The Moral Economy of Charity: Advice and Redistribution in Italian Caritas Welfare Bureaucracy

ABSTRACT

Welfare state transformation has resulted in the expansion of private associations and the increased role of religious charities. In the context of the austerity crisis, the paper addresses how Caritas volunteers in an impoverished urban area in southern Italy deal with the bureaucratisation of resource distribution in face of increasing demands of ‘aid’. The categorisation of poverty by welfare agents and the moral evaluations that underlie volunteers’ approach to ‘the new poor’ provide insights to the explanatory frameworks they articulate in order to make sense of their compensatory role in the face of scarcer welfare state provisions. The paper highlights the linkages of formal and informal circuits in charity initiatives in order to analyse the interplay between procedural and moral definitions of poverty. It shows how volunteers adjust to the transfer of the responsibility to care from welfare state to charity and finally how they make sense of social inequality.

KEYWORDS:

• Charity
• moral economy
• class
• inequality
• voluntary work

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Deborah James, Insa Koch, Susana Narotzky, Ryan Davey and Alice Forbess, for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I also wish to thank all the colleagues of the GRECO research group for the stimulating debates on the topics developed in this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 All names are pseudonyms, including the name of the neighbourhood, Eden.

2 Regulation (EU) No. 223/2014 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 March 2014 on the Fund for European Aid to the Most Deprived (http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2014:072:0001:0041:EN:PDF). According to official figures, over €3.8 billions are earmarked for the FEAD for 2014-2020. In addition, EU countries contribute with 15% or more in co-financing their national programme. In Italy, the overall funding for 2014–2020 corresponds to around €789 millions (http://www.lavoro.gov.it/temi-e-priorita/europa-e-fondi-europei/focus-on/fondo-di-aiuti-europei-agli-indigenti%E2%80%93Fead/Pagine/default.aspx; accessed 7 March 2018).

3 The Italian Managing Authority is the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy, while AGEA is the intermediary board in charge of the gross distribution to ‘partner organizations’. In application of the EU Regulation, the Italian Managing Authority approved the ‘Operative Program on food aid and material assistance’ (Programma Operativo sugli aiuti alimentari e l’assistenza materiale – PO1), that set the overall regulatory framework for the period 2014–2020 (http://www.lavoro.gov.it/temi-e-priorita/europa-e-fondi-europei/focus-on/fondo-di-aiuti-europei-agli-indigenti%E2%80%93Fead/Documents/PROGRAMMA-OPERATIVO-FEAD.pdf; accessed 7 March 2018).

4 Austerity measures started to be implemented in Italy in 2011 in the midst of the southern European ‘sovereign debt crises’. Economic recession and austerity measures have had a territorially diversified impact in Italy, with more acute consequences for the fragile economies of southern regions. The uneven ‘dualism’ between North and South, as well as the stereotyping of southerners as ‘lazy’ and ‘backward’, against the ‘hard-working’ northerners, is pervasive in the history of the Italian state and society (Schneider 1998).

5 A detailed picture of the increasing number of requests of assistance in Caritas centres is provided by the national reports of Caritas Italiana (2016). A short English summary of the Italian case can be found in (Caritas Europa 2015: 53).

6 See Narotzky (2015) on the use of declassado in austerity Spain.

7 The public-private partnership is by no means an absolute novelty and it has been a recurring aspect – rather conflictual at times – of church-state relations in the management of social assistance. Yet the contemporary configuration of the public-private partnership unfolds in relation to wider reorganization of economic and political spheres, as shown, among others, by Read and Thelen (2007).

8 See Mittermaier (2014) for a comparative view on the ‘ethics of giving’ among Islamic volunteers in Egypt.

9 A national anti-poverty measure was introduced in 2016 (SIA – Sostegno di Inclusione Attiva) and replaced by a larger scheme in 2018 (REI – Reddito di Inclusione). Finally, a new a conditional cash transfer scheme, Reddito di Cittadinanza, passed in January 2019, has been recently implemented. However, these measures revealed to be still inadequate in the face of increasing poverty and social insecurity and far from the structural measures (e.g. a large-scale income support program) that are necessary to reduce the scale of the problem.

10 The outsourcing of charity food baking in Italy involves few official large organizations, which include – among others – the Italian Red Cross and Fondazione Banco Alimentare, which is a member of the FEBA – European Federation of Food Banks.

11 The first Caritas was founded in Germany in 1897 by the priest Lorenz Werthmann. Most of national Caritas in Europe and Latin America were created between the 1940s and 1950s. Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, played an important role in laying the foundation of Caritas Internacionalis, an international network of national organizations. Caritas Internacionalis, officially established in 1954, is nowadays a confederation of 160 organizations across the world (https://www.caritas.org/; accessed 13 December 2018). For an account of the history and action of Caritas in Latina America (Brazil) see Forte (2008).

12 See Sigrun Kahl’s challenging and problematic claim that religious charity represents ‘a fundamental component of the ways social assistance, modern poverty policy and poor relief developed’ (Kahl 2005).

13 The worthiness of charity commitment has been strongly reasserted by Pope Benedictus XVI, in his encyclical letters Deus Caritas Est (2005) and Caritas in veritate (2009).

14 A diocesan Caritas is the territorial administrative entity from which all the parish church Caritas are dependent. While the whole organization depends on the episcopal conference of the Italian bishops (C.E.I. – Conferenza Episcopale Italiana), more than two hundred diocesan Caritas are responsible for the territorial coordination of charity activities.

15 Caritas is not the only organization present and active in the local arena, which is in fact rather composite and made up of both local associations and branches of larger organizations, such as the Red Cross and the Vincentian Sisters of Charity. What makes Caritas an interesting case is the peculiar combination of bureaucratic form of large organizations and grassroots patterns of self-organization. Finally, Caritas holds a very distinctive place in the social imaginary of ‘poverty relief’.

16 The analogy between redundant factory workers and ‘redundant’ cigarette smugglers was often recalled when discussing the ‘post-smuggling’ crisis, either in conversation with local informants or in the local press. For example, in the aftermath of the police operations that ended cigarette smuggling, people who earned their living through smuggling requested a meeting with the mayor. According to a journalist, ‘they were welcomed as metal-mechanical workers at risk of losing their jobs after a factory shut down’.

17 Similar categorizations emerged from a research in Portuguese charity organisations, where volunteers drew the distinction between ‘the professional poor’, manipulative and false, and ‘the new poor’, who fell into poverty ‘for reasons outside their control’ (Matos 2017). It is also important to stress how the categorization of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving poor’ represents a deep-rooted discourse and practice in the history of Christian charitable institutions (Geremek 1997 [1989]; Terpstra 2013).

18 When the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno – the state fund for the South to tackle the so-called ‘southern question’ – was founded in 1950, the Christian Democrat leader Alcide De Gasperi was reported saying that he had chosen the word cassa (fund) ‘to give to the Italians and above all to the southern Italians the almost physical sensation that there would be considerable sums reserved genuinely for the South, which would be allocated in consistent and constant flow’ (Ginsborg 1990: 162). The Cassa per il Mezzogiorno was eventually lifted in 1992.

19 These views were widespread in public discourse, originating in debates taking place as early as the 1960s and later revamped in the 1990s to question the efficacy of state intervention in the economy.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council Advanced Grant ‘Grassroots Economics: Meaning, Project and practice in the pursuit of livelihood’ [GRECO], IDEAS-ERC FP7, Project Number: 323743.