Timothy Stanley praises the compassion of medieval monasteries:
True charity must surely display "compassion", which means "to suffer with". … it is the personalized nature of monasteries which enabled them to show the appropriate degree of compassion. When the countryside was hit by famine, the monks starved with their flock. When plague came, they exposed themselves to the pestilence by taking in sufferers; whole monasteries were wiped out this way. What they could not offer in physical sacrifice, they provided in existential comfort. … This was not a distraction for the gullible, but a way of reinforcing the physical reality that the Church suffered with its people.
The Dish 