infinitely difficult. With age, the disabled worker becomes more and more helpless and needy. He becomes weak in body and spirit. The failings and passions, the evil habits of his younger days come more and more to light. The inclination toward uncleanliness, often to an appalling extent, listlessness, alcoholism, quarrelsomeness, etc., all meet there. There is perhaps no place in which all the wretchedness of human nature converges as it does in these institutions. Whoever wants to endure there and triumph over all this spiritual and physical infirmity through force of loving care needs to arrive with a heart filled with more than just human and earthly love. Where this is not the case, even the best and most benevolent wardens will gradually tire when faced with so many bad ones, they will become accustomed to the misery of these people and soon run the risk of acting in a way that frequently violates the laws of higher charity. Insofar as I have been given the opportunity in my life to become acquainted with similar institutions, I have become convinced that – in spite of all the humanitarian principles that are abundantly articulated by the supervising officials – most of the institutions under purely worldly care have major handicaps in their inner organization and that many of them exist in a state of neglect, in which filth, sluggishness, and dissoluteness rule on the one hand, while a dulled indifference toward all of this misery prevails on the other. Having daily contact with poor sick patients and poor invalids and caring for them all year long is such an arduous business that human nature, left to its own resources, is not up to the task. Even the love of parents and children frequently succumbs to this burden when longstanding illnesses and elderly infirmities exist. In much the same way, some aged fathers are treated unlovingly by their children because the children’s feelings have been more or less dulled by the long duration of the misery! How should the kind of care for which even the love of children often no longer suffices be practiced by people who dedicate themselves to this business simply for the sake of their wages? Only the supernatural love that Christ pours into human hearts can confer the power to give the poor in such refuges of human misery the [kind of] care that is lasting and loving enough to be what they actually need.
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