In his for-the-ages encyclical Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict XVI expressed and affirmed the Church’s teaching that charity is indivisible from truth.

“To defend the truth, to articulate it with humility and conviction, and to bear witness to it in life are therefore exacting and indispensable forms of charity. Charity, in fact, “rejoices in the truth” (1 Cor 13:6),” Benedict wrote in the opening paragraph of the 2009 encyclical. “In Christ, charity in truth becomes the Face of his Person, a vocation for us to love our brothers and sisters in the truth of his plan. Indeed, he himself is the Truth (cf. Jn 14:6).”

He went on to place charity at the heart of the Church’s social doctrine and, as Jesus taught us, “the synthesis of the entire Law.” 

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The heart of that doctrine, that synthesis of the Law, is what we celebrate this week in marking the 50thanniversary of ShareLife, the charitable fundraising arm of the Archdiocese of Toronto.

As the Register reports, ShareLife emerged from what might be seen at a purely surface level as a political dispute in 1976 between the Council of Catholic Charities and the United Community Fund of Greater Toronto, grouped under the United Way.

For Archbishop Philip Pocock, it was anything but mere politics pitting the Archdiocese against secular granting agencies that had agreed to support abortion counselling. It was, as the Archbishop said, “a decision of conscience.”

While Catholic Torontonians had been founding members of the city’s community fund as far back as the 1940s, Pocock regarded what was then only a recent federal legislative change to permit abortion as antithetical to the constant teaching of the Church.

Leaving the established charitable grouping was a loving defense of Catholic truth. It is critical to appreciate that the gesture of rupture was essential to the advancement of that truth in charity. Perhaps the most important part of the then Archbishop’s message underscored that necessity.

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“Our indignations and energies will continue to be directed against every form of poverty, unemployment, exploitation, discrimination (and) injustice,” he wrote in his Declaration on Behalf of Life.

That is the foundation of the charitable commitment ShareLife has now made for half a century. This year alone, it seeks to raise $15.2 million to be shared among the needy, the suffering, and all who will benefit from the loving care of Holy Mother Church without regard to the myriad of variables of human identity. 

As current executive director Arthur Peters expresses it so well, only some of the fruits of that giving are in the tangible benefits of food, shelter, safety and the physical aspects of the hierarchy of human needs. Much more, he says, the work of ShareLife is about “bringing the Gospel  to life and putting our faith into action…not simply a collection but how we, as a Catholic community, bring the hands of Christ to those in need.”

The 40 agencies who bring the Gospel to life through ShareLife, growing from the seven of Catholic Charities in 1976, represent the continuity of Archbishop Pocock’s promise and by extension the working out, day by day, of what Benedict XVI called “the heart” of Catholic social teaching.

In his inimitable way, the late Holy Father did not stint in Caritas In Veritate from telling the truth about the diminishment of charity in our secular age. He did not mean simply the rise of selfishness evident in refusal to give or indulgence in greed. Rather, he spoke of a loss of understanding of what charity truly is.

“I am aware of the ways in which charity has been and continues to be misconstrued and emptied of meaning, with the consequent risk of being misinterpreted, detached from ethical living and, in any event, undervalued. In the social, juridical, cultural, political and economic fields — the contexts, in other words, that are most exposed to this danger — it is easily dismissed as irrelevant for interpreting and giving direction to moral responsibility,” he wrote.

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Such an emptying of meaning and abdication of moral responsibility, he warned, directly affects our willingness, indeed determination, to pursue and hold onto truth.

Renewal of commitment to that moral responsibility, re-dedication to love of truth, is precisely what was set in motion by the creation of ShareLife in 1976. Fifty years later, we celebrate its half-centenary of charitable giving but, much more, the verity of its contribution to the action of the Gospel in Catholic life.