So, I’m going through my mail, and as usual about 50% of it comes from various organizations writing to beg support for this or that good cause. With Thanksgiving and Christmas around the corner, these mailings are soon to double. Given the processes that these organizations go through in collecting names, your stack of junk mail does tend to be somewhat individualized, so maybe other people get different stuff, but mine generally falls into the following categories:

1. Organizations that help people overseas who are very poor or devastated by natural disasters.
2. Religious orders and other Catholic organizations that advertise themselves as defenders of the faith.
3. Academic organizations that claim to support scholarship in some way (including requests from my alma mater), or to fight for intellectual freedom. (A few months ago I was sent a special, personalized invitation to join the ACLU, ha ha.)
4. Organizations that fight the good fight for conservatism in a world swamped with evil liberals.

As a graduate student, it’s pretty much a given that I’m not going to make any organization’s list of top donors. But I do try to give my “widow’s mite” if you will by making small donations here and there. So the question becomes: to whom should we give? I’ve hashed this one out with my students in political philosophy courses, but here I’d like to consider it from a more overtly Catholic perspective.

So, to begin with, a Catholic is obliged to give some of his income to his parish, and this is always the best place to start. You can’t start writing large checks to Save the Children if you aren’t already making substantial donations to your home parish. I can see a possible argument that, unless you are a person of very substantial means, you ought to put all your donations towards the parish. Sort of a “think globally, give locally” philosophy.

If everybody did that, though, then a lot of other charitable causes would suffer, and that would be a shame. I tend to think of giving to my parish as somewhat on par with paying my rent or my bills – it’s important, but it doesn’t really count as almsgiving. I probably ought to give more (for example, perhaps I ought to tithe, which I don’t) but it still seems to me that even the relatively poor might still have the privilege of selecting other charities to which they may donate a few dollars.

Among those charities remaining, one strategy is to give to those who are most desperately needy. This will probably turn you towards internationally-focused organizations like Catholic Relief Services. I’ll put my cards on the table and admit that the bulk of my meager donations do go to those kinds of organizations. I am really concerned about the needs of the global poor, and I always tend to feel that I can make more of an impact overseas, where I know from experience that even very small amounts of money can mean a lot. I like giving to organizations like CRS because it seems most obviously to be helping the poor, and it doesn’t seem too overtly political. And Our Lord does seem to have commanded us to do this when he told his parable of the sheep and goats. “For you saw me hungry,” he tells the sheep, “and you gave me meat. You saw me thirsty and gave me drink.” I guess we all know how it ends. Taking his words literally, internationally-focused organizations are attractive, because the developing world has a lot more hungry, thirsty or homeless people than we have in the United States.

However, there is also a strong case to be made for supporting more directly Catholic organizations, like, for example, religious orders. I often get requests for money from orders of priests or nuns advertising that they have a “vocation problem” – so many vocations that they can’t feed and house them all. Obviously, there is a keen need for more religious in the world today, and particularly if they are contemplatives, they will have to depend on the generosity of others. Surely that is a worthy cause? Or consider, as another example, the five Catholic families who sponsored Mother Angelica’s Shrine of the Blessed Sacrament. I am persuaded that this wonderful place is going to grow steadily in popularity as a pilgrimage destination; anyone who hasn’t been there yet should definitely plan to go. It’s absolutely beautiful, a magnificent temple for Our Lord – and the building of it clearly took millions. That money could have gone a long way in a microcredit program or a disaster relief effort… but somehow I can’t feel that the families who (anonymously) put up the money made a mistake. In our times we’ve almost lost a sense of the importance of building beautiful things for God, and we need more places like this.

There might also be something to be said for trying to give to organizations that have benefited you or others close to you, or that might benefit your own community. We might reasonably feel obligations of loyalty to those with whom we have some kind of connection, which might mean literal neighbors, compatriots, fellow Catholics, members of one’s own ethnic group, and so forth. This might inspire us to give money, not to CRS, who will spirit your money away to help people you’ll never see or know, but rather to a local food bank or safehouse or crisis pregnancy center (and here, in addition to our money, we might also be able to give our time.) It might inspire us to take money out of our pocket and give it to a beggar or a Salvation Army bell-ringer. We might feel obligated, too, towards organizations that helped us out in some way. This is why schools and high school/university clubs always rely on their own alums as a steady source of support. The Royal Banner (the student newspaper of Fairview High School in Boulder, CO) may not be the neediest organization on Earth, but I have many happy memories of my time working for that little publication a decade or so ago, so I might reasonably feel a debt of gratitude towards them which would inspire me to give. This doesn’t seem like a bad thing. After all, human community is very important and necessary to life, and building communities involves forming particular loyalties. Sometimes it might be good to show our support through financial donations.

Finally, we might feel some draw to give to those who most obviously fight the ideological battles that we identify as worthy. This might mean giving to the Thomas More Society, or to pro-life organizations around the country. Or we might give to printing presses like TAN that publish books that we want to keep in print. We might even, if we really like a particular candidate, give money to support a campaign or to a lobbyist group to push a particular issue. Given the amount of confusion and doubt in the world, “idea-pushing” donations don’t seem like a waste, and they can give you the satisfying of having expressed your views through your pocketbook.

I’ve already said that I give most of my extra donations to international aid organizations; I also make occasional donations to particular Catholic groups (i.e. religious orders.) No matter how many trees are killed in urging me, I never give money to 1) my alma mater, 2) any political campaign, 3) the Phi Beta Kappa Society, 4) other “cause-based” organizations like the Thomas More Society or Ave Maria University. With the money I earn, I’m not going to be able to transform the world through material giving in any case, but at someplace like Ave Maria my check might cover, say, one morning’s sprinkler bill. That just doesn’t give me a winning feeling.

The bottom line is that there are so many worthy causes that, no matter how much or little you can afford to give, it can be tough and even agonizing deciding who is most worthy. What should be the most important determining factor? Dire need? Closeness to God? Closeness of connection to ourselves? Closeness to Truth? Or is there some way to strike a nice balance between these? I open this subject up to our readers. To whom do you give financial donations? How do you choose? What is the most Christian way to “give alms?”
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