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The history of religious charities is not exactly immaculate either. The reality is that if you give people power over the desperate, some of them will abuse it.
However, it's also not really correct to say that responsibility transferred from church to state. In some places (especially Catholic countries) the church and state provision of aid were heavily enmeshed. However, you also had things like the English poor laws, which were secular, state-provided relief (of a sort) for the desperately poor. More commonly than either, people in the described categories simply went without aid if they weren't situated within a community they had strong ties to. The social support systems of the past were quite narrowly applicable (almshouses were for people who nowadays we'd consider 'homeless'), don't generalize to modern contexts very well (relatively few people live in small agrarian communities, and even those have been radically transformed from pre-industrial forms), and in some cases have no modern analogs.
I am not exactly a rationalist, but I am generally unimpressed by romanticization of the past. I am likewise skeptical of the desire to reserve a privileged spot for religion in the functioning of society. It is true than in some cases religious organizations did provide certain social services, but I don't seem much reason to think they were uniquely capable in that respect.
The first Poor Law was introduced in 1601 to fill a gap in society that had been created (according to schoolboy history) by the dissolution of the monasteries or (according to revisionist histories of the Reformation) by Protestant spiritual coercion being less effective than Catholic spiritual coercion at getting the money in, so secular coercion was required instead.
I use the term "spiritual coercion" literally - in a society where people actually believed in their religion, "pay up or go to hell" is directly coercive in the same way which "pay up or go to jail" is today.
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The benefit of having charities handle it is that it never is forced to become an entitlement. You can put requirements that ultimately help the person get out of the traps they are in. Governments, at least in modern democratic nations really can’t do that. In modern states, you are entitled to things like food, housing and health services, simply because you live in the country (and in the 21st century, you don’t even have to be here legally). So a person can be perfectly able bodied and collect welfare benefits for basically a lifetime, without having to get a job or do any community service, or go to school. You just go on welfare, and so long as you draw breath, you get a check. People can be generations deep in welfare as well. A charity can say “no, if you want to keep getting help from us, you have to do something productive. You either get a job, or if you truly can’t, you can volunteer with the charity. Your kids have to attend school. You can’t be on drugs.”
Government welfare schemes do do all those things. Unless you are too disabled to work, I am not aware of any countries where you are officially allowed to live for more than a few months as a welfare bum, or more than a few years as a welfare mother. (Unless you count able-bodied retirees in their 60's and 70's as welfare bums, which I do but a supermajority of the electorate don't). In every country I have looked at,
The US has no cash or cash-equivalent welfare at all for able-bodied, childless paupers. In the UK assistance is gated by a fortnightly interview where you have to show receipts for your job search. I don't know much about Continental Europe, but the generous benefits in those countries are limited to people who have already paid into the system. I do know that Italy has no means-tested benefit for people without a contribution history and explicitly expects them to sponge off their parents.
The problem is that chivvying the undeserving poor into work doesn't work well at the best of times, and doesn't work at all when done by large centralised bureaucracies. Victorian England was already rich enough that you couldn't whip effort out of idlers without paying the man with the whip more than the value extracted - the workhouses cost more than just paying people outdoor relief, and were deliberately and consciously maintained as an expensive tool of social control similar to the prisons. Conventional wisdom among British Jobcentre workers is that the signing on process is completely useless for genuinely unemployed people and the only reason for retaining it is that it preferentially inconveniences people with a cash-in-hand job to supplement their benefits.
The other problem is that when you go looking for people who could get a job with ordinary effort but choose not to, you don't find as many as you expect. You find single mothers who can't fit the available jobs around their childcare arrangements, you find disabled people who haven't managed to get a diagnosis through the bureaucracy, you find people who don't have a diagnosable disability but are clearly unemployable basket cases, you find people living in unemployment blackspots without the resources to move, and you find people who had a job when the economy was better and will get another job when the economy improves.
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