Church Agency Folk Meet
Diocesan Press Service. June 5, 1963 [XI-7]
NEW YORK, -- Charity is a mockery without justice, an Episcopal editor told a Church-related social agency conference recently.
"Doing acts of mercy and almsgiving to ease the lot of those who have been deprived of what is rightfully theirs is almost worse than leaving them to rot in their misery. It adds insult to injury," Peter Day, editor of The Living Church, said.
He was a key speaker at an Episcopal Church child care and youth agency conference in April in Philadelphia that involved executives and staff members of church-related social welfare agencies. Included in the conference, which was sponsored by National Council's Division of Health and Welfare Services, were 130 diocesan representatives with specific Christian social relations concerns.
In discussing the relationship between charity and justice, Mr. Day said, "If the God proclaimed by the well-to-do has nothing but patient endurance to offer the dispossessed, then the news of that God is not Gospel--not good news--but bad news."
He added that "only the dispossessed can speak to the dispossessed, only the poor to the poor, only the powerless to the powerless."
Another key speaker at the conference was John V. P. Lassoe, Jr., executive secretary of the National Council's Division of Church-Community Studies.
Mr. Lassoe analyzed the changes in society and discussed its impact on families, minority groups and resulting alienation of the individual which has led to a decline of voluntary associations.
The participants also heard Dr. C. Wilson Anderson, commissioner of the Office for Children and Youth of the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare.
Another featured speaker was the Rev. Dr. Daisuke Kitagawa who said that the task of social agencies is to perpetrate the ministry of reconciliation. Dr. Kitagawa is executive secretary of Council's Division of Domestic Missions.