Governing Charities: Church and State in Toronto's Catholic Archdiocese, 1850-1950 (review)

Turning the liberal axiom of the separation of churchand state on its head, Paula Maurutto lays out her interest in Governing Charities so as to establish 'a historical overview of the linkages between the state and voluntary agencies in the governing of both charities and their clients.' Focusing on the concomitant development of state welfare and Catholic charity within the Archdiocese of Toronto, particularly during the interwar period, Maurutto exposes the complex series of developments and relationships that actually saw the growth of church charity within the state.

Legislation such as the Charity Act of 1874, for example, tied funding to the number of poor being cared for, a great relief to the disproportionately large numbers of Catholics seeking relief in the 'Belfast of North America.' Later, the evolution of diocesan organizations such as Catholic Charities into the Catholic Welfare Bureau in 1922, and church forays into children's aid and industrial schooling, harmonized its necessary charitable function with the interests of governments increasingly fixated on developments in the social sciences, inspection, and reporting. The resulting analysis, sensitive to both historical and sociological conventions, is fascinating and readable.

I do have some small quibbles. While Maurutto depicts the influence of Taylorism on government restructuring and a 'loosely Foucaultian' methodology to inform her understanding of key terms such as governance and welfarism, her analysis would have benefited from a more balanced Christian understanding of charitable virtue. It would not have taken too deep a wade into the 'Catholic intellectual tradition,' for example, to see its mandate as rooted in the gospels (Matthew 5:43 and 19:16-21 in particular spring to mind) and reflected in the Corporal Works of Mercy and the 'social encyclicals.' Rerum Novarum and Quadragessimo Anno were not the radical documents implied here; rather, they were new ways of looking at old problems.

Turning her attention to the church in microcosm, she is perhaps guilty of casting her net too widely by including the period from 1850 to 1950, when her strongest research focuses on the interwar period.Detailed examinations of the Catholic Charities Papersand selections from those of Archbishops Neil McNeil and James McGuigan spanning from the 1920s to the 1940s allow Maurutto to build a number of strong cases for her church-state thesis in a variety of fields. Her conclusion, however, that 'there is no extensive literature that deals with the history of Catholic charities' is rendered suspect when one considers that many of the authors she cites in her synthesis of Toronto's Catholic scene in the nineteenth century have reaped rich harvests from the detailed collections of key prelates such as Michael Power, Armand de Charbonnel, and J.J. Lynch. In addition, her examination of 'Social Casework during the Depression' pays scant attention to Ontario's religio-political condition at this time. The separate schools, so important to her understanding of Catholic charity infrastructure in the nineteenth century, never return to her consideration, despite the perception at least that the Hepburn Liberals were elected on a pro-Catholic platform and the resulting emergence of the separate school tax question as one of the most inflammatory issues of the decade.

These minor tribulations do not overshadow what is an otherwise highly innovative, and even trail-blazing, study. Seeing beyond the rash assumption of a Toronto church that responded to myriad government initiatives in kind, Maurutto's examination of church-state co-operation in different forms of social control, including private policing, surveillance, and community corrections, is imaginative and didactic. As food for thought for historians and sociologists, her work may have greater implications still when one considers what we have yet to understand about areas of more obvious church-state complicity in Canada, such as the residential schools.