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reared the orphans, cared for the sick, and were havens of refuge
for all who were weighed down by spiritual or corporal misery.
For centuries they were the centers of all religious, charitable,
41
and cultural activity. Monasteries distributed alms daily to
those in need. W. E. H. Lecky wrote of monastic charity: As time
rolled on, charity assumed many forms, and every monastery
became a center from which it radiated. By the monks the nobles
were overawed, the poor protected, the sick tended, travelers
sheltered, prisoners ransomed, the remotest spheres of suffering
explored. During the darkest period of the Middle Ages, the
monks found a refuge for pilgrims amid the horrors of the Alpine
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snows. The Benedictines, Cistercians, and Premonstratensians,
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HOW CATHOLIC CHARITY CHANGED THE WORLD 185
as well as the mendicant orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans
later on, distinguished themselves in their attention to charitable
work.
Poor travelers could rely on monastic hospitality, and the
records indicate that even well-to-do travelers were often made
welcome as well, in conformity with Saint Benedict s instruction
in his Rule that the visitor was to be received as the monks would
receive Christ. But the monks did not merely wait for the poor to
come their way in the course of their travels. They sought out the
poor who lived in the surrounding area. Lanfranc, for example,
gave the almoner (the distributor of alms) the responsibility of
discovering the sick and the poor near the monastery and provid-
ing them with monastic alms. In some cases, we read of the poor
being given lodging, at times even indefinitely, in the monastic
43
almonry.
In addition to more institutionalized giving, the monks also
provided food for the poor from their own leftovers. Gilbert of
Sempringham, whose own leftovers were rather substantial,
placed them on a plate he called Lord Jesus dish, in clear view
of his fellow monks and with the obvious intent of urging them to
emulate his generosity. It was also traditional for food and drink
to be set out in commemoration of deceased monks, and distrib-
uted to the poor at the conclusion of the meal. This practice
would be observed for as few as thirty days or as much as a full
year following a monk s death and in the case of an abbot, some-
44
times even in perpetuity.
Just as the sixteenth-century attack on the monasteries by the
Crown debilitated the network of charity that those institutions
had supported, the French Revolution s eighteenth-century
attack on the Church likewise struck at the source of so much
good work. In November 1789, the revolutionary French govern-
ment nationalized (that is, confiscated) Church property. The
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186 How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
archbishop of Aix en Provence warned that such an act of theft
threatened educational and welfare provisions for the French
people. He was right, of course. In 1847, France had 47 percent
fewer hospitals than in the year of the confiscation, and in 1799
the 50,000 students enrolled in universities ten years earlier had
45
dwindled to a mere 12,000.
Although you d never know it from reading the standard
Western civilization text, the Catholic Church revolutionized the
practice of charitable giving, in both its spirit and its application.
The results speak for themselves: previously unheard-of amounts
of charitable giving and systematic, institutionalized care of wid-
ows, orphans, the poor, and the sick.
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Chapter Ten
The Church and
Western Law
n most Western countries, if a person is convicted of murder
and sentenced to death, but goes insane between the moment
Iof sentencing and the moment of execution, he is kept alive
until he regains his sanity and only then is he executed. The rea-
son for this unusual proviso is entirely theological: Only if the
man is sane can he make a good confession, receive forgiveness for
his sins, and hope to save his soul. Cases like this have led legal
scholar Harold Berman to observe that modern Western legal
systems are a secular residue of religious attitudes and assump-
tions which historically found expression first in the liturgy and
rituals and doctrine of the church and thereafter in the institu-
tions and concepts and values of the law. When these historical
roots are not understood, many parts of the law appear to lack
1
any underlying source of validity.
Professor Berman s scholarly work, particularly his magisterial
Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradi-
tion, has documented the influence of the Church on the devel-
opment of Western law. Western concepts of law, he argues, are
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188 How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
in their origins, and therefore in their nature, intimately bound
up with distinctively Western theological and liturgical concepts
2
of the atonement and of the sacraments.
Our story begins in the early centuries of the Church. The first
millennium, following the emperor Constantine s Edict of Milan
(which extended toleration to Christianity in 313), saw a fre-
quent conflation of the roles of Church and state, often to the
detriment of the former. To be sure, Saint Ambrose, the great
fourth-century bishop of Milan, once proclaimed, Palaces belong
to the emperor, churches to the priesthood, and Pope Gelasius
famously formulated what became known as the two swords
doctrine, according to which the world was ordered by two pow-
ers, one temporal and the other secular. In practice, though, this
line was often blurred, and secular authority came to exercise
more and more authority over sacred matters.
In 325, Constantine was already issuing a call for what became
the Council of Nicaea, the first ecumenical council in Church his-
tory, to deal with the divisive issue of Arianism, a heresy that
denied the divinity of Christ. Succeeding centuries saw far more
involvement in Church affairs by secular rulers. The kings (and
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