Salt of the Earth: Social justice news

Social justice news
November 2000

A Texas-sized taste for the death penalty
Vote early and vote often!
Are conservative Catholics redefining Catholic Social Teaching?—news analysis
An international prayer for peace—from U.S. Catholic

Are conservative Catholics redefining Catholic social teaching?
Every year, usually on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, Catholic parishes take up a special collection for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), the U.S. Catholic bishops' domestic antipoverty and social justice program that addresses, in the words of its mission statement, the "root causes of poverty in America through promotion and support of community-controlled, self-help organizations and through transformative education. . . . By helping the poor to participate in the decisions and actions that affect their lives, CCHD empowers them to move beyond poverty."

The CCHD has had its critics in recent years. The Capital Research Center, a "nonpartisan education and research" organization, has through its Foundation Watch newsletter criticized the CCHD for funding "leftist groups and causes, some already amply blessed with federal funding" as well as "left-wing, big-government political mobilization and 'antipoverty' groups," and community-change organizations (Foundation Watch, October 2000).

These criticisms raise an issue larger than the highly debatable proposition that CCHD functions as an agent of the left. At stake may be the way Catholic social teaching is understood and applied. This implication surfaces strongly in the views of Father Robert Sirico, the cofounder and president of the Michigan-based Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty.

Sirico looks at Christian responsibility to the poor from a self-help, anti-welfare perspective. "Christianity," Sirico writes, "with all its talk of love as the fundamental virtue, never accepted the notion that it was a moral responsibility to help those who could, but would not, help themselves" (The Detroit News, 12/20/92). "I want to say that every human being who is in real objective need has some moral claim [to charity]," he notes, "but I don't want to say that, that if its is owing to your sloth, which is a sin, and to other factors relating to your moral turpitude, that means you have the right to live as well as anybody else who works hard and saves and delays gratification" (quoted in Our Sunday Visitor, 12/5/99).

Besides believing that God helps those who help themselves, Sirico also thinks faith communities, including the Catholic Church, should cease lobbying for the welfare state. "There is a growing body of literature indicating that governmental programs, owing to their political nature, instill a sense of dependency in those they are designed to help. They create the very situations they profess to cure. . . . The time has come for religious leaders to abandon their advocacy of more and more government programs, and take back form the state their rightful position as the primary ministers of the welfare of the poor."

In contrast, Sirico praises the U.S. Catholic bishops' 1996 ten-point "Catholic Framework for Economic Life" because document "provided a moral framework, rejects socialism and excessive government management, calls upon people to put morality at the center of decision-making, while tolerating divergent opinions on the details" (The Wall Street Journal, 12/19/96). "True progress," Sirico writes, "means progress toward freedom, limited government, free enterprise, and desocialization," the move away from the "soft socialism of social democracy, the welfare state, and corporate planning [sic]" (The Detroit News, 7/28/96).

The sticking point for Catholic social teaching arises in the alleged political neutrality of Sirico's position. In an article published in The Progressive Populist (July 15, 2000), writer Bill Berkowitz worries that "Sirico brings to the table an extremely conservative interpretation of Catholic social teaching on economics, and a strategy to subvert the progressive aspects of these teachings." As an example, Berkowitz points to Sirico's reputedly growing influence in the Vatican, as exemplified in his work on a recent Vatican publication The Social Agenda: A Collection of Magisterial Texts, a selection of passages from the social teachings of the popes from Leo XIII to John Paul II. "By selecting," Berkowitz writes, "as the central theme in the papal social encyclicals 'the principal of subsidiarity'—wherever possible responsibilities should be 'handled at a lower organizational level' (read less government regulation)-and emphasizing 'the right to private property,' Sirico is clearly aligning the church's teaching with his own free-market philosophy."

Sirico approvingly cites Pope John Paul II's statement, "In her social doctrine the church does not propose a concrete political or economic model, but indicates the way, presents principles." And in his criticism of the CCHD, Sirico says, "It appears to me that the funding is still directed at groups with a specific, partisan, and ideological approach to relief of the poor favoring political action over filling the voids that still exist in many families and communities which enable people to become independent. There is a particular problem," he says, "when money that is collected from American parishes, which have a broad representation of political ideas, is distributed with such partisan political precision, as it clearly has been in the past."

So the problem, as Sirico presents it, lies with the left-wing, welfare state ideology structuring the church's official efforts to combat poverty. Catholic social teaching presents principles, not programs, and should not be manipulated into supporting political agendas, particularly those of the left.

At the same time, while government antipoverty programs and programs aimed at changing the conditions of social inequality—and their church-based imitators and contributors—may tend to favor liberal solutions to social problems, their conservative critics are not immune from politics. The economic philosophy of reducing the welfare state is no less prone to partisan and ideological excesses than the philosophy that gave rise to such an approach to government in the first place. Moreover, it is equally presumptive to call Catholic social teaching inherently "progressive" as it is to mobilize it in support of "conservative" priorities. Sirico frequently quotes the pope's caution about the excesses of the welfare state, yet the pope has also envisioned a marketplace "appropriately controlled by the forces of society and the state." To say only liberal approaches partake of politics and ideology patently begs the question.

While it is important to hold principles at some distance from the messy business of policy, principles remain lifeless if not applied. Critics such as Sirico may very well be making a useful contribution to the debate about the values underlying the application of Catholic social teaching to American social and economic conditions, but for the sake of the common good, these critics need to adhere to the same standards of good sense and political accountability they demand of those on the other end of the spectrum.—Joel Schorn

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