Charity

Charity comes from the Latin caritas, a word for dearness, esteem, and warm regard. The root is carus, the adjective for whatever is held dear or costs a great deal. From that root the meaning widened toward affection and, in Christian Latin, toward active love for other people.

English took the name up as a virtue, the way it took up Faith, Hope, and Grace. In the Puritan naming of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Charity stood beside those sisters on baptismal records. Behind the choice sat one famous text. In 1 Corinthians 13, older English Bibles render caritas as "charity", the greatest of the three virtues Paul names. That reading fixed the sense of "charity, love" onto the name itself.

The name barely crossed into Polish, and it has no imieniny in the church calendar here. A Charity in a Polish class register reads at once as foreign, English by association. Yet the meaning underneath translates cleanly. Charity means miłosierdzie and miłość, the same caritas that started it.