edition of The
Catholic Encyclopedia (see HYPERLINK "http://www.newadvent.org" www.newadvent.org).
The term that saints used to describe their care for others was “charity,” the virtue infused into all Christians
at Baptism. They based their conduct on obedience to God’s law governing relationships to others, the divine command
to “love your neighbor as yourself” found in Leviticus 19:18 and proclaimed by Christ in Matthew 22:39. Following
the teaching of the Old Testament (see Deuteronomy 14:28–29; 24:19-21) and Jesus’ example in the gospels, they
especially served the poor and the marginalized.
From St. Peter’s healing of the lame man at the Temple gate (Acts 3:6) to Mother Teresa’s rescuing babies from
the streets of Bombay, the social action of most saints has consisted in personal service to people in need. Wealthy saints
such as Anthony of Egypt (251–356) and Bl. Pier-Giorgio Frassati (1900–1925) sold all their possessions and distributed
money to the poor. After St. Anthony withdrew far into the desert, he continued his personal service to the people who sought
him. Offered an automobile by his father, Pier-Giorgio took cash instead and used it to support his giving to the poor and
the sick of Turin, Italy. Even cloistered nuns such as St. Theresa Margaret of the Sacred Heart (1747–1770) and St.
Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897), although seriously ill themselves, served the neediest sisters in their convents, caring
for the elderly and disabled and ministering to the sick.
Some saints such as Jesuit St. Peter Claver (1580–1654) performed personal social action that can only be described
as prodigious. Over forty years he and a few associates fed, clothed, and nursed about 300,000 slaves at Cartagena, Colombia,
the slave trade’s port of entry in the New World. “We must speak to them with our hands,” he said, “before
we try to speak to them with our lips.” Bl. Frederic Ozanam (1813–1853), the founder of the St. Vincent de Paul
Society, institutionalized hands-on charity by requiring his followers to serve the poor in person. He wrote: “Help
honors when, to the bread that nourishes, it adds the visit that consoles, advice that enlightens, the friendly handshake
that lifts up flagging courage.”
Ozanam’s organization developed from his own personal ministry to the poor. Similarly, other saints established institutions
that grew from their social action. St. Fabiola (d. 399), a rich Roman widow, made history by using her wealth to found the
first public hospital on record in the Western world. She carried sick people from the streets to the hospital, dressed the
wounds of the injured, fed patients, and assisted the dying. From his lifelong individualized service to the sick, St. Camillus
de Lellis (1550–1614) founded an order of male nurses that established and staffed eight hospitals in Italy. In 1595
and 1601 members of his community attended the wounded on battlefields in Hungary and Croatia, becoming the first recorded
examples of military ambulance units. St. Louise de Marillac (1591–1660), under the direction of St. Vincent de Paul
(1581-1660), organized a group of committed women to serve the poor at Paris. “Your convent,” Vincent told Louise,
“will be the house of the sick, your cell a rented room, your chapel the parish church, your cloister the city streets
or the hospital wards.” Her community that began with four women in 1633 quickly evolved into the Sisters of Charity.
Contrary to a mistaken popular notion that contemplatives withdraw into isolation, many mystics were also social activists.
Evidently their drawing nearer to God allowed him to share with them his love for the poor. St. Elizabeth of Hungary (1207–1231),
a duchess and a mystic, had her husband construct a hospital near their castle in Thuringia. Twice daily she personally went
there to minister to the sick. She arranged for food to be distributed daily to the poor of the duchy and, anticipating modern
social policy, she gave those she served an opportunity to work in exchange for aid. St. Catherine of Genoa (1447–1510),
a gifted visionary, tended the sick at the large hospital of Pammatone from 1473 to 1496, and for 11 of those years served
as its administrator. Dominican brother St. Martin de Porres (1579–1639), a contemplative from his youth, turned the
monastery of the Holy Rosary at Lima, Peru, into a rough prototype of a modern social services center. Hundreds of the city’s
poor came daily to him for healing, medicines, food, and money. With the support of dedicated lay people, he funded, designed,
built, and staffed an orphanage and school for street children. St. Pio of Pietrelcina (Padre Pio; 1887–1968), a stigmatist
and miracle worker, opened a hospital for the sick poor in the impoverished town of San Giovanni Rotando in the nearly inaccessible
Gargano Mountains of Southern Italy. With its top-shelf medical staff and equipment, it has developed into thriving medical
center.
Many saints devoted themselves to the education of poor and marginalized youth. For example, St. Marguerite Bourgeoys (1620–1700)
founded the Congregation of Notre Dame, the first missionary order of women. In 1658 she opened her first school for Iroquois
children in Quebec and not long after her death her community had accomplished her educational mission by establishing two
hundred schools. St. Mary McKillop (1842–1909), Australia’s first native-born saint, founded the Josephites to
serve the poor from all religious backgrounds with schools, orphanages, refuges, and hostels. For nearly half a century St.
John Bosco (1815–1888) catechized and cared for homeless youths in Turin, Italy. He built them residences, workshops,
schools, and churches. Other priests joined him and many of his youths also became priests. The saint organized them into
the Salesians, a religious order which at the beginning of the twenty-first century had about 2,000 communities in 113 countries.
St. Katharine Drexel, the first American saint born in the United States, spent herself and her money for the poorest of the
poor. An heiress to the vast Drexel fortune and founder of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, she established 145 Catholic
missions and twelve schools for Native Americans and fifty schools for African Americans During her lifetime she gave about
twenty million dollars to these causes.
Some saints performed innovative social action that anticipated modern concerns. St. Angela Merici 1470?–1540) built
groups of single women of all social classes in Brescia and other northern Italian cities. She wanted the women to be in the
world, but not of it, so they consecrated themselves to God and promised celibacy. But they lived at home with their families
and looked for ways to serve their neighbors. In 1535, Angela organized the groups into the Company of St. Ursula, later called
the Ursulines. Unique for its time, her avant-garde association provided single women a secure position in their local society.
Bl. Anne Marie Javouhey (1779–1851), in 1812 founded the Sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny to serve children of different
races. By the 1830s she had set up missionary outposts in Africa at Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Gambia, and in South America
at French Guiana. At the French government’s request Mother Javouhey undertook some very unusual tasks. She spent four
years supervising the establishment of a colony for blacks at Mana, French Guiana. Then in 1834 she accepted a remarkable
assignment. The government asked her to prepare 600 slaves in Guiana for emancipation by training them in the ways of religion
and civil society. As families family were ready to be freed, Bl. Anne Marie provided them with money, land, and a cottage.
St. Pachomius (292?–346) and St. Roque González (1576–1628) performed social action that prefigured twentieth-
and twenty-first-century social justice undertakings. Pachomius built in the Egyptian desert nine monastic communities for
men and three for women that attracted more than three thousand disciples. He organized his monasteries into houses of thirty
or forty who worked at the same trade. The communities had gardeners, blacksmiths, bakers, carpenters, and makers of baskets,
nets, mats, and sandals. Each house had a dean that supervised the work. Pachomius’s monasteries refute the stereotypical
view that monks fled to the desert to escape civilization. Rather Pachomius provided a social context and work for the marginal
and the unemployed poor of the cities who went to the desert in search of community and God.
At a time when Spanish conquistadors were brutalizing and enslaving Indians in Paraguay, Jesuit St. Roque González helped
them become self-sufficient and free. He led the Jesuits who founded the “reductions,” the independent villages
that excluded European settlers. Roque was the innovative social activist who created the model for these avant-garde communities.
He designed the economy of the reductions to make the Indians self-supporting by combining communal agriculture with private
property holding. He also gave the reductions their own political structure that offered the natives a measure of freedom.
St. Roque González’s efforts had a significant impact. He and his associates built more than thirty reductions with
an average population of three thousand people. The saint’s creative social action drew high praise from Voltaire, the
great skeptic of the Enlightenment, who wrote: “When the Paraguayan missions left the hands of the Jesuits in 1768,
they had arrived at what is perhaps the highest degree of civilization to which it is possible to lead a young people. . .
. In those missions, law was respected, morals were pure, a happy brotherhood bound men together, the useful arts and even
some of the more graceful sciences flourished, and there was abundance everywhere.”
In his last days with the Church at Ephesus, St. John the Evangelist (first century) repeated a teaching that sums up the
saints’ motivation for their social activism. When he was too feeble to preach, he used to be carried into the assembly
where he always said the same thing: “My little children, love one another. When asked why, he said: “Because
it is the word of the Lord and if you keep it you do enough.”
Bibliography
Butler’s Lives of the Saints: New Full Edition; ed. David Hugh Farmer. Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press,
1995–2000; 12 vols.
Butler’s Lives of the Saints; ed. Herbert Thornton, S.J., and Donald Attwater. London: Burns & Oates, Ltd., 1956; 4
vols.
Ghezzi, Bert. Voices of the Saints; Loyola Press, 2009.
© Copyright 2009 by Bert Ghezzi
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