A reflection on what Catholic Social Teaching and contemporary research on human wellbeing reveal about the gap between generous impulse and transformative service—and what our students can do about it.

Dr. Margaret Callahan, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Theology and Ethics  ·  Director, Center for Community Engagement

Dr. Callahan has spent twenty years building service-learning programs at Catholic universities in the United States. She has come to believe that the most urgent formation our students need is not the willingness to give—they arrive with that—but the discipline to listen before they act.

"What do you want me to do for you?"  —Matthew 20:32

It was a Tuesday in November, the third week of the semester, and eighteen of my students had just returned from what their field notes described as a 'highly successful' afternoon at a food pantry two miles from campus. They had sorted cans, restocked shelves, and distributed bags of groceries to forty families. The pantry coordinator thanked them warmly. Everyone left feeling, as one student wrote, 'like we actually did something.'

The following week I asked them to do something harder: go back. Not to sort cans. To sit with someone who had been there the previous week and ask them, without any agenda, what their life was like.

Three students came to my office afterward, visibly unsettled. One of them—a pre-law junior who had organized a winter coat drive every year since high school—put it this way: 'I realized I've spent four years helping people I don't know at all. I knew what they needed. I never asked.'

She was not describing a failure of generosity. She has more of that than most people I know. She was describing something more subtle and more common: the gap between the impulse to help and the discipline to help well. Between what we want to give and what the other person actually needs. Between service performed on behalf of someone else and service as a relationship that transforms both parties.

That gap is not new. The Catholic tradition has wrestled with it for two thousand years. What is perhaps new is that we now have frameworks—theological, philosophical, and empirical—that can help our students see the gap more clearly, and cross it more deliberately.

The Question Jesus Always Asked First

The scene is Jericho. Bartimaeus, blind from birth, is sitting by the road when he hears that Jesus of Nazareth is passing. He shouts. The crowd tries to silence him. He shouts louder. Jesus stops—and asks a question that, on the surface, should be unnecessary:

"What do you want me to do for you?"  —Mark 10:51

It is evident what Bartimaeus wants. He is blind. He wants to see. And yet Jesus asks. Theologians have reflected on this moment for centuries, and the consensus is striking: the question is not about information. It is about recognition. Before the healing, there is an encounter. Before the gift, there is a relationship. Jesus does not approach Bartimaeus with a solution prepared in advance; he approaches him with attention.

This pattern recurs throughout the Gospels. When the disciples want to send the hungry crowd to the villages, Jesus first asks what resources the disciples themselves have. When Zacchaeus climbs the sycamore, Jesus does not tell him what to do; he invites himself to dinner, and the transformation emerges from the encounter itself. When the woman at the well approaches, Jesus begins not with proclamation but with conversation—asking for water, listening to a life.

Thomas Merton, reflecting on the monastic tradition's understanding of caritas, wrote that genuine charity requires what he called 'a going out of oneself'—a movement away from one's own assumptions and toward the concrete reality of the other person (Merton, 1960). The saint who gives from abundance without knowing the other's actual need is, in Merton's framing, practicing a form of spiritual self-satisfaction dressed in the language of love.

This is not a comfortable observation for those of us who run service programs. But it is an honest one.

Before the healing, there is an encounter. Before the gift, there is a relationship. The tradition has always known this. Our programs often forget it.

What Catholic Social Teaching Actually Demands

Catholic Social Teaching (CST) is frequently summarized by its principles—human dignity, solidarity, subsidiarity, the preferential option for the poor—and these summaries are useful. But they can flatten what is, in the original documents, a demanding and specific vision of what it means to help another human being.

Gaudium et Spes insists that 'respect and love ought to be extended also to those who think or act differently than we do in social, political and even religious matters' (GS §28). The document uses the word respect before the word love—not because respect is more important, but because it is the precondition. You cannot love in the CST sense someone you do not see as a full subject of their own life.

Pope John Paul II, in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, offers what remains one of the most demanding definitions of solidarity in the tradition: 'not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people,' but rather 'a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say, to the good of all and of each individual' (SRS §38). The phrase 'of each individual' matters enormously. Solidarity is not statistical. It demands attention to the particular person in front of you.

Libertatis Conscientia adds the uncomfortable corollary: genuine service to the poor requires being accountable to the poor themselves, not to the givers' sense of what they have accomplished (LC §68). This is a form of relational accountability—the recognition that the measure of our service is not what we gave but what was received, and that the only reliable judge of that is the person who received it.

These documents consistently insist on a form of service that is relational, particular, and accountable—not transactional, aggregate, or self-confirming. Our programs should be too.

A Contemporary Framework: When Giving Misses the Mark

Several years ago I encountered a framework from the field of wellbeing research that articulates what CST implies but rarely makes operationally explicit: the conditions under which giving actually constitutes care.

Andy Figueroa Cárdenas, a Peruvian researcher developing the DASBIEN Theory of Life, proposes that any genuine act of care requires three sequential conditions (Figueroa Cárdenas, 2025). First, the giver must subjectify the receiver: investigate, observe, and discover what is genuinely good for this specific person according to their own inner world, not the giver's assumptions. Second, the giver must act with intention: give that specific good on purpose, designed for this person. Third, the giver must seek feedback: verify that the receiver actually experienced something good according to their own definition of good.

Figueroa Cárdenas calls this the 'love triangle,' and is explicit that if any condition is missing, the action—however generous in impulse—is not yet love in the fullest sense. It may be kindness, or goodwill, or empathy. But it has not completed its arc.

I want to be careful here. This framework does not replace the theological tradition, nor does it add something CST lacks. What it offers is a way of operationalizing what the tradition demands but often leaves implicit. 'Love your neighbor' is a commandment. The love triangle is a checklist. Both are necessary. The commandment without the checklist risks becoming a feeling. The checklist without the commandment risks becoming a protocol.

What struck me when I first encountered this framework was how precisely it diagnosed the failure my students brought back from the food pantry. They had acted with intention. But they had not subjectified—they did not know who those forty families were, what pressures shaped their week, what forms of help would matter most. And they had not sought feedback—they left with warm feelings and no mechanism to know whether anything had shifted for the people they served.

Two of the three conditions were missing. And so, despite everyone's best intentions, the encounter remained a transaction rather than a relationship.

Integrating Catholic Social Teaching and the DASBIEN Framework in Service-Learning

ELEMENT	CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING	DASBIEN FRAMEWORK	IN SERVICE-LEARNING PRACTICE
Knowing the person in need	Human dignity requires seeing the other as a subject, not a case. (GS §27)	Subjectify: discover what is good for the receiver according to their own inner world, not yours.	Students interview, observe, and listen before designing any intervention.
Acting with intention	Solidarity is not vague compassion but a firm determination to commit to the good of each individual. (SRS §38)	Intend: give that specific good on purpose, designed for this person, not the general poor.	Students articulate clearly what they are doing, for whom, and why—before and after.
Verifying that help arrived	Preferential option for the poor means being accountable to those served, not to donors. (LC §68)	Feedback: confirm the receiver experienced something good according to their own definition.	Students return, ask, adjust. The project ends when impact is confirmed, not when students leave.

Sources: Gaudium et Spes (1965); Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987); Libertatis Conscientia (1986); Figueroa Cárdenas (2025). Table: author.

The Evidence Behind the Encounter

The theological tradition makes this case on grounds of human dignity and the nature of love. The empirical literature makes a parallel case on grounds of effectiveness. Both point in the same direction.

Robert Lupton, who spent decades building community development organizations in Atlanta, documented what he called 'toxic charity'—the unintended harm that well-intentioned giving can cause when it bypasses the agency, dignity, and expressed needs of those it aims to serve (Lupton, 2011). His research showed that repeated one-way giving without relationship tends to erode the capacity for self-sufficiency in recipient communities, while generating a sense of obligation and resentment that rarely surfaces in donor-facing accounts of the work.

The psychologist C. Daniel Batson drew a distinction between empathy-driven altruism—motivated by genuine concern for the other's wellbeing—and 'egoistic pseudo-altruism,' where the impulse to help is primarily motivated by the helper's desire to relieve their own discomfort at witnessing suffering (Batson, 1991). Programs that do not create the conditions for genuine encounter risk producing the second without the first: students who learn to feel better about themselves through service, rather than to serve in ways that actually better the situation of those they serve.

Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, has put this in terms that resonate with both the empirical and theological traditions: 'We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent.' Stevenson's argument is that genuine proximity to the poor and marginalized—not programmatic distance from them—is the condition of possibility for justice (Stevenson, 2014). You cannot serve from a distance. You can only give from a distance. Service requires getting close enough to know.

'We are all broken by something.' Service that acknowledges this mutual vulnerability is fundamentally different from service that positions one party as whole and the other as needing repair.

What Gets in the Way: Four Patterns to Name

In twenty years of directing service-learning programs, I have observed patterns that consistently prevent the encounter from becoming genuine. Naming them is not meant to discourage service—it is meant to help us design programs that build the capacity to move past them.

Patterns that interrupt genuine service encounter

PATTERN	WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE	WHAT IT SIGNALS
Charity without relationship	Students deliver food or supplies and leave without speaking with recipients.	Service as transaction, not encounter. The other is an object of giving, not a subject of life.
Assumptions about need	Interventions designed from campus, without sustained input from the community they target.	Paternalism dressed as generosity. What is given reflects what givers have, not what receivers need.
No follow-through	One-time events with no mechanism to know whether impact occurred.	Service without accountability. May feel meaningful to givers while changing nothing for receivers.
Savior framing	Students describe service primarily in terms of what they personally learned or felt.	The center of the experience remains the student, not the person served. The relationship is inverted.

Elaborated from Lupton (2011), Batson (1991), and field observations across multiple service-learning programs.

None of these patterns makes students bad people. They are often the product of genuine goodness that has not yet been formed into the discipline of encounter. The task of a Catholic university is not to produce students who are more generous than when they arrived—they usually arrive quite generous. The task is to form students whose generosity has become wise: attentive, relational, accountable, and humble.

Formation for Encounter: What Programs Can Do Differently

The following are design principles, drawn from programs that have consistently produced the kind of transformative encounter the tradition calls us toward.

• Listen before you plan. Any project that begins with student-designed interventions before sustained community contact begins in the wrong place. The first assignment should be an extended listening session—not a needs assessment survey, but an open conversation where students' task is to understand a life, not to identify deficiencies to address.
• Name the asymmetry, then complicate it. Students often arrive with an implicit framing: we have something they need. Formation requires that students also identify what the community they serve possesses that they lack: knowledge, resilience, relationship, history. The theology of encounter in CST assumes a mutual poverty and a mutual abundance. Our programs should too.
• Build in return. A service encounter with no mechanism for follow-up cannot produce accountability. The framework's third step—feedback, verification that good was received—requires proximity over time. Projects should include a return visit designed explicitly to ask: 'Did what we did help? What didn't work?' Students should be prepared to hear honest answers.
• Debrief the discomfort, not just the success. The moments of greatest formation are rarely moments of satisfaction. They are moments of confusion, failure, and unexpected realization. Debriefing should make room for students to voice what disturbed them and what they would do differently—with theological reflection on why discomfort is often the place where genuine encounter begins.
• Measure what the community experienced, not what students felt. Evaluation that relies primarily on student self-reporting is measuring the wrong thing. Sustainable programs ask the communities they serve: did our presence help or complicate your situation? What would you want us to do differently? This form of accountability is demanding. It is also required by the tradition.

A Closing Reflection: The Student Who Came Back

The pre-law junior I mentioned at the beginning—the one who had organized coat drives for four years without knowing the people who received the coats—did something at the end of the semester that I think about often.

She went back to the food pantry on her own time, a week after the semester ended. Not to sort cans. She sat with a woman in her sixties who had been coming to the pantry for three years. They talked for an hour and a half. She learned that the woman was a retired schoolteacher whose Social Security payments had been delayed by a bureaucratic error unresolved for eight months, and that what she needed most was not food—the pantry handled that—but someone to help her navigate the appeals process for her benefits.

My student is pre-law. She knew how to read a government appeals form. She did not fix the problem in a day, but she made calls, wrote letters, and connected the woman with a legal aid clinic. Six weeks later, the payments resumed.

She told me afterward that she had not expected to feel what she felt. 'I've been giving things to people my whole life,' she said. 'This is the first time I think I actually helped someone.' The difference, she said, was that this time she knew the person. She knew what the problem actually was. And she knew, because she stayed in contact, that something changed.

That is the difference between giving and serving. Between charity as transaction and charity as encounter. Between what we offer from a comfortable distance and what becomes possible when we get close enough to know.

The Catholic tradition has a name for the discipline of getting close enough to know. It calls it love. And it has always insisted—from the Sermon on the Mount to the social encyclicals—that love is not primarily a feeling. It is a practice. It is something you do, repeatedly, in relationship, with attention to whether what you gave was actually received as good.

That is what our students can learn. That is what our programs should teach. And it is—quietly, persistently, and without fanfare—what the world most needs from institutions that claim to form people in the tradition of the one who stopped on the road to Jericho and asked a blind man what he wanted.

For Faculty, Program Directors, and Campus Ministry Teams

Questions for course design, faculty retreat, or program evaluation:

1. In your service-learning program, at what point do students first make sustained, open-ended contact with the people they will serve—before or after they have designed their intervention?

2. How does your program measure impact? Whose experience is being measured, and by what method?

3. What theological frameworks do students encounter in preparation for service? Do those frameworks address the risk of paternalism, and do students have language for naming it when they encounter it in themselves?

4. What would it mean for your program to be accountable to the community it serves, rather than primarily to student learning outcomes or donor expectations?

5. Can you identify a moment in your own service history when you gave something well-intentioned that, in retrospect, was not what the other person needed? What would you do differently?

References

Batson, C. D. (1991). The Altruism Question: Toward a Social-Psychological Answer. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. (1986). Libertatis Conscientia: Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation. Vatican Press.

Figueroa Cárdenas, A. K. (2025). Theory of Dasbien Life. Editorial Tecnologías Dasbien.

Figueroa Cárdenas, A. K. (2018). Lo Bueno. Editorial Tecnologías Dasbien.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum.

John Paul II. (1987). Sollicitudo Rei Socialis. Vatican Press.

Lupton, R. D. (2011). Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse It). HarperOne.

Merton, T. (1960). The Wisdom of the Desert. New Directions Publishing.

Second Vatican Council. (1965). Gaudium et Spes: Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. Vatican Press.

Stevenson, B. (2014). Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Spiegel & Grau.

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. (2020). A Place at the Table: A Catholic Recommitment to Overcome Poverty and to Respect the Dignity of All God's Children. USCCB Publishing.

Vanier, J. (1998). Becoming Human. Paulist Press.

About the AuthorDr. Margaret Callahan holds a Ph.D. in Theological Ethics from Boston College and has served as Associate Professor of Theology and Ethics and Director of the Center for Community Engagement at a Catholic university in the Mid-Atlantic region for twelve years. Her research focuses on the intersection of Catholic Social Teaching, service-learning pedagogy, and community development ethics. She has published in Theological Studies, the Journal of Catholic Higher Education, and the Review of Religious Research. Her forthcoming book, Encounter Before Action: Rethinking Service in the Catholic University, examines how programs of community engagement can form students in habits of attention, relationship, and accountability that genuine service demands. She was trained as a community organizer before entering academic life—a fact she considers relevant to everything she does in the classroom