Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.
(King Lear, Act III, Scene IV)

In the storm scene in Shakespeare’s King Lear, where the king and the elements are jointly furious, Lear wonders for the first time how the poor make out in protecting themselves against the elements -- without a winter-coat drive, one may add, as in many big cities, or used clothing from Goodwill.

I have thought too little of this, he says. And then the advice to the wealthy: guard yourself against that emergency; show solidarity with the needy, distribute your excess to them; and contribute to greater justice.

The nakedness that Lear experiences for the first time, the condition this corporal work refers to, is the nakedness of being unprotected, in Shakespeare’s apt expression, of being “houseless.” In Genesis, Adam and Eve discover after sin that they too are naked, but the condition there is more existential, less social. It implies exposure, in the sense of vulnerability or capacity to be hurt. It is not the nakedness of “looped and window’d raggedness.”

People become naked in this latter sense through a variety of circumstances -- mismanagement of resources, missed opportunities, bad breaks, addictions, hard times. But nakedness may also be due to sudden calamity.

A hurricane or earthquake strikes, for instance, and whole populations find themselves left with only the clothes on their backs. A sudden fire similarly leaves a family without shelter, lacking the basics in clothing and bedding.

More emblematic, however, than the need that arises from natural disaster, is the nakedness which is everywhere a synonym for poverty. Naked, potbellied children, in any part of the world, are a standard image of destitution.

To “clothe” the naked thus involves more than salvage among the down and out, or tiding people through a period of unexpected loss. It means addressing the conditions of poverty that make nakedness an affront to human dignity.

In the late sixties, when the Church’s social teaching first began to be taken seriously, the French theologian, Marie-Dominique Chenu famously remarked, “these days mercy passes through structures.” In other words, the days of the Church’s response to poverty issues via the traditional methods of handouts and personal charity were over.

Chenu was not arguing for displacing charity by social justice. He was pointing to the inadequacy of addressing poverty through personal charity alone. Since then, of course, the conscience of the Church as a whole has matured, and this is now a non-existent dilemma.

In 1971 the Synod of Bishops meeting in Rome went so far as to declare that work on behalf of social justice was a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the gospel. It was a statement that would have been unthinkable just a decade earlier.

But nakedness has other meanings and dimensions, more symbolic than actual, perhaps, but equally destructive of human dignity. There’s the nakedness of humiliation, for instance, where the experience itself practically subsumes one’s identity. “Identity,” James Baldwin once wrote, “[is] the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self.”  When identity, however, is humiliation, the self is naked indeed.

This kind of nakedness was a condition Jesus shared in his crucifixion. Matthew records what happened immediately after Pilate rendered his judgment: “The governor’s soldiers took Jesus with them in the Praetorium and collected the whole cohort round him. Then they stripped him…”

Religious paintings of the crucifixion generally protect our sensibilities by showing Jesus and the two criminals executed with him as wearing some sort of loin-cloths, but this was simply not the way Roman justice was done. Public stripping went hand in hand with crucifixion. It was the “lesson” in humiliation Rome directed at non-Romans who ran afoul of her laws and traditions.

When Spartacus and his band of renegade slaves were finally brought to heel after their revolt, more than 6000 of their naked, crucified corpses “permanently” lined the Appian Way, the main thoroughfare in and out of the Rome.

Being stripped of identity and being without rights are two sides of the same coin. From this perspective, one may regard the rights revolution that took off in the 1960s in all industrialised countries, and is still running its course, as a continuing attempt to “clothe the naked.” 

Consider the range of the struggle over these decades: women’s rights, rights of gays and lesbians, children’s rights, minority rights, aboriginal rights, language rights, constitutional rights. The revolution is in fact a broad narrative of inclusion, a story of how previously excluded groups fought to obtain rights of equality, dignity, and respect.

Rights are more than dry legalistic notions. They represent our attempt to give legal meaning to the values we care about, and their extension even in our lifetime has worked its way deeply into our psyches.

No one today can say that women exist only to be homemakers, or that it is sometimes permissible to persecute gays on the basis of their difference, or that in a democracy the majority prevails, whether minorities like it or not.

Clothing the naked thus has a broad moral sweep extending from the provision of clothing, bedding, and sheeting, to structural approaches to eradicating poverty, to affirming everyman’s and everywoman’s dignity, to bringing more excluded people into legal ambit of rights protection.

Catholic social teaching affirms this trajectory today – a trajectory that brings new and considerable depth to a corporal work normally understood in more restricted terms.