What is charity?
Charity is an infused virtue, by which we love God for His own sake and above all things and our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God. It is the best gift that God Himself can give, the gift compared to which all other gifts are insignificant and valueless. It is the end and aim, the perfection, and the crown of the Christian life. If we possess it, we have all things; if we possess it not, we have nothing; we are miserable and wretched and poor and blind and naked before God. Pray that God may teach you to know and to love His Divine gift.
Charity is called an infused virtue, because we can only obtain it if God shall please to pour it into our soul. No amount of practice can make it ours. No natural benevolence will develop into charity unless God adds that supernatural character that alone can render it pleasing in His sight and meritorious of eternal life. We must carefully distinguish natural from supernatural charity and we must beware of being satisfied with the former.
Charity is one of the virtues called "Christian virtues," inasmuch as their model and type is the Life of Christ upon earth, because they unite us to Christ and make us like to Him.
It is true that charity is in itself pre-eminently the Christian virtue and when Saint Paul says, "Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ" (Romans 13:14), he refers alone to the virtue of charity with which we must be clothed if we are to be the servants and followers of our Lord. Can I say I am clothed with charity so all around me see it? Do they not too often detect in me a lamentable want of this virtue?
- text from Charity, Meditations for a Month by Father Richard Frederick Clarke, SJ