For the last week and a half, I have been traveling with a group of pilgrims to the Ignatian sites in Spain. Twice we have visited what are variously called “hospitals” or “hospices” where St. Ignatius stayed, living in poverty and begging for alms to meet his daily needs. One of these is in Manresa, where Ignatius spent time in prayer after his conversion. The other is in his hometown of Azpeitia, where he stayed for several months between departing from the University of Paris and meeting up with his companions in Venice.
During this visit home, rather than staying with his family, he elected to stay in a hospice in the town adjacent to the castle where he had been raised. This seems to have scandalized his elder brother, who headed the Loyola family. The closely related alternative names for where Ignatius stayed—hospital and hospice—are key to understanding why.
At the time, hospices were not places sought out for healing. Those with means would have a doctor attend to them at home. Instead, a hospice was where the sick poor wound up with nowhere else to go, along with others who had no other options left. We might think of them as a kind of cross between homeless shelters, guesthouses for travelers without many resources and last refuges for the sick.
This is not to say that no care was offered in a hospice; it was. But if someone had any other options, they would likely avoid a hospice. And if travelers could, they would bypass a hospice and count themselves lucky to do so. Ignatius, instead, sought these places out.
In addition to the hospices we visited and prayed in at Azpeitia and Manresa, Ignatius stayed in a hospice when he first arrived in Paris, until he realized he could not adequately attend to his studies while living there. He and the first companions lived in various hospices while in Venice and continued to visit and care for the poor in hospices in Rome. Only a few years after the first approval of the Society of Jesus, when the pope requested Ignatius to send three Jesuits to the Council of Trent, he gave them instructions to, among other things, make a point of visiting the poor in hospices while there.
I had visited many Ignatian sites in connection with World Youth Day in Madrid in 2011, such as the Chapel of Conversion at Loyola, the monastery and Black Madonna at Montserrat, and the cave at Manresa. But during that previous trip, I had not seen the hospices. Though I knew about them from Ignatius’ autobiography and Jesuit history, I had not thought about what they were really like until I was standing in them myself, thinking about Ignatius living there.
In the lives of many of the saints—whose stories inspired Ignatius—these are places they seek out, both to care for the poor and to better embrace poverty in union with Christ, poor and suffering.
In other words, it is both noble and necessary for us who are whole and healthy to be in contact with those who are poor, sick and suffering. In those encounters, grace flows in both directions.
Over the past few months, the Trump administration’s cost-cutting efforts, led by Elon Musk, have taken particular aim at humanitarian relief funds, especially those administered through the United States Agency for International Development, which is now all but defunct. In concrete terms, those cuts mean that people will go hungry, lack medical care and die in places where they were previously being cared for.
U.S.A.I.D. has been selected as in many ways an easy target. When foreign relations are involved, the president has much discretion and authority, making it easier to pretend that near-total cuts are exercises of prudence. It has also been targeted because some of its programs are accused of advancing a progressive ideological agenda, even though the cuts were not restricted to only those programs.
The idea that the cuts significantly help the federal budget, however, should be set aside: All foreign aid expenditures together amount to barely more than 1 percent of the total budget, with a bit less than half of that going to humanitarian relief and health programs.
But another reason, I fear, that humanitarian relief can be so easily targeted is because those in power do not value what it accomplishes. It is as if an equation is being solved with one side missing. U.S.A.I.D. funds count when they are cut and posted on a “wall of receipts,” but the lives they save and the people they feed are invisible.
This is not to say that all humanitarian aid is beyond criticism, or that government funds are the only or best way to care for the poor and needy. That responsibility is incumbent on each of us personally according to our capacity—but it is also incumbent on all of us together, acting in common through both voluntary associations and public authority.
The further we get from the needs and the lives of the poor, the easier it is to forget that we have such duties at all. To the degree that the United States is stepping away from such contact—and celebrating its abandonment—we are all becoming poorer in ways that no amount of funding can redress.
