Agape-justice conflicts provide unique opportunities for growth in supernatural excellence. There are “no tidy answers” in sorting through competing duties of justice and agape. However, justice’s obligees who hold strong legal and moral claims can voluntarily and generously choose to forego their claim-rights in favor of those who have none—agape’s beneficiaries. If we can give of ourselves with alacrity, then, even the most intractable agape-justice conflicts can be resolved with the adjudication of last resort—to love as Christ loves. Doing so leads to growth in Christified agape, that is, caritas. Such self-giving dissolves the competing claims of agape and justice.

Agape-justice conflicts are epistemological in nature because they arise from limitations in human knowledge. However, they may in fact be also ontological in nature as occasions to give vent to love’s diffusiveness, to develop the moral faculties of reason and freedom, to acquire personal and collective virtue, and to grow in Christified agape (caritas). Even epistemological limitations may, by divine design, also be meant to serve these purposes. Agape-justice conflicts are instrumental for humans’ eventual union with God, their telos. They are occasions for grace to build on our human frailties and brokenness, grace building on nature.

This chapter explores the various ways that those in the ghetto at the communal and individual level tried to support the poorest of the ghetto. This chapter discusses how charitable groups, Jewish communal organizations, Judenrat, individuals and informal networks attempted to employ many means to support those who were most economically fragile. It examines how foreign aid was able to continue to enter the ghetto albeit at a far reduced rate. It discusses how Judenrat established formal public welfare programs and encouraged the creation of private charitable programs. It also discusses private individual efforts to provide support for the most vulnerable.

Charity has a rich association with European international law. As a Christian virtue, charity drove the imperial exploits of Christian missions during the Age of Discovery in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is when the early Christian writers of a modern, European international law such as Francisco de Vitoria (1486–1546), Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), Richard Zouche (1590–1661), Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and Cornelis van Bynkershoek (1673–1743) emerged, and the Peace of Westphalia is said to have established a law of nations amongst “a European society of sovereign states.” Christian charity, it was believed, offered non-Christian peoples in the “New World” eternal salvation, and it became a prime justification for the universalization of a European international law – all of which Anghie points out resulted from the process by which European doctrines and beliefs “were transferred to, or imposed upon, the non-European world, principally through the mechanism of colonialism.”