In Catholicism, one of the ways an individual can get into Heaven is by doing good works. Therefore, men would build hospitals and women would become "Mothers of the Poor." They would take care of the poor in the hospitals as if they were their own children, nursing them back to health. The hospitals built were magnificent works of art, luxurious palaces of healing. Although I was impressed that they would build such amazing hospitals, I was initially surprised at how adorned they were. However, as I think about it more, it makes sense. Since they were doing this in God's name, they would want to make them ornamented and beautiful, like the Catholic Churches.
In order to beg, the poor had to be issued a special "beggar's license." Without it, if a person was caught begging, they would be severely punished. The beggar's license was meant to serve as a stigma, as well as prevent people from pretending to be deserving poor from earning money on the streets. I can see both pros and cons to this arrangement. The begging license would prevent those who did not need the money from begging (because, like the street performers in major cities, they could possibly have earned a lot of money in a day) and it would ensure that more of the money from good-deed doing Catholics went to people who actually needed it. However, it also branded the poor who possessed it, and they were marginal members of society, so it would be much more difficult for them to find legitimate jobs and pull themselves out of poverty.
The deserving poor were most often categorized as women, children, or the disabled. This was because women made less money than men, so if the man of the family died, a woman could not support herself, but if the woman of the family died, the man could support himself more easily. I expected that this would be the case, so I was not particularly surprised. However, although I did not expect this to be the case, it would have been nice if there had been some way to help the deserving poor besides allowing them to beg.
Some of the poor also turned to crime. I can see how this would be desirable, because it would seem that oftentimes an individual could earn a lot more money in a much shorter time by crime than by honest labor. In addition, there could have been a sort of Robin Hood complex going on where they justified their crimes by telling themselves that they need the money, whereas the people they are robbing do not.
Although most of this information did not faze me, I was shocked and slightly horrified by the baby transporters. I could not believe that people would actually do that, and that it seemed like there was so little concern for the high mortality rates of the infants. I can only imagine the position someone would have to be in to take up a job like that. Also, how were they not convicted of infanticide?
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