Does charity begin at home? The short answer to the question is yes, it surely does. But the answer is controversial. In part, that’s because a short answer often calls for a careful explanation and we don’t provide it. Sometimes we’ve filed it where we can’t find it. That’s alright, because reconstructing the explanation can lead to sober second thoughts, although the process can be jolting.

Allow me, then, to expand — by explaining — my short answer. For a start, the family is a school of virtue. If we are to learn the virtue of charity, our first lessons will be at home. The lessons, rightly taught, tell us that charity reaches out to others. It extends to our neighbors, the very people we are to love as we love ourselves.

Ah, but who is our neighbor? Jesus highlights this question with the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). It’s a powerful parable that shows us what it is to be a neighbor to strangers in need. But the parable comes with an assumption. The Samaritan, we presume, is not neglecting his family at home. Indeed, if he’s traveling to avoid his family and dispensing denarii to assuage his guilt, then he’s lost his way.

But Jesus need not speak in parables to teach us about charity. Remember his injunction: “When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they might invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind” (Luke 14: 12). Again, this injunction comes with a basic assumption. One who hosts such a banquet sees to it that his own family isn’t going hungry.

The Pharisees were apt to ignore the basics. So Jesus confronts them: “Moses said, Honor your father and your mother…Yet you say, ‘If someone says to father or mother, “Any support you might have had from me is qorban”’ (dedicated to God), you allow him to do nothing more for his father or mother” (Mark 7: 10-12).

Charles Dickens offers us a literary example of ignoring the basics. Mrs. Jellyby, in Bleak House, is a paragon of “telescopic philanthropy.” Dickens portrays her as a “diminutive woman with handsome eyes” notable for their “curious habit of seeming to look a long way off [a]s if they could see nothing nearer than Africa.” What Mrs. Jellyby did not see was her own family living in squalor.

Augustine doubtless learned much about charity from his mother, Monica. Living in perilous times, he proposed a durable framework for charity. “Since one cannot do good to all,” he writes, “we ought to consider those chiefly who by reason of place, time or any other circumstance, by a kind of chance are more closely united to us” (De Docr. Christ. i. 28). In discussing the virtue of piety, Thomas Aquinas goes further. He contends that we are especially indebted to that which is our “connatural principle of being and government” and that “piety regards this principle inasmuch as it pays duty and homage to our parents and country and those who are related thereto” (ST II-II, q. 101, art. 3).

To be sure, when we live in perilous times, we expect “hard cases.” How are we to balance closeness and need? “Other things being equal,” Thomas writes, “one ought to help those rather who are most closely connected with us. And if of two, one be more closely connected, and the other in greater want, it is not possible to decide, by any general rule, which of them we ought help rather than the other, since there are various degrees of want as well as of connection” and “the matter requires the judgment of a prudent man” (ST II-II, q. 31, a. 3, ad. 1).

Prudence, of course, cannot be at odds with mercy, with having a heart for those in misery. Neither virtue can be opposed to justice. With regard to justice, Thomas can be provocative. “According to the natural order established by Divine Providence,” he tells us, “the division and appropriation of things which are based on human law, do not preclude the fact that man’s needs have to be remedied by these very things.” From this it follows that “whatever certain people have in superabundance (emphasis added) is due, by natural law, to the purpose of succoring the poor” (ST II-II, q. 66, art.7). And if the poor are left to starve? Time for a Blue Ribbon Commission? Too late, writes Thomas. “If the need be so manifest and urgent that it is evident that the present need must be remedied by whatever means be at hand…then it is lawful for a man to meet his own need by means of another’s property, by taking it either openly or secretly” (ST II-II, q. 66, art. 7).

And yet, gentle reader, you and I don’t have this world’s goods in superabundance, nor does this land of ours—or so we tell ourselves. Perhaps not. Yet some do. Imelda Marcos, they say, had over seven hundred pairs of shoes while beggars in Manila went without any. What of Mr. Trump and his golf courses? And what of this nation that would be great? Yes, Thomas can be provocative.