catholic social teaching

Of God and Cod

June 7, 2015 by William Bole 1 Comment

Word comes that June 18 is the unveiling date of Pope Francis’s widely anticipated encyclical letter on themes related to the environment. Media coverage will predictably dwell on the newness of such a papal pronouncement, which is to be expected from news. And there will be enough novelty in the occasion, starting with the fact that no pope has ever offered up an ecological encyclical. More interesting, though, is not what Francis will say about the new (about climate change and such), but what he will do with the old—with timeless notions of morality, justice, and the divine.

Acclaimed church analyst and Vatican watcher John Allen has issued a helpful alert, counting the ways in which reporters and pundits will spin the encyclical. Spin No. 2, as enumerated by Allen: “The encyclical is a dramatic break with Catholic tradition.” On the contrary, he believes informed people will conclude that the encyclical “is the tradition.”

Allen recalls, parenthetically, when the Vatican installed solar panels atop its main audience hall some years ago. He wrote a story at the time, leading with: “For two millennia, the Catholic Church has claimed to draw on the power of the Son. As of today, however, it’s also drawing on the power of the Sun.”

Point made. Father, Sun, and Holy Ghost. We’re not present at the creation of Catholic, much less Judeo-Christian, ecological consciousness. That stream began flowing some time ago, and the upcoming encyclical will certainly add to the currents. Beyond that, it’s hard to say just how much Francis will stretch official church teaching on the environment.

Much of the stretching has already taken place within the contours of Catholic social teaching during past papacies beginning notably with John Paul II’s. Here’s my top three list of Catholic social principles that have been arcing toward creation, and will undoubtedly arc further, with Francis’s encyclical:

1. The Person

The dignity of the human person has served as the starting point of church social doctrine. Only in the past quarter century or so have hierarchs conceded that nature, too, has dignity and deserves respect. As John Paul said in his 1990 World Day of Peace message, The Ecological Crisis: A Common Responsibility, the cosmos is “endowed with its own integrity, its own internal, dynamic balance.”

In other words, the natural world doesn’t exist merely for the pleasure and prosperity of humans, as had often been preached through centuries of Western Christianity. It has “its own integrity.”

Human beings haven’t been demoted, in the scheme of creation. We’ve just been put in our cosmic place. Popes and theologians have begun to clarify that humans, while pivotal in God’s design, are nonetheless part of creation, connected to other creatures because we too are creatures of God. Our common creaturely status means that both humans and nonhumans are “radically dependent on God’s ongoing creative activity,” as Terence L. Nichols wrote in his insightful 2003 book, The Sacred Cosmos.

I like this way of thinking. It swaps human-centrism not for eco-centrism (which would be a bad trade), but for a theocentric view of the universe. God is God and we are not.

2. The Poor

Catholic social teaching upholds a “preferential option for the poor.” Increasingly, the church has taken this principle of justice for the poor into debates over environmental justice.

Again, John Paul led the way. “The goods of the earth, which in the divine plan should be a common patrimony, often risk becoming the monopoly of a few who often spoil it and, sometimes, destroy it, thereby creating a loss for all humanity,” he proclaimed at a 1991 Vatican meeting on the ecological legacy of St. Francis of Assisi.

The reason for an ecological option for the poor is simple. Impoverished people and nations suffer most palpably from environmental problems such as rising sea levels and deforestation, reliant as they are on basic raw materials for their economic survival. A damaging cycle begins to take effect. Environmental destruction worsens poverty. Poverty triggers further environmental destruction, as poor nations desperately exploit their natural resources—ramping up mineral and fossil-fuel mining, for instance.

With that in mind, John Paul said in The Ecological Crisis that solutions to that crisis “will not be found without directly addressing structural forms of poverty that exist throughout the world.” Well before the Age of (Pope) Francis, John Paul knew there could be no option for the earth without a preferential option for the poor.

3. The Common (Planetary) Good

The common good is an ancient principle of both Catholic and philosophical ethics. About half a century ago, the Catholic Church began speaking of the “universal common good,” to underline the importance of international justice and solidarity. More recently, Catholic leaders have articulated a “planetary common good,” because “ecological concern has now heightened our awareness of just how interdependent our world is,” as the U.S. bishops pointed out in their 1991 pastoral statement, Renewing the Earth.

The goods of nature are about as common as they get. They include the air we breathe, the water we drink—and the climate we change. As Pope Benedict declared in 2007: “Preservation of the environment, promotion of sustainable development and particular attention to climate change are matters of grave concern for the entire human family.”

Protecting these goods calls for solidarity among individuals, groups, and nations, according to Catholic commentators. But the Vatican has taken a step toward deepening this notion of solidarity, giving nature a seat at the table. “There is a solidarity among all creatures arising from the fact that all have the same Creator and are all ordered to his glory,” said no less definitive a document as the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church.

The new solidarity extends as well into the future, tying the human community to what the U.S. bishops described as “generations yet unborn.” Since the earth is a common heritage, a gift from God, it has to be passed on to future generations, preferably in better condition than when it was received.

…

The encyclical is bound to be dramatic, simply by virtue of the fact that it is an encyclical, the most authoritative form of discourse by a pope. Catholic reflections on the environment will suddenly gain a status and authority they hadn’t enjoyed up to that point, even if Francis adds nothing of substance to that developing tradition within the tradition.

But what might he add, of substance? Where will he take these and other ideas about faith and the earth? How much further will he go toward affirming the common creatureliness of human beings and the natural world? It’s not immediately clear to me how you go beyond saying that people should be in solidarity with possum, or that the relationship between humans and the divine is radically similar to that between God and cod.

Answers will begin flowing, around June 18.

Market Up, People Down

April 11, 2013 by William Bole 2 Comments

Did the recession actually start about 40 years ago?

I didn’t know I was a pessimist on the economy, especially its bottom half, until I asked the opinions of a diverse mix of well-informed people. I sampled the thinking of three people in particular, in a story and sidebar appearing in the April 21 issue of Our Sunday Visitor, a national Catholic weekly with a fairly conservative audience.

I don’t know how many of its readers will agree with economist and social ethicist Charles Clark, when he argues basically—Forget about knocking down poverty rates, if we don’t do something about economic inequality. They might agree with my friend of many years, journalist Cecilio Morales, who has read every study out there about anti-poverty programs, when he explains that getting out of poverty is getting harder all the time. And they’d probably agree with Sam Gregg, who, for his own libertarian conservative Christian reasons, doesn’t expect the poor and vulnerable to get a lift any time soon.

Apparently my slant was none too subtle. The headline writer added the drop line, “Country’s tax and economic policies favor the fortunate few … ” Here’s the main bar, followed by the sidebar:

On March 28, the Wall Street Journal ran a long story headlined, “Use of Food Stamps Swells Even as Economy Improves.” The Journal reported that a record 47.8 million people are enrolled in what is officially called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, despite what the headline writer saw as a brighter economic picture.

One cause of the jump (from about a million fewer the previous year) is that President Barack Obama’s administration has loosened eligibility requirements for food stamps. But that’s hardly the whole story, analysts say. The simpler explanation is that record numbers of Americans are poor.

During the economy recovery, the official poverty rate has remained stuck at around 15 percent (the poverty line is $23,021 for a family of four). That’s pretty much the same as the percentage of Americans getting food stamps.

At the same time, the stock market is roaring. This juxtaposition — market up, people down — should not surprise anyone, said Charles M. A. Clark, senior fellow of the Vincentian Center for Church and Society at St. John’s University in New York.

“There’s never been a connection between the stock market and poverty rates, or even the stock market and the economy,” he told Our Sunday Visitor in a telephone interview.

No trickling down

Even economic growth doesn’t benefit the poor like it used to, according to Clark, who teaches economics at St. John’s. He noted that for decades after World War II, rising tides lifted all boats. Incomes at the economy’s lower rungs grew even faster than those at the top. But that trend was upended in the 1980s. Now, Clark said: “The trickle-down effect has clearly stopped.”

The reasons most often cited for the shift are globalization (which weakened the bargaining power of U.S. workers) and technology (which put a premium on high-skilled labor). But Clark also faults government policies that he says widened gaps between rich and poor.

He points to tax policy. In recent decades the wealthy have been taxed less as a percentage of their rising incomes, and corporate taxes are noticeably lower than they once were, as a percentage of the overall economy, Clark said. Financial deregulation also has allowed Wall Street to drastically up its share of national wealth.

As the U.S. Catholic bishops often have said, the basic moral test of an economy is how well the poor and vulnerable are faring. By that standard, the American economy isn’t doing well and hasn’t been for quite some time, as Clark sees it.

‘High inequality’

The problem, in his analysis, is that public policy is tilted toward the fortunate few. He cites the 2008 financial collapse. “We bailed out and made whole the very rich and the very industries that caused the problem in the first place, but we haven’t bailed out the people affected by it,” Clark said, referring to millions of homeowners whose mortgages are still greater than what their houses are worth.

To tackle poverty, “we have to address high inequality, which no one wants to deal with,” Clark told OSV. Topping his agenda would be an all-out effort to expand access to higher education, which creates opportunities, and health care, which too many lack. And that would require government action, he said.

From a Catholic perspective, education and health care are social goods, but they’re not ends in themselves. They’re examples of what people need to become full participants in society. “In Catholic social thought, it’s the participation that’s important,” Clark said. But that doesn’t happen, he added, when people are excluded from higher education because they can’t pay tuition or when they can’t get the health care they need. (He feels the jury is out on whether the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as “Obamacare,” will do much to solve the latter problem).

Aiding business growth

What complicates this outlook is that many people simply don’t agree.

Samuel Gregg, research director at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, called for an altogether different agenda. Poverty is unlikely to ease, he said, unless Americans finally decide to rein in the national debt and support low-tax-and-regulation policies aimed at promoting growth through entrepreneurship.

“Business and market-driven growth is what gets people out of poverty on a sustainable basis. Not government,” he said. “Just ask the millions of Chinese and Indians who have escaped poverty over the past 20 years” by way of rapid growth.

As to what could be done now to tamp down poverty, Gregg added, “Unfortunately, there are no quick fixes.”

Other analysts are relatively optimistic, predicting the economy will expand and jobs will begin flowing a year from now. Clark acknowledged that economic growth would help. But it takes a long time to reach people at the bottom, he noted.

“Don’t expect it to happen in the next few years,” he said.

And here’s the sidebar, featuring Morales and his vivid description of the poverty trap.

Poverty is rarely a hot topic in American politics, and when it is, one point often gets lost in the discussion.

“Getting out of poverty is a lot harder than most people realize,” said Cecilio Morales, a journalist and expert on public and private nonprofit programs geared to lifting up the poor.

Morales is editor-in-chief and publisher of the specialized weekly Employment and Training Reporter. He cited a typical case: a single mother on welfare who gets help finding a job and lining up child care. To begin with, the obstacles to just holding down that job are sobering.

“One slip and you’re out,” he said by email. “The most common slip? One of the kids gets sick. Day care doesn’t want a sick kid. Burger flippers don’t get leave to look after kids.”

“This is a cobbled life,” Morales added. “Transportation fails. Anything. She loses her job. Then she’s back to square one. With nothing to show for it.”

Since the federal welfare overhaul in 1996, mothers in that predicament have also faced a five-year lifetime limit on the aid. “Welfare reform got a lot of people off the rolls,” Morales said, “but not out of poverty.”

More government help with job creation, day care and other initiatives would bolster the chances of success, he added, but there’s no silver bullet. “Poverty is very hard to beat, and this society puts too few resources into beating it,” said Morales, whose articles on economic policy have appeared in both secular and religious publications.

Samuel Gregg of the Acton Institute, headquartered in Grand Rapids, Mich., would like to see more efforts by people of faith, fewer by government.

“Catholics have concrete responsibilities to the poor, and all of us should be looking for ways to come to the aid of our brothers and sisters in need,” he affirmed. But in his view, the best ways are either through charities or an expanding business that creates jobs.

“There are government Band-Aids that can be applied,” Gregg said. “They’re not a lasting solution.”

For that matter, a job isn’t a lasting solution for many. The Census Bureau recently reported that a quarter of all jobs in America pay below the poverty line for a family of four.

TheoPol will be on assignment next week and will return the following week. …read more

Filed Under: Business, Economics, Politics, Poverty, Religion, TheoPol Blog, Uncategorized Tagged With: Acton Institute, catholic social teaching, food stamps, poverty rates, st. john's university, stock market, wall street journal

An Occasionally Radical Pope

February 12, 2013 by William Bole 1 Comment

In news stories about the numbered days of Benedict XVI’s papacy, the word of choice appears to be “conservative.” In some ways, you could hardly go wrong when you pin that label to a Roman pontiff. The man is, after all, the leader of what is arguably the most hierarchical organization on earth, and that person is inevitably a “he.” The problem is that we tend to hear that word in a secular political echo chamber, and that’s where we might stray.

I don’t know of many political conservatives who would say something like this:

To manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration: for all this, there is urgent need of a true world political authority …

The quote is italicized in Benedict’s 2009 encyclical letter, Caritas in Veritate (“Charity in Truth”). In the wake of the financial meltdown, the document called for regulation of the world economy through international law. In other words: a global New Deal. My friend and occasional collaborator, Drew Christiansen, S.J., pointed out in America magazine’s online edition yesterday that this social encyclical “may be the most radical since John XXIII’s Pacem in terris 50 years ago.”

Contrary to what some of my secular liberal friends might think, this is not like referring to the most left-wing thing ever said by Karl Rove. Catholic social teaching is already left of center (to the extent that ideological labels are useful here) on issues of peace and economic justice. It means something to say that a social encyclical is especially radical on matters such as poverty and the role of government.

Christiansen cited Benedict’s concept of “political charity,” which breaks down the distinction between charity and justice (a distinction overdrawn by many political conservatives who say private charities, not government, should help the poor and struggling).

Here are some powerful words along that line, from the encyclical:

I cannot “give” what is mine to the other, without first giving him what pertains to him in justice. If we love others with charity, then first of all we are just towards them. Not only is justice not extraneous to charity, not only is it not an alternative or parallel path to charity: justice is inseparable from charity, and intrinsic to it.

Catholic Politics, Benedict Style

There’s no doubt that Benedict earned his stripes as a cultural and theological conservative. Still, I find it revealing that during this pontificate, some liberal theologians began latching onto Benedict as a way of countering the rightward political drift of the American bishops. I first caught a glimpse of this maneuver at a presentation by noted moral theologian Lisa Sowle Cahill of Boston College. Here’s how I described the scene in a profile of her for Commonweal (January 14, 2011).

In the conference room of a Tudor-style house across the street from Boston College’s Chestnut Hill campus, Cahill is trying on a new idea. She is giving a luncheon talk, titled “Benedict XVI and the U.S. Bishops: Political Differences and the Difference They Make,” at the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life. Her new idea amounts to this: people who think like Lisa Cahill are more or less in flow with the political currents in Rome, but the American bishops are not.

On the surface it is not an idea she wears exceedingly well, as a feminist theology professor. But she has a point, especially if one accepts the big distinction she makes between issues and politics. “The positions [of the bishops and Benedict] are very similar if not identical, but the way they are played out politically is very different,” she tells a group of twenty-five attendees, mostly faculty members and graduate students. Take Caritas in veritate, Benedict’s first social encyclical, issued in June 2009. Though the letter reiterated the pope’s opposition to abortion and euthanasia, it focused overwhelmingly on other issues such as world poverty, development, reform of international economic institutions, and access to health care. In contrast, Cahill asserts, the U.S. bishops have concentrated on abortion and related issues virtually to the exclusion of other social imperatives. Her conclusion? The American episcopacy is carrying out its politics differently—“and, I would say, in a very biased way.”

The pope also devoted an entire chapter of Caritas to environmental concerns, which he addressed on many occasions. That first social encyclical by Benedict has turned out to be his last (unless there’s another February surprise), but it ought to be enough to temper some of the commentary about this conservative papacy. …read more

Filed Under: Culture, Economics, Environment, International Affairs, Politics, Poverty, TheoPol Blog, Uncategorized Tagged With: carita in veritate, catholic social teaching, global economy, pope benedict

The Right to Work, But Not Really

December 12, 2012 by William Bole 2 Comments

Msgr. George G. Higgins, friend of labor

At the very least, the “right to work” is an impressive feat of branding, as demonstrated yesterday in Michigan. There, the ruling Republicans turned that heartland of industrial unionism into a right-to-work state—the 24th in the nation. Who isn’t literally in favor of such a right? The notion that a person shouldn’t have to pay union dues just to work taps deeply into the reservoir of American individualism.

And yet, ironies abound. I’ll name three:

First, proponents argue that right-to-work laws allow people to go it alone, if they so choose, without a union behind them. But the laws do no such thing. They allow workers to dispense with the obligations of unionism—i.e., paying dues for collective bargaining services. But workers retain the rights of unionism; they receive the benefits of such bargaining. The laws require that collective bargaining contracts cover all workers, both dues payers and free riders.

Second, right-to-work laws allow a minority of anti-union workers to opt out, when the majority has voted in a union. But they don’t allow a minority of pro-union workers to opt in, when the majority has voted down a union. A union can’t represent a minority of workers, according to federal or any state law. In other words, an individual worker is free to decide whether to join a union—as long as he or she decides not to. There goes the right to choose.

Third, the right-to-work people say government shouldn’t tell companies and workers what they can or can’t do. But the laws do exactly that. They make it illegal for a company to withhold union dues from paychecks, as part of a voluntary, negotiated agreement between free labor and free enterprise. Unions and employers together can’t set up a bargaining unit that includes every worker as a dues payer. That’s against the law in right-to-work states. So much for getting government off our backs.

Twenty years ago, my friend and mentor in Catholic social teaching, the great and good Msgr. George G. Higgins, made the moral case for unions in his memoir, Organized Labor and the Church: Reflections of a “Labor Priest” (Paulist Press). Here’s a passage from that volume (on which I collaborated), dealing with right-to-work legislation and the common good:

In the argument over right-to-work laws, the first thing to get straight is that these laws have nothing to do with the right to work. That is, the very term is a verbal deception, a play on words to cloak the real purpose of the laws, which is to enforce further restrictions on union activity. Such laws do not provide jobs for workers; they merely prevent workers from building strong and stable unions…. Further, the pressure for such legislation did not arise from workers seeking their “rights.” The measures, rather, were uniformly backed by employers’ organizations and related groups, which continue to apply the pressure that keeps these laws on the books….

A favorite argument of the right-to-work lobby revolves around states’ rights. They argue that states should have the right to regulate labor problems according to their own desires, and that federal standards should not be imposed upon them. Frankly, the argument is less than honest. Under present conditions, the right to regulate labor unions has not been returned to the states. What is conceded [under the Taft-Hartley Act passed by Congress in 1947] is the limited power to enact union-security regulations more stringent than those in the federal law. But a state may not constitutionally enact regulations more favorable to the union movement.

After arguing a few other legal points, Higgins, who died in 2002, spoke to the moral question:

Apart from this, the argument about individual choice does raise serious questions. Even if an overwhelming majority of workers want a union shop, do they have a right to demand that the minority step into line with this decision? Since the right to work is the right to life itself, may conditions be imposed upon this right?

The answer to both questions, from my standpoint, is a straight yes. People are more than individuals; they are members of society. Such is their nature. For this reason, the rules necessary for harmonious social living may be binding, not merely optional. So, as members of civil society, we must obey laws, pay taxes, and fulfill our duties as citizens…. Likewise, the common good of industrial society may demand that individuals conform to rules laid down for the good of all.

Medical societies and bar associations generally have the right to lay down binding rules for their professions…. In business, few if any workers enjoy an unconditional “right to work.” The employer imposes rules concerning safety, performance of work, health and hygiene, and miscellaneous matters such as smoking and appearance…. These and other conditions of employment express the principle that the common good of the professional or plant community must prevail. In these matters, the right to impose conditions of employment is rarely questioned, even if the wisdom of particular conditions may be debatable.

Similarly, an employer and a union should have the right to agree, in collective bargaining, that union security—the requirement that workers assume some financial obligation to the union—would aid the industrial relationship. In agreeing to union security (when not prevented from doing so by right-to-work laws), the parties set out a norm of conduct for the common good of their industrial community. When a worker takes a job … he or she is no longer a detached individual; the worker becomes a member of the community and comes under its rules and norms. The alternative to such a system of ordered freedom is chaos and exaggerated individualism in the workplace.

I miss George Higgins. …read more

Filed Under: Economics, Politics, TheoPol Blog Tagged With: catholic social teaching, George Higgins, Michigan, right to work, unions

Two Bishops, and the World’s First Climate Change Refugees

November 29, 2012 by William Bole 1 Comment

A message from the Catholic Climate Covenant

At a reception before the start of a Catholic conference on climate change earlier this month in Washington, I asked Bishop Donald Kettler of Fairbanks, Alaska, what brought him to such an event. “One of our villages will be under water in 10 years,” he replied instantly. He was speaking of a coastal community populated by indigenous people—soon to be washed away by rising sea levels resulting from climate change.

I didn’t get the impression, from my conversations with him or from perusing his diocese’s web site, that Kettler is what you’d call a progressive bishop. A big, avuncular man with thick brown eyebrows and a balding head, he seems to go along with the general drift of the American Catholic hierarchy. Which is to say, a largely conservative drift. For example, he has been a frequent objector to the Obama administration’s birth-control mandate, calling it “morally disturbing and contrary to God’s law.”

But a village in his diocese (including its Catholic church) is disappearing from the earth’s surface. If you exist in a reality-based world, as the bishop surely does, such an experience is bound to alter your course.

Yet the story Kettler tells is not nearly as alarming as what I heard from Bishop Bernard Unabali of Papua New Guinea. His diocese includes a raft of islands that are also vanishing under the sea, and many of the islanders have already fled. They have been called the world’s first climate-change refugees, although others (including some of Kettler’s flock) are not far behind.

The link to my December 2 article about the conference is currently open only to subscribers of Our Sunday Visitor, but it’s posted here below.

If I had more space, I would have said more about a lively, interesting group, the Catholic Coalition on Climate Change, which cosponsored the conference. Based in Washington, its main instrument is the Catholic Climate Covenant, which is calling on Catholics and others nationwide to sign “The Saint Francis Pledge to Care for Creation and the Poor.” Take the pledge here, if you are so inclined. And learn more about the whole campaign here.

The organization is trying to reach the broad middle of American Catholic laity, according to its executive director, Dan Misleh. The message isn’t aimed primarily at Roman Catholic tree-huggers (there are more of those than you’d think) or people who would like to see the environmental movement disappear along with the Carteret Islands.

“We’re never going to be the Sierra Club at prayer,” Misleh told me, referring to the Catholic community. “But this is part of who we are as Catholics, part of what the church teaches about care for creation. And we’re getting a whole lot less pushback than we used to.” He was speaking in that breath of the coalition, launched in 2006.

But as I was saying about the bishops and the climate exiles—here’s the report I filed on the conference.

During a talk last month at Catholic University in Washington, Bishop Bernard Unabali unfolded a long rectangular cloth depicting a map of his diocese in Papua New Guinea. Someone from the first row volunteered to hold up one end of the brown-and-yellow cloth, and the bishop pointed to a half-dozen populated islands to the north. Each one “will completely vanish” in the next 20-30 years, due to rising sea levels associated with climate change, he explained.

Bishop Unabali delivered the keynote address at a Nov. 8-10 symposium titled “A Catholic Consultation on Environmental Justice and Climate Change.” Just before the start of the gathering, a reporter asked Bishop Donald Kettler of Fairbanks, Alaska, why he was there. The bishop replied, “One of our villages will be under water in 10 years.” He was referring to a community of Native Alaskans on the Bering Sea.

The comments by these two prelates underscored an atmosphere of urgency bordering on crisis at the meeting sponsored by three organizations including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. But the scholars and experts who spoke there also took a step back to look how Catholic faith can help nurture a balanced environmental ethic.

In Catholic discussions of this kind, St. Francis of Assisi, patron saint of ecology, is usually invoked early and often. And his praises did not go unsung at this gathering, which pulled together nearly 60 scholars including Franciscan Brother Keith Douglass Warner, a theologian and environmental scientist at Santa Clara University. Wearing a brown tunic girded by a white rope belt, he conveyed the Franciscan view that Creation, because it reveals the hand of God, plays “an essential role in salvation history.”

And yet, the papers dealt far less with the man from Assisi than with the bishop of Rome. The subtitle of the symposium was “Assessing Pope Benedict XVI’s Ecological Vision for the Catholic Church in the United States.” Speakers pointed out that he is the first pope to regularly tackle environmental questions, the first to devote a chapter of an encyclical (Caritas in Veritate, in 2009) to these concerns.

A number of conference goers carried around a little book titled simply The Environment, a collection of statements by the Pope (published last spring by Our Sunday Visitor).

There is, for instance, Benedict’s 2009 remark to an interviewer that he feels “an inner obligation to struggle for the preservation of the environment and to oppose the destruction of creation.” He told the Vatican Diplomatic Corps a year later: “If we wish to build true peace, how can we separate, or even set at odds, the protection of the environment and the protection of human life, including the life of the unborn?”

The presentations in Washington indicated that an official Catholic teaching on the environment is emerging—and its key principles revolve around concerns about the person, the poor, and the common good. For example, while modern-day environmentalism often exalts nature over people, the Church looks upon human beings as “the guardians of Creation, which God has entrusted to us,” said Mary A. Ashley of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. “We have a vocation to care for every creature.”

Joining with the bishops’ conference to sponsor the consultation were the Catholic Coalition on Climate Change, which represents a dozen national organizations, and Catholic University’s Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies. Setting the urgent tone was Bishop Unabali’s public lecture that kicked off the meeting on Thursday night, November 8.

After making a few self-deprecating jokes about, among other things, his diminutive size, the bishop spoke in his stilted English of the need for “right relationships” with God and creation. He unfurled the cotton cloth with the map of his Diocese of Bougainville, which includes the outlying Carteret Islands, home to several thousand people. And then he talked about coconuts.

The coconut tree is a staple of sustenance in those South Pacific islands, but higher sea levels mean that salt is inundating the ground and mutating the crops. “The size of the coconut is shrinking,” Bishop Unabali said. Worse, the liquid extracted from them—a primary source of island water—is becoming undrinkable. “It’s too salty now,” he said later in an interview.

The islands are expected to be uninhabitable in the next few years, long before they disappear under the sea. The diocese is spearheading an effort to relocate the residents (nearly all are Catholic) to higher ground in Bougainville, a major island east of the mainland. Some have already fled, making them what many describe as the world’s first climate-change refugees.

With a smile, the bishop acknowledged that not everyone is persuaded by the science of climate change.

“But I say it’s real. It affects everyone, not just small islands. It’s affecting you, too,” he said, waving a finger up and down the tiered lecture room filled with students and members of the public in addition to consultation participants. “It’s come to New York,” he added, alluding to Hurricane Sandy.

Like his brother bishop 6,000 miles away, Bishop Kettler of Fairbanks is responding to the plight of those whose land will soon be submerged along with their local Catholic church. He said in an interview that some 300 Native Alaskan families in the Bering Sea village are affected. The diocese hopes to raise funds for their relocation to a less-endangered outpost that could sustain their culture of fishing and trapping.

The bishop noted that some Alaskans have wondered why these families don’t just resettle in urban areas, where ecological threats do not loom as large. But he added a bit wryly, referring to western Alaska’s indigenous people—“They’ve only been there for 8,000 years.”

Sentiment at the gathering ran strongly in favor of immediate efforts to curtail carbon emissions linked by most scientists to climate change. There was, however, some pushback when one presenter pointed a finger at Catholics who decamp to the suburbs, where ever-larger houses and gas-hogging cars abound. These people are unwittingly part of the problem and are participating in a “structure of sin,” he said.

In the Q&A that followed, a young theologian objected. He said his family intends to buy a suburban home, a decision that has less to do with “hedonism” (a keyword in the preceding talk) than with the desire for “a safer neighborhood and a better school system for my children.”

Still, retired Bishop William Skylstad of Spokane, Washington—one of five American bishops in attendance—caught the general mood when he warned of multiple environmental crises. He noted, for example, that people are dying every day for lack of clean, potable water, and he adjourned the meeting with these words: “The time is now. The urgency is now.” …read more

Filed Under: Education, Environment, International Affairs, Poverty, TheoPol Blog Tagged With: Alaska, catholic social teaching, climate change, Papua New Guinea, pope benedict, St. Francis.

The Social Mortgage

October 11, 2012 by William Bole 2 Comments

Not really, but it can be a good thing, just like unemployment insurance and Food Stamps.

I’ve enjoyed many conversations about the economy with my conservative friends and acquaintances, but I’m often struck by how viscerally they respond when I share with them a particular Catholic social teaching. That is the principle of a “social mortgage,” basically the idea that the public has a legitimate and necessary claim on private wealth and property.

The doctrine has very deep roots in the Judeo-Christian worldview. It’s grounded primarily in the Creation story, and specifically God’s gift of the earth to all of humankind—styled by Roman pontiffs as the “universal destination of goods,” intended for use by all God’s children. When I speak of this, the typical response I get is, “Are you saying that everybody has a right to the money I earn?”

I don’t think “right” is the right word here, but that aside, the short answer, pretty much, is yes. All of us owe quite a bit to society, usually more than we’re prepared to admit. That goes for the wealthiest citizens as much as for the rest of us. To neutralize a current political slogan: everyone is a taker as well as a giver.

Case in point: so-called “corporate welfare,” which has drawn too little scrutiny in the long wake of Mitt Romney’s 47-percent revelations. Economics writer James Surowiecki provides a handy summary of this public largesse in his “Financial Page” column in The New Yorker’s Oct. 8 edition.

What he shows, in his brief sampling, is that membership in the corporate elite does have its taxpayer-funded privileges. Surowiecki points out that government has given a leg up to business ever since the days of high tariffs and generous land grants to railroads, but that recent years have seen an expansion of the “corporate welfare state.”

For examples, Surowiecki mentions oil companies, which lease millions upon millions of acres of public land from the government, at what amount to rates far below any conceivable market value (even when adjusting for royalties); the telecomm industry, which, in the late 1990s, was given swaths of the digital spectrum worth billions of dollars, purely as a gift from Uncle Sam; the mining industry, which leases federal land for a grand sum of five dollars an acre, and is able to pocket 100 percent of the profits from gold, silver, and other minerals it extracts. He also points to farmers and their direct subsidies for crop insurance and drought aid, import quotas for the benefit of sugar companies, federal deposit insurance, ethanol subsidies, the huge expansion of copyright and patent protection in recent years, and other ways in which the public aids private wealth accumulation.

Dependency, in Perspective

Surowieck rightly points out that corporate welfare isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “Some of these giveaways arguably do a lot of good,” he writes without elaborating. (I’ll submit one example: government-funded cancer research, which pharmaceutical companies are able to patent and parley into expensive drugs, with net gain for society and, less diffusely, their shareholders).

But he adds quickly that companies on the receiving end of these and many other policies “are just as dependent on the government as the guy who gets the earned-income tax credit.” He started off the piece talking about the 47 percent, so you know where he’s going with this.

And, when Romney concentrates his fire on the latter [the EITC recipient] rather than on the former [dependent businesses], it makes you wonder if his problem isn’t with government assistance per se, but only with government assistance to poor and working people. Romney may say that he wants small government, but what he’s pushing for is a government that’s small when it comes to helping people and big when it comes to helping business.

I wouldn’t call these companies “dependent,” any more eagerly than I’d slap the derisive label on a secretary who loses her job and gets unemployment insurance because of a financial crash, especially when the reckless driver in that collision is an industry later bailed out by the feds. I’d find it more meaningful to say, quoting Martin Luther King, that each of us is “eternally in the red,” indebted to both God and neighbor—and often falling behind on our social mortgage. …read more

Filed Under: Economics, Politics, Poverty, TheoPol Blog Tagged With: 47 percent, catholic social teaching, corporate welfare, James Surowiecki, Romney, social mortgage

God at Work

August 29, 2012 by William Bole 2 Comments

In their annual Labor Day message, the U.S. Catholic bishops have declared that it is high time to put workers and their families “at the center of economic life,” adding: “The relative silence of candidates and their campaigns on the moral imperative to resist and overcome poverty is both ominous and disheartening.” The bishops are right about this—more than they may realize.

Neither party has an economic plan that puts the lowly or even the middling first. Republicans venerate “job creators,” which functions as a pet name for the wealthy. Democrats purport to speak for the middle class but are mostly inarticulate when it comes to labor unions and policies to promote a living wage. And, neither party has much to say about poverty.

Truth be told, the American bishops themselves have scarcely put the poor and downtrodden “at the center” of their own election-year discourse. All year they’ve been absorbed in a campaign launched on the shaky premise that government and notably Barack Obama are trampling upon their religious rights. One prelate who has tried to plot a different course is Bishop Stephen Blaire of Stockton, California, who made headlines this past spring for critiquing Paul Ryan’s budget plan, in his capacity as chairman of the hierarchy’s Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development. In that role he has now offered up the Labor Day statement.

“Despite unacceptable levels of poverty, few candidates and elected officials speak about pervasive poverty or offer a path to overcome it,” says the 2012 message issued by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops under Blaire’s name. “We need to hear from those who seek to lead this country about what specific steps they would take to lift people out of poverty.”

Channeling John Paul

As it should, the statement cites the 1981 papal encyclical Laborem Exercens (“On Human Work”), in which Pope John Paul II spoke of unions as “an indispensable element of social life.” This encyclical letter is really all that a Catholic, qua Catholic, needs to understand about human dignity in the workplace. It is also one of the most elegant philosophical meditations on work ever written.

Laborem Exercens is almost too radical to discuss in polite company. Its operative theme is “the priority of labor over capital,” words that would provoke the “class warfare” police if uttered by a politician today. The papal message is that money and machines, the stuff of capital, must serve the worker, not the other way around.

The encyclical also described work as “a key, probably the essential key, to the whole social question.” John Paul had a profoundly radical way of expressing this idea. “The basis for determining the value of work is not primarily the kind of work being done, but the fact that the one doing it is a person,” he wrote in a line that is humanistic with a vengeance.

For John Paul, a living wage—enough to support a worker and a family—was a given. In Catholic social parlance it is a “minimum requirement” of justice, the least that work should do for us. But more than that, work is a deeply social activity, as limned by the Polish pope. Even a lone craftsperson is drawn into a larger nexus of work, because he or she uses tools others have made from raw materials. “In working,” the pope wrote, “man enters into the labor of others.” (Yes, the exclusive pronouns are distracting though what you’d expect from a mid-to-late 20th century Eastern European.)

Co-operating with the Creator

As John Paul often said, institutions can foster these human ties in the workplace. Above all, he commended the role of unions, “not only in negotiating contracts, but also as ‘places’ where workers can express themselves. They [unions] serve the development of an authentic culture of work,” he said a decade later in his encyclical Centesimus Annus (marking “100 Years” of modern Catholic social teaching).

The pontiff did not stop at that leftward point. He tacked further in that direction, arguing in Centesimus that when corporations engage in such tactics as “the breaking of solidarity among working people”—in other words, union busting—they are essentially forfeiting their right to ownership.

From a strictly theological view, John Paul also saw dignified work as a way of cooperating with God in the continued unfolding of Creation. In Genesis, God planted a garden and instructed his children to fill it with good things. Human work of all kinds is the primordial way in which human beings follow this call: “In carrying out this mandate, man, every human being, reflects the very action of the Creator of the universe,” he wrote in Laborem Exercens.

Most of these meditations fall outside of what would be considered prudent discourse in American politics today. Some politicians, namely Obama, might be accused of harboring beliefs like the illegitimacy of ownership in some circumstances, but hardly anyone visible on the national stage actually thinks this way. And that includes, on roughly 364 days a year, the American Catholic hierarchy. …read more

Filed Under: Economics, Politics, Poverty, TheoPol Blog Tagged With: catholic social teaching, Labor Day, Obama, organized labor, Pope John Paul II, religion and politics, religious freedom, U.S. Catholic bishops

Paul Ryan, Liberation Theologian

April 25, 2012 by William Bole 4 Comments

Mary exercised the option

The “preferential option for the poor” is one of those great social doctrines nobody ever heard of—and to the extent that it’s known, it’s generally loved by the left and loathed by the right. So, the sudden interest in this Catholic social principle—inside the halls of power—is unexpected. That’s all the more so because the attention has emanated from a corner office in one hall of exceptional power, occupied by Paul Ryan.

The Republican chairman of the House budget committee isn’t knocking the preferential option, either. He’s saluting it as “one of the primary tenets” of Catholic social teaching, which he currently avows. He’s complimenting a doctrine that says a nation and its government should have no greater priority than lifting up the poor. Yes, I’m still talking about social-welfare-budget-slashing, upper-bracket-tax-cutting, Ayn Rand-adulating Paul Ryan.

True, Ryan appears to be seeking cover as much as wisdom. All this got started with religious leaders and activists who denounced his budget proposal unveiled on March 20, which would deal a blow to programs for the poor and homeless. The Wisconsin lawmaker responded a couple of weeks ago with a Christian Broadcasting Network interview in which he held forth on Catholic social principles including the preferential option for the poor.

Then the U.S. Catholic bishops chimed in. They’ve been shy on social justice issues of late, but last week they roused themselves to complain publicly about the Ryan plan, which could come off as a preferential option for billionaires. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released letters it had sent to two congressional committees including Ryan’s, declaring that his plan fails to meet “moral criteria.” That includes placing a “circle of protection” around programs for the needy like Food Stamps.

Ryan, a Catholic, brushed aside the criticism on Fox News. He argued lamely that the letters made public on April 17 didn’t count because they came from committees of bishops, not from all of the American bishops, who meet and speak collectively only twice a year at general meetings.

Though not mentioned by name, Ryan had probably helped stir the bishops by arguing in the press that his budget embodies the social principles. (Ryan has also tried to leverage the small-is-beautiful Catholic doctrine of “subsidiarity”—a topic for another time.) On Tuesday of this week, an ad hoc group of nearly 90 Georgetown University scholars issued a letter going after Ryan for his representations of Catholic social teaching, in advance of a lecture he will deliver there tomorrow. In response, Ryan continued with his theological repartees. Through a spokesman on Tuesday he said the preferential option for the poor “does not mean a preferential option for bigger government.”

Ryan’s clearest word on the matter (so far) came in the interview aired April 12 on CBN, in which he professed his Catholic faith and his adherence to the “social magisterium” or teaching authority. He continued, in part:

… the preferential option for the poor, which is one of the primary tenets of Catholic social teaching, means don’t keep people poor, don’t make people dependent on government so that they stay stuck at their station in life. Help people get out of poverty out onto [a] life of independence.

One could question if Pell grants for college tuition (on Ryan’s chopping block) breed dependency among needy families any more than billions in tax subsidies do among Big Oil executives. That aside, I find it hard to argue with what he says here, as far as it goes. The preferential option is about liberating the poor, not making them dependent on government or any institution.

Sending the Rich Away Empty?

The concept is, after all, a product of liberation theology. It took off in the 1960s with the writings of left-leaning Latin American liberation theologians and made a gradual landing in Rome, more or less intact. In his 1987 encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (“The Social Concerns of the Church”), Pope John Paul II called the preference for the poor “a duty of solidarity.”

It has often been politicized, but it’s not really political. The doctrine is best understood as a statement of faith in the God of the Hebrew Scriptures and in Jesus of Nazareth. In ancient Israel, the prophets gave witness to God’s special concern for the powerless. At the start of his public ministry, Jesus returned to the synagogue in the dusty hamlet where he had grown up, and proclaimed his mission to “bring glad tidings to the poor.” Soon after, an angry mob chased him out of town.

In my fallible reading of the biblical narratives, this Good News for the poor actually began with Jesus in the womb. After an angel delivered to Mary the surprising news that “the Lord is with you,” she went to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who declared: “Most blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” At that moment Mary broke into song, responding with her “Magnificat.”

My soul magnifies the Lord … he has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty….” (Luke 1:46-55)

Sounds like what some would call “class warfare.” That’s been more or less the rap against liberation theology and the preferential option. But the teaching, as articulated by most theologians (and leaving aside for now the young Blessed Mother’s rabble-rousing), isn’t against anyone. It’s not meant to exclude the wealthy. Its purpose is to include the poor and make them full participants in society. The option is, fundamentally, for the whole community, because poverty inflicts countless wounds on the social body, tearing away at the bonds of solidarity. What suffers most is the common good.

What does it mean to include the poor? A lot of things, but popes and theologians have said it starts with simply listening to the downtrodden and lifting up their voices in the public debate. That would be a good start for anyone cobbling together a budget plan, but it’s a step rarely taken.

Fair to say that this teaching calls for government to stand with the poor and not lopsidedly with the rich. Ryan might have it backwards, in other words (as many of our political leaders do). Still, he should get points for venturing out of his ideological comfort zone and debating poverty on liberationist terms. By endorsing the preferential option, he’s implicitly acknowledging in theory (I realize the qualifiers are mounting here) that the poor should come first. That’s the key moral principle.

The rest is how that principle gets put into practice. The rest is—in the best sense of the word—politics. …read more

Filed Under: Culture, Economics, Education, Politics, Poverty, TheoPol Blog Tagged With: catholic social teaching, liberation theology, paul ryan, preferential option for the poor, religion and politics, u.s. bishops

Half-Rights

March 28, 2012 by William Bole 3 Comments

The news from the nation’s capital this week was much about queues outside the Supreme Court, about the three days of oral arguments there over the Affordable Care Act, and most intensely, about the law’s so-called individual mandate—which calls for almost everyone to carry health insurance. The argument against the mandate is basically that it infringes upon a person’s rights, in this case, not to purchase a service he or she doesn’t want. If you missed the arguments over whether not having access to healthcare is an even greater violation of human rights, you could be forgiven. There was no such colloquy in the Court; there was scarcely a possibility of it.

That’s because we the people—or maybe just they the lawgivers and legal interpreters—have a somewhat pinched view of rights. We’re enamored of some rights but not others. As a nation we have a dynamic tradition of affirming (certainly in principle) negative rights—not to be harmed in some way. We have far less to say about positive rights, which uphold social and economic claims to a decent standard of living. These are the two great human-rights traditions, and we characteristically choose one.

Still, the unacknowledged rights are hardly just a matter of theory, even in the United States. They’re enshrined in international law as well as in religious and ethical systems of social thought.

For example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, embraces the don’t-tread-on-me civil and political rights cherished by Western liberal democracies. But it also lifts up the social rights to food, housing, healthcare, and other goods—rights articulated by most Western democracies. And it constitutes part of international human-rights law.

The Universal Declaration is global though in no way alien to the United States. We not only signed it: We took the lead in drafting it. Its language and inspiration echoes in part the “Second Bill of Rights” proposed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his 1944 State of the Union Address but never enacted, as Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon pointed out in her highly readable 2001 book A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Roosevelt called for economic rights including the guarantee of adequate medical care and a job with a living wage.

Support for social rights is the rule rather than the exception among the major religious faiths. The Catholic Church has probably the best-known system of social ethics, and the church holds emphatically that human beings have a legal right to the goods they need to participate actively in community. Marking the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration in 1998, Pope John Paul II spoke of social and economic rights as “inseparable” from other human rights.

John Paul went even further: “It is important to reject every attempt to deny these rights a true juridical status.”

A View from the Gurney

Personally I don’t go to the wall on the question of whether something like healthcare ought to be christened a right. It’s fine with me to call it a basic human need that any decent society should provide. Certainly, many thoughtful and conscientious people aren’t comfortable with the nomenclature of rights.

One of them is Edmund Pellegrino, an emeritus professor of medicine and medical ethics at Georgetown University who served from 2001 to 2009 as chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, a panel created by President George W. Bush. Pellegrino shies away from rights talk and prefers to speak instead of obligations, partly because, as he rightly observes, there’s no legal framework for economic rights in the United States. All the same, his critique poses a powerful challenge to the status quo on healthcare politics.

At an April 2008 forum on healthcare reform sponsored by Georgetown’s Woodstock Theological Center, Pellegrino (who is Catholic) shared a stage with a rabbi and an imam. All three stood by the fundamental moral precept that healthcare shouldn’t be treated as a commodity—as a business driven solely by market forces. Illustrating the difference between healthcare and other things that might be left to the marketplace, Pellegrino put it this way: “When you’re on that gurney, you’re not buying beer, panty-hose, or Band-Aids.” You don’t want market forces to determine the kind of care given to you. He continued:

Is there a moral obligation on the part of a good society to those who are sick, disabled, not able to function, and even to our brothers and sisters who are not taking care of themselves and are not being responsible, but who have the same dignity that you and I have?

That question, Pellegrino added, ought to be the starting point of any debate over healthcare policy. It barely surfaced this week in three days of considerations by the highest court in the land. …read more

Filed Under: Culture, Economics, International Affairs, Politics, TheoPol Blog Tagged With: catholic social teaching, healthcare, human rights, individual mandate, religion and politics, woodstock theological center

Parsing out “Christian Family”

February 16, 2012 by William Bole 4 Comments

For some time now the coupling of the words “Christian” and “family” has communicated a particular message in our culture, an assertive political stance. One medium of the message has been the ubiquitous voter guides, the kind handed out to evangelical churchgoers just before Florida’s Republican primary this year. Leading that effort was the statewide Christian Family Coalition, a conservative group that sized up the candidates on selected issues deemed critical to family preservation. Good light was thrown on presidential hopefuls who oppose legal abortion and same-sex marriage, as one would expect from such an organization. The same favorable light was cast on opponents of health insurance reform and higher taxes to stimulate the economy, as one would expect from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

One issue highlighted in the Florida guide might suggest that liberal Christians have too-hastily tagged their conservative brethren as rigid biblical literalists. That is the question of amnesty for some undocumented immigrants, which the biblical conservatives reject in what would seem to involve a limberly interpretive approach to Matthew 25:35—“I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” Each of the eight Republican presidential candidates assessed by the Florida coalition was able to bring home an excellent Christian report card.

People could argue all day about what sorts of temporal positions ought to be taken by a group with “Christian” and “family” in its name, but one basic question is likely to be lost in the colloquy: What is a Christian family, anyway?

Non-nuclear

Ask your typical pro-family activist, and the answer would probably simmer down to: mom, pop, and the kids. This is not, however, a definition of the biblical Christian family. It is a serviceable description of the nuclear family, a modern construct that didn’t materialize until well into the Industrial Revolution. What distinguishes this model of family are thick boundaries placed between itself and networks of biological kin as well as communities.

Is it asking too much for a Christian family to live up to this nuclear ideal? No, it’s asking too little, at least from the standpoint of biblical theology.

In my mind, the most enlightening work on this subject was and remains Lisa Sowle Cahill’s Family: A Christian Social Perspective, published in 2000. A couple of years ago, Cahill—a Roman Catholic who is one of the most prominent theological ethicists of any persuasion—told me that her idea for the book originated in a series of meetings she attended in New York, sponsored in part by the Institute for American Values. By her account, there was too much talk of the need to “re-stigmatize” out-of-wedlock births, too much handwringing over the personal moral failings of those who fall outside traditional family norms. The gatherings led her to pose the simple but vital question of what constitutes a Christian family.

In her book she approached the question in part by examining biblical sources that shine light on first-century Christian families. She found that the primary allegiance of early Christians was not to the patriarchal family but to the Christian community—reconceived as “the new family.” Christian commitment had the effect of transcending biological ties.

Cahill examined other sources, including Catholic social doctrine upholding the family as a “domestic church” that inculcates generosity and solidarity. She concluded that the Christian family is not modeled by the particular structure of the modern nuclear family, “focused inward on the welfare of its own members.” Rather, it is marked by concern for those outside the boundaries of biological kinship. It can find expression in single-parent families, families broken by divorce, gay and lesbian families, blended families, and adoptive families.

“The Christian family defines family values [her emphasis] as care for others, especially the poor,” wrote Cahill, who teaches at Boston College. “It appreciates that truly Christian families are not always the most socially acceptable or prestigious ones.” Such values highlight “compassionate action” and “personal commitment to … mercy and justice.” Family values are, in other words, social values.

Yes, the family that implodes will have a tougher time reaching out in service to the world. Unavoidably, each family is partly “focused inward on the welfare of its own members.” And that does bring us back more or less to the nuclear family, which, generously defined, should be considered the most basic unit of social solidarity.

But it’s worth noting that the family as limned in the New Testament is not simply that. It is made up of persons for others, as the Jesuits like to say. It is concerned about peace and the poor—two biblical keywords I have never seen in a conservative Christian voter guide. …read more

Filed Under: Culture, Politics, Poverty, TheoPol Blog Tagged With: boston college, catholic social teaching, Christian family, lisa sowle cahill, pro-family, religion and politics

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