Planning for the second hundred years of Catholic Charities

By Dr. Joseph Doolin

The Pilot, Archdiocese of Boston, May 26, 2000, at 9

Thirty months hence, Catholic Charities, the Archdiocese of Boston’s primary social service expression of God’s love for all, will celebrate the centennial of its founding.

The trustees, volunteers, and staff have been hard at work on a new Strategic Plan to position Catholic Charities to be even more effective in its second hundred years.

The religious, social, demographic, economic, and public policy changes of the century just eclipsed that have shaped social work and related professions have affected Church sponsored social service organizations equally.

Societal changes, such as the widespread problem of child abandonment, that prompted the creation of Catholic Charities at the dawn of the 20th century, the waves of immigration from non-English-speaking countries beginning soon thereafter, the Great Depression, and World War II and its aftermath, all prompted programmatic and organizational responses from Catholic Charities and other social service entities.

Change did not stop there.  Starting out as a young social worker in the 1960s, I experienced a vastly different organizational and client landscape than exists today.   At that time, the group most likely to suffer from poverty were the elderly, more than one-in-four of whom lived well below accepted standards of sufficiency.  Among families, single-parent households were a rarity; a dysfunctional family was one who, when the neighborhood aide made a home visit, was found to have more beer than food in the refrigerator.

Today children are the most economically deprived, with a quarter living beneath the poverty line, while only about one- in-ten older adults is poor.  These days, single parenthood is so common that in some school districts, children with both biological parents living with them are a rarity.  Drugs, precocious sexual activity, and preoccupation with consumerism at the expense of education and spiritual fulfillment, are common family problems today.

Today, when social agencies do make house visits, should they have the temerity to open refrigerator doors, any food found with whatever else, would be an indication of family stability.

In 1970, less than nine percent of Massachusetts’ population was foreign born.   Today it is 30 percent, or more than three times the 1970 level.  Then, most immigrants came from Europe or Canada.  Now, they come from all over the world. The immigrant stream shifted and more than half now come from non-European countries, especially China, Vietnam, India, and Cambodia.  Of late, more individuals from Puerto Rico, Brazil, El Salvador, and Russians are moving to Massachusetts.

Affordable housing available to poor families has declined considerably since the mid-‘60s.  The Columbia Points and Orchard Parks, troubled as they were, did provide housing for thousands of families with no other options.  As government recedes from the business of housing the poor, and as gentrification sweeps through the neighborhoods of just about every city in Eastern Massachusetts, increasingly poor families are the losers.

In these days of pervasive public-sector involvement in funding voluntary agencies, perhaps the greatest challenge in the area of contracting, is to preserve the unique community mandate of the private, non-profit social welfare agency.  Particularly Church agencies. Not only must we protect our ability to serve as an instrument of Church, but we must also protect the historic social work function of responding to basic human needs in a compassionate, neighborly, and case-by-case flexible way.

Creativity is greatly prized in social work; far less so in service delivery.

Service delivery is the provision of highly regulated and process-bound state services.   Service delivery is very important from a common-good perspective.  Social services are needed.  That the state now pays for so much is a barometer of increasing public support for professional social services.  But while it may entail social work skills and expertise, service delivery is different from social work.

Social workers delivering only contracted services, do not live up to their potential, nor do their agencies live up to their mandates unless they can balance the needs of the community, which gives them their mandate, and the needs of government which gives them money.

Child poverty, the fragile state of the family, newcomers in our midst who come with different languages and cultural matrices, the housing crisis, the challenge of the symbiotic relationship of public funding and voluntary agency — and dealing with dignity, integrity, and justice as a Church agency in that regard — are the primary issues facing Catholic Charities today.  How we handle them today will determine the course of our second hundred years.

Programmatic, governance, Catholic identity, and funding issues are all being re-visited as a plan is crafted to point Catholic Charities toward its second hundred years.

Your insights are important to us.  If you have ideas about how we can improve our service to God through his people, please let us know. And, please pray for the success of this important work.

Dr. Doolin is president of Catholic Charities and Cabinet Secretary for Social Services, Archdiocese of Boston, 75 Kneeland Street, Boston, MA, 02111. Tel. (617) 451-7955. E-mail jdoolin@ccab.org.