The first kind of aid that the Church will offer the working class from now on is the establishment and management of institutions for disabled workers.
We have already observed that the great liberal party – after initially treating Christian alms with great resentment in order to give prominence to its own highly praised [social philosophy of] self-help – is now starting (after all) to include the establishment of institutions for disabled workers in the scope of its activities. But even in the future, just as before, this will remain the special domain of Christianity, the Church, and Christian charity. Almost all the funds, houses, and institutions that currently serve this end in Christian Europe owe their existence to Christianity and its spirit. Whatever humanism has accomplished in comparison is insignificant. Even now, the entire portion of the working class that has become occupationally disabled and dependent upon outside help still owes a debt of gratitude to Christianity, whose blessings it often no longer recognizes, for all the help it receives in the numerous places of refuge for the poor, in the hospitals, in the poorhouses, in the institutions for the disabled, etc. But it is not just the funds for these kinds of institutions that the Christian spirit has raised; rather, it is also their inner organization, the care that the disabled worker finds there, that Christianity alone can offer in a manner that alleviates the misery of the poor to the greatest possible extent. The helpless worker, as previously remarked, has not found true help when he is accepted by an institution; instead, what really matters is that he also gets proper care, loving treatment. I do now believe, to be sure, that humanism will succeed for a while – here and there under especially favorable circumstances, namely under the influence of outstanding individual personalities, and for as long as they live – in bringing similar institutions to a certain level of inner organization. Competition with Christian institutions will even force humanism to do its utmost and [will] compel it to create a few model institutions that might have greater luster and therefore harbor the illusion of holding their own alongside the former. By and large, though, none of the parties who are now trying to help the world without the supernatural forces and gifts that God has inscribed into Christianity will ever succeed in offering workers who have become unemployed and been accepted at one of the numerous places of refuge the same kind of treatment and care that Christianity is capable of providing. The inner organization and direction of hospitals and poorhouses is something
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