Charity and Social Welfare

When this reviewer was working with homeless people in Dublin in the 1980s, one rough-sleeper grumbled bitterly about a religious organisation with Our Lady’s name in its title, which she felt had turned her away unfairly: ‘That’s no f****** Mary’. A century earlier, a recipient of poor relief in Rotterdam complained about having to stand in the church on Christmas Day, while the rich occupied the pews. H.D. and Marco van Leeuwen tell this story in this book as an example of the limitations of religious charity, but another way of understanding it is that the Dutch woman—and that homeless person—believed utterly in their own worth in the sight of God (and for Catholics, His mother), and their right to complain about organisations acting in His name. The contributions to this excellent volume, edited by Leen Van Molle, all argue convincingly that no poor relief provisions of any provenance in any northern European country in the ‘long nineteenth century’ operated independently of religion. Even in Britain and Ireland, where there was a universal state-run workhouse-based Poor Law from the 1830s (discussed here by Frances Knight and Dáire Keogh respectively), central government supported a wide range of supplementary institutions often run by Catholic and Protestant religious groups, for orphans, young offenders, the disabled, inebriates, ex-prisoners and many others

Government (linguistics · Knight · Political science · Poor relief · Poorhouse · Poverty · Protestantism · Sociology · History · Law · Philosophy · Religion, Society, and Development · Religious studies · Religious Studies