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Welfare reform
The following article originally appeared in Salt of the Earth. It is posted here for private use only. It may not be reprinted in whole or in part without the permission of Salt of the Earth magazine.
Churches can't pick up
the welfare tab
Father Fred Kammer, S.J.
"Faith. Works. Wonders." That slogan from Catholic Charities USA in Washington, D.C. sums up the wonderful work of Catholic Charities USA around the nation. Over 225,000 staff and volunteers do miraculous work with over 11 million people each year.
Now some people argue that all social welfare work should be turned over to the churches and religious charities. This is a perplexing desire to many of us who work in social service. Some see it as a strange intrusion into direct services by some religious groups who have been notably absent from the world of social welfare, for example, those represented by the Christian Coalition. Others view it as a well-meaning effort to inject more overtly religious activities into what can be or become secularized social services. But many of us who work daily with needy families see this proposal as just another excuse to cut government spending.
Before responding, it is important to understand how the religious charities have interacted with government supported social-welfare programs up to now. Besides their leadership as innovators of new program ideas, religious charities largely have played two roles.
First, they are the glue that holds folks together when everything else is coming apart. Usually this is short-term help for working or welfare families to meet a crisis--the charity helps pay a seasonally high electric bill to avoid a cutoff in service, or it may provide funds for medicine, to find shoes for the first day of school, to provide shelter for a few nights, or to feed a family for a week.
No charity has the resources to be the long-term support of needy families. That is a role which government fulfills through a complex web of social programs--from Social Security and Medicare to Supplemental Security Income, veterans' benefits, food stamps, and Medicaid.
A second role which charities play has been as a partner to government at all levels. Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish charities have a long history of providing specialized services to the public in partnership with state, local, or federal governments. This includes housing for the elderly, protective services for children, resettlement for refugees, transportation for poor people, and counseling for addicts.
Government provides most of the funding; charities provide the care, commitment, and specialized skills needed by the targeted families. Charities make good partners for government because they are widely regarded as deeply committed to those served, trusted by the communities in which they are located, and efficient and economical.
So, why shouldn't government just turn the whole business over to charities--the way some people think it was 100 years ago? First, religious charities just don't have the resources to do all this work (and a century ago many more poor families simply died of hunger, sickness, and poverty).
Congressional budget cuts on low- and moderate-income families for the next six years are estimated at $504 billion. If you averaged that amount among the 258,000 religious congregations in the U.S., it would cost every every church, synagogue, and mosque in America over $2 million dollars! That's $2 million dollars in addition to what these congregations are already spending on needy families.
Second, the church record on social problems is not necessarily one we want as our national standard. Consider civil rights, for example. While some church people were in the forefront of the civil-rights movement, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. once observed that the most segregated hour in America was Sunday morning worship.
My guess is that Sunday morning segregation continues, coast to coast. I do not want to turn over the determination of who does or does not get a welfare check to every priest, rabbi, and minister in America, to their notion of righteous behavior, or to their satisfaction with the sincerity of a potential recipient's belief.
Some things are better done by a more impartial government--among them the determination of eligibility for public assistance and its distribution. So, too, is creating a fair and equitable tax system to fund needed services.
Some proponents of shifting welfare to the churches have cast a false dichotomy between government and the religious charities. They see a wide gulf between religion and public life. At a hearing this year, one U.S. senator said to me, "I know of lots of volunteers in church-related charities, but I never heard of a volunteer at the welfare office." The problem here is that the senator ignores the broad middle ground where government partners with religious and other charities.
I told the senator that we have hundreds of programs in Catholic Charities which have both government funding and volunteers. That's why government likes to partner with us; we bring so many extra resources to the job.
Ultimately the churches cannot do a better job than the government in meeting all the needs of low-income Americans. And we can't fix all of America's problems.
What we can do is to be the glue that holds needy families together in crisis moments; what we can do is work as partners with government to make people's lives better. But in the name of all Americans, it is government that has a moral obligation in social justice to provide a safety net for our most vulnerable families. Religious charities cannot pretend to replace government's responsibility for the common good nor assume its moral obligations.—END
Father Kammer is the president of Catholic Charities USA.
© 1996 by Claretian Publications
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