As the current Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts government aid, I have been reflecting on what social conscience requires of us as Catholics. Catholic social teaching emphasizes that we are to champion human dignity, promote access to the common good, stand in solidarity with others striving for dignified lives, and support subsidiarity to foster human flourishing at the grassroots level. Most philanthropists—people who love humanity, regardless of their faith commitments—would agree with these points, but I believe authentic Christian philanthropy calls us to go still further.
Four celebrations taking place this year—the 1,700th anniversary of the opening of the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea, the Jubilee Year of Hope, the canonization jubilee of St. Katharine Drexel, and the centennial of Xavier University of Louisiana—contain powerful implications that can reshape how we think about Christian philanthropy.
During the Council of Nicaea, bishops formulated a creed to address an ongoing dispute about God’s oikonomia, or economy—the divine plan to manage and save the world through the Trinity’s relationship with humanity. Later councils developed this trinitarian theology to explain how God mysteriously shares divine life: The Creator bestows everything upon Christ, while the Spirit is the mutual sharing of God’s self between the Creator and Christ.
This self-giving love, which transcends human understanding, is God’s economy from which all existence flows. The Nicene Creed insists that this economy is one of radical self-gift that neither diminishes the giver nor requires subordination. It is a love that creates, redeems, and sustains life beyond God. Our immersion in Christ, who is all in all (Col. 3:11), enables a new way of living in the Spirit at every level of creation.
Today’s competitive, consumer-driven global economy directly opposes divine self-giving. Still, the late Pope Francis wanted us to embrace this challenge as pilgrims of hope. In his papal bull calling for the Jubilee Year of Hope, he quoted St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, where Paul encourages the Roman church to contribute to the mutual aid collected from Gentile churches in Greece and Asia Minor for the Jewish churches suffering in Jerusalem. Paul goes on to say: “Hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Rom. 5:5). The divine economy empowers us to become like Jesus, who “came not to be served but to serve” (Mark 10:45).
In Mark’s gospel, the term diakonos (“servant”), from which the word deacon is derived, appears first in Chapter 9, when Jesus addresses a dispute among his disciples regarding greatness: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all” (Mark 9:35). He places a small child among the arguing disciples, and then, embracing the child, he says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not just me but the one who sent me” (Mark 9:37). When I was a young boy growing up in rural South Carolina, elders often told children to “stay in a child’s place”—but that is the very “place” Jesus calls us to honor. He uses a child to illustrate his call to live in ways that challenge the status quo.
Diakonos appears again in Chapter 10, when James and John ask to sit next to Jesus in his glory. When the other disciples learn what James and John have requested, they become angry. Jesus has been trying to teach his 12 friends that following him leads not to worldly glory but to the glory of the cross, and yet they struggle to grasp what he’s saying. They still believe Jesus’ way leads to power, not poverty.
Jesus corrects them again and explains they will not rule like tyrants over others. He says, “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant [diakonos], and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave [doulos] of all” (Mark 10:43–44). To end the what-is-in-it-for-me? logic, Jesus has now replaced the word servant with slave. A servant is a hired worker; an enslaved person is unpaid. In the next verse, Jesus affirms his own servanthood and says he came to give away his life in order to set others free. Christian service means giving our own lives away, as Jesus did, to free people captured and enslaved by oppression.
This self-giving shines bright in St. Katharine Drexel’s life. The Philadelphia heiress of a wealthy Catholic family, she walked away from her privilege and followed Christ’s example of servanthood, creating the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament to work beside her. Most white Catholic philanthropists at the turn of the century focused on serving European Catholic immigrants who looked like them, but Mother Katharine advocated for social causes that were unpopular among Catholics, including establishing schools and churches for Black and Indigenous Americans.
One of her greatest legacies is Xavier University. In 1915, in response to white residents’ successful campaign to shut down and relocate the all-Black public Southern University from a predominantly white neighborhood in New Orleans to Baton Rouge, Mother Katharine opened Xavier Preparatory School. Ten years later, 100 years ago this year, she opened the university. At the groundbreaking ceremony, white Catholics insisted on claiming all the chairs while Black attendees had to stand. Mother Katharine responded by removing all the chairs, ensuring everyone was on equal footing. She connected deeply with the struggles of Black Catholics.
In A Black Theology of Liberation (Orbis Books), James Cone says, “knowing God means being on the side of the oppressed, becoming one with them”; this, he says, requires that we “become black with God by joining God in the work of liberation.” Jesus did exactly this when he came to live among us, becoming one with us. As St. Paul writes, Jesus “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness” (Phil. 2:7).
In a society that’s attacking human dignity, Christian philanthropy means following Jesus’ example, choosing slavery—radical self-gift—to free others. It means participating in the divine economy, grounding our hopes in God rather than this world’s financial system with all its ups and downs. We remain separate persons, but in God, through Christ and the Spirit, we are so wrapped up in loving others that we become one.
This article also appears in the July 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 7, pages 40-41). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
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