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

Paula Maurutto's Governing Charities is an exceptionally clear and timely history of welfare services in Toronto's Roman Catholic archdiocese before 1950. Examining a range of programs and services, Maurutto explores how the 'techniques of governance' adopted by welfare workers regulated the provision of charity, intensified the surveillance of the poor, mediated the relationship between church and state, and balanced the demands of public opinion, political expediency, and financial conservatism.

Central to the book's theme is a challenge to the notion that we are now 'returning' to an environment of voluntarism. Tracing the long history of cooperation between church and state, Maurutto persuasively argues that neo-conservative distinctions between our public welfare state and the private charities of our past are false. In the microcosm of Toronto, territorial disputes were persistent features of this history, but so were cooperative administrative efforts, and public funding for so-called private charities. Using a 'loosely Foucauldian approach,' Maurutto demonstrates that as financial responsibility for the poor devolved upon the state, so too did the state gain the ability to govern welfare recipients 'at a distance' - more intensely and effectively than ever before.

Maurutto's arguments are convincingly framed by the story of the archdiocese's active promotion of, and participation in, 'modern' methods of social work. She firmly contradicts the frequent assumption that religious and social scientific methods were mutually exclusive. Importantly, however, Maurutto is sensitive to the way that Catholic theology affected the application of these modern techniques. This approach removes religious endeavour from the passive role so often attributed to it by a historiographical dependence upon secularization theory.

Maurutto's challenge to secularization is part of an increasingly critical and nuanced approach to the role of religious organizations in Canada's past. It is also here that the limits of the study become apparent. While acknowledging the deficiencies of secularization, the book does not present the substantive challenge to the theory so necessary for this historiography. She argues from the perspective of religious persistence - what happens in the archdiocese happens despite the secularization of Canadian society; it does not contradict the fact that the 'forces of secularization' were at work. The trends she so rightly identifies as significant are thus diminished, becoming exceptions to the rule.

This problem is exacerbated by Maurutto's research. The book relies heavily on secondary literature, and while she presents an innovative interpretation of that literature, she is nonetheless bound by chronologies that are not particularly well suited to her own argument about church-state cooperation. Ending in 1950, she cannot explore the role of private welfare services at a time when publicly funded welfare was the sine qua non of Canadian society.

The boundaries to Maurutto's argument are also defined by a tendency toward religious reductionism. Religion here is presented as a somewhat static text that the archdiocese uses to redefine welfare practices in its own community. The dynamic nature of belief remains hidden. As Robert Abzug laments, scholars too often consider expressions of religious belief to be symptomatic of some deeper and therefore more significant psychological wish - to quell radicalism, to maintain social prominence, or to remake the stuff of juvenile delinquency. As a result, the persistence of the Catholic presence in charity is narrowly defined as something that is achieved because its ultimate goals corresponded with those of a secular community. This perhaps unnecessarily truncates the importance of belief in the everyday lives of Canadians. Scholars must explore how belief not only regulates method or defines a political position, but how it becomes, and is, the full embodiment of the purpose and desired result of social action.

We must also explore the possibility that what we so often accept as modern and therefore secular is perhaps (as Nancy Christie has argued) deeply religious in nature. Throughout Governing Charities, the social scientists, committees, and policies existing outside of Roman Catholic services are frequently...