Elemente de filantropie şi asisten ă socială în ... - Revista Teologica

Elemente de filantropie şi asistenţă socială în Europa secolului al XIX-lea
iertarea adversarilor politici şi a prizonierilor de război, ocrotirea şi ajutorarea
orfanilor, văduvelor şi a săracilor. În toate aceste situaţii însă ea îşi păstrează
valoarea soterică. Buna ocârmuire şi operele de binefacere sunt atuurile pentru ziua
Judecăţii Ultime. Astfel cercul se închide, iar iubirea de oameni (milostenia,
milosârdia, cum apare ea cu un echivalent slav în documentele româneşti) chiar şi
atunci când fundamentează gestul politic, o face din perspectivă religioasă.
Philanthropic and Social-Work in Nineteenth-century Europe. Social work is
as old as the history of humanity. There are at least two facts that support this
statement: first, all communities contained individuals, who owing to genetic,
natural and social elements, were not able to satisfy their needs on their own; then,
all civilizations care more or less for those in need. Thus, poverty, disabilities,
orphans and abandoned children, sick old people with no familial support are
century-old problems humanity has been trying to solve for ages, by using various
internal regulating spontaneous or institutionalized structures and mechanisms.
Nevertheless, the profession of those providing “treatment for social maladies” is
rather young: the first decades of the 20 th century witnessed the development of the
first public assistance national systems, and implicitly the emergence of a new
profession, that of social worker.
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