Before the Social Security Act of 1935, many US counties hosted “poor farms”, that were in effect, farms for the poor, based on their labor, growing some crops and engaging in animal husbandry to reduce their costs. It was expected that those able to work would work.
However, as government entities, they were prone to corruption and abuse, often mistreating their charges.
Yet with this as an “honest model”, the Catholic church, perhaps in cooperation with other faiths, could offer a “religious poor farm” that could offer a host of services based in faith, not bureaucratic expediency.
Here are some possibilities:
1) (Assuming the oppressive USDA has been told to “back off” of its overregulation and controls over private farms), such a farm could grow crops not for sustenance, but for profit, growing high value crops that could be sold or traded for their food. This would mean a better diet as well as needs like electricity, running water and sewage, new clothing and amenities.
2) The offering of a “nursing home and hospice of faith”, neither oriented to “expedient euthanasia” nor “unnatural technological extension of life”, instead offering caring medicine, pain relief, and natural death.
3) A continual emphasis on faith and spirituality, family and friendship, respect and remembrance. That the elderly and invalid deserve respect and involvement in life.
4) Perhaps even a home for unwed and poor mothers and their children, along with an orphanage.
Setting up such places would address a host of social problems, it would raise the public profile of the Catholic and other churches considerably, significantly increase faithful membership (if not CINOs), and provide an alternative to atheistic, secularist, and the often anti-human government mechanisms that exist today.
For a time I was fortunate enough to live in Hillsdale, Michigan.
Perhaps the most famous native of Hillsdale was a 19th. Century poet named Will Carleton. Carleton is best known for his epic poem “Over The Hill to the Poor House”. At the time just about every community of any size had such a place.
I had heard my grandparents recite “Over The Hill to the Poor House” many times as a child. Apparently the Progressive Reformers in the early 1900’s started making children memorize it to prepare the way for the New Deal. Either accept more government intervention in your lives, or be consigned to Carleton’s grim Dickensian vision of an old age spent alone and toiling away in the poor house. And they were duly terrified. I think my grandparents would have voted for a top income tax bracket of 97% rather than to bring back the poor houses.
They did such a good job of drilling Carleton’s poem into kids that my grandmother could still recite it from memory as late as 1990. Will Carleton, perhaps unknowingly, single-handedly sealed the fate of the poor farm in America.