THE BENEFITS OF CHARITY

Andrés Motto, CM

I believe that a very effective way to celebrate the feast of St. Vincent de Paul is to reflect on his thinking. Charity dwells in the heart of St. Vincent. As a good teacher, he encourages us to practice charity. So, in this article, I want to show you how beneficial it is to practice charity. Let’s get started:

The effectiveness of charity is so powerful that “a grain of charity is enough to calm many concerns and smooth out numerous disagreements.” In this life, charity allows us to persevere in all good works. It also helps us to persevere in community life, since one way to continue in our vocation is to “live together with great charity and cordiality.” In this way, St. Vincent suggests charity as the primary means of persevering in one’s vocation. In other words, our vocation takes root when we do everything out of charity. We can say that every Christian vocation must be lived out of charity. 

Morality seeks to make people happy. This is the most universal quest, since everyone wants to be happy. This is achieved by living the virtue of charity to the full. Love must begin to be lived with those around us, in order to expand it more and more. This experience is fulfilled in heaven; moreover, we can say that charity gives us a foretaste of the joy of heaven:

“Charity is… heaven for communities. The house of Saint Lazarus will be heaven if there is charity; heaven is nothing more than love, unity, and charity; the main happiness of eternal life consists in loving; in heaven, the blessed are continually devoted to beatific love; finally, there is nothing more desirable than living with those one loves and feels loved by.”

Regarding the benefits of charity, the words of Saint Vincent are striking: “Charity turns necessity into virtue.” With this phrase, he points out that when Christians accept God’s will out of love in afflictive and painful situations, they are turning a simply deprived situation into an experience of God. Love makes pain fruitful. Charity allows a merely painful situation to become an opportunity for virtuous practice and, consequently, for merit. Vincentian ethics postulates action. But not just any action, rather that which transforms the world for the better: charity. It gives pastoral fruitfulness; it is the virtue necessary for the apostolic spirit. People listen with their intelligence, but also with their hearts, and to those who are kind to them. Therefore, the way to be kind is to be charitable and humble. For these reasons, he advises that when preaching, “great circumspection is needed so as not to hurt anyone, and great charity and humility with the audience so as to leave them edified.” 

Another advantage of charity is that even a small amount of it can mobilize people more than a large amount of harshness and hardness. On the contrary, “bitterness only serves to make things more bitter.”  Furthermore, charity is a virtue that, when practiced, leads the person to be enriched by the exercise of other virtues. Especially those who practice charity with the poor will grow in the practice of other Christian virtues. Ultimately, the greatest benefit of practicing charity is to live in friendship with God and men, since the reward of charity is charity itself. 

My dear friends, I hope that this brief Vincentian reading will make us more charitable and normal. Since charity can do anything…