Caring for the Poor

“I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.” – James Madison, author of the Constitution.

Between 1791 and 1804, Haiti was a French colony in a state of revolt. The Haitians were attempting to overthrow the enslaving French and establish their own republic. In this attempt, they were successful. But this same attempt created a large number of French refugees, many of whom fled to the United States.

Americans felt a debt of gratitude to the French for the inestimable help the French navy had provided American troops during America's recent revolution. Without the French navy, the Americans could not have triumphed. Many called for the government to provide assistance to the refugees.

The quote above was James Madison's response to those calls.

Madison very much wanted to help the refugees, but he knew there was no way to justify that help within the confines of the Constitution. The money was taxpayer money meant to be expended on matters of national importance. It was not to be squandered on specific individuals at the whim of legislators. If help were to be given, it had to be given by individuals and private organizations.

The USCCB 
Today, some of the more reckless bishops in the USCCB have called for Paul Ryan's head. His budget, they claim, is not Catholic.
It does not care for the poor.

But the Constitution has not changed since Madison's time. There is within it, to this day, no provision whereby public funds can be disbursed for private benefit.

As an elected official, Paul Ryan has a duty to care for the funds entrusted to him. The bishops have a duty to recognize Ryan's duty.

Let's put this another way.

Assume you were a bank teller. You are a friend of mine. I walk in and plead with you. I need money. My family is starving, my children homeless. I need money. You know it is true.

As you stand at your station in the bank, you realize you have money close at hand - a whole drawer full of it. Would your Catholic faith justify you in giving part or all of the money in that drawer to me?

If you refuse to reach into the bank till to hand me money, would you be violating your Catholic faith?

That's essentially what the USCCB is demanding of Paul Ryan.
There are poor people.
Paul Ryan is standing at the bank till.
"Give them the bank's money!" cry some of the USCCB bishops.

There is no provision in the Constitution which permits this.
The bishops know this, or should know this.
Their attempt to read into the Constitution something which is manifestly not there should be worrisome.


The Abortionists
The USCCB is not the only group who has tried to read into the Constitution something that is not there.

"[S]pecific guarantees... have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance," according to Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.

This was the basis upon which contraception and abortion was legalized.

The USCCB protests mightily against this false reading of the Constitution.

Many of its bishops now protest mightily in favor of their own false reading.

God gives us everything we have out of His own abundance.

I am supposed to imitate Him by giving to other people out of the abundance He has given me.

My charity imitates the divine charity.

I can hold a gun to your head and take your things, but I cannot force you to be charitable.

Confiscation is not charity, it is taking.

Taxation is not charity, it is taking.

Insofar as I take resources from you, I take from you your ability to imitate God's generosity.

I steal from you your ability to be charitable as God is charitable.

I violate your ability to image God.

When a child is legally aborted, the state takes of the life of a child.
When a man is unreasonably taxed, the state takes the man's ability to imitate the life of divine charity.

Both are sins, the first much more heinous than the last.
But, if the first is allowed, the last seems not so much a sin.

In attacking Paul Ryan, the USCCB is imitating Planned Parenthood.
There is a reason they do this.

It is the job of Christians to care for the poor.

It is not the job of the government - at least not any government ruled by the US Constitution - to care for the poor.

We Christians should care for the poor without looking to the government for help. The government should assist us in this endeavor by drastically lightening the load of taxes it imposes on us.

When we are lightly taxed, we have excess goods which we then give to the poor ourselves. This allows us to imitate the life of divine charity directly. 

We get to practice the presence of God by practicing constant charity with the resources we have earned through our work and won through God's providence. The government should be small, weak, and out of the way so that we can proclaim and live the Gospel without hindrance, interference or government intermediary.

Charity flows from individuals towards individuals. Government's role is to facilitate this one-on-one charity, not confiscate it. The government can never become what we already are.

Christians are children of God. 
The Church is a real person, ensouled by the Holy Spirit. 
Charity is love between individual persons. 
The Church can practice real charity because the Church is a person.
Government is not a person.

Government cannot be a child of God. 

Government is incapable of practicing divine charity because government is not a person. 

The bishops of the USCCB do not seem able to distinguish between God and government.

Thus, they compel Paul Ryan to do something which violates Catholic Faith.

They have become the evil they claim to fight.

This is a source of sadness for all Catholics.

P.S. 
The original article ended with the line above, but I have been thinking about this and a further disturbing thought occurred to me.


Certainly the bishops know everything I have said above. 
So why do they continue to push for something so wrong?

Many answers could be given to that question, but one answer is particularly disturbing: the bishops do not trust their flocks.


The bishops don't trust that, if left to our own devices, we will be good Catholics.
They believe in government employees.
The do not believe in their own parishioners.

They believe you can be paid to be a good Catholic, you can be employed to be one.
But they do not believe their own parishioners can be good Catholics (unless those Catholics are also government employees, I suppose).


Governments care, parishioners don't.


John Chrysostom, a doctor of the Church, pointed out that if the rich man has more than he needs, then he is stealing from the poor. If I have ten pairs of shoes in my closet, but I only really need two pair, then I have stolen the other eight pair from the poor. 

A poor man who is in desperate need, a poor man who has asked for sustenance from someone who can provide it, but is refused that sustenance because of the provider's lack of charity, has a right to take what he needs - it is not theft, in that case, for the poor man to take it. 

The need must be very great - it must be life-threatening, in fact - but if it is a very great need and the miserly rich man will not satisfy it, then the poor who take that great and necessary thing have not stolen from the rich. Rather, the rich were stealing from the poor by withholding it. The poor man is just acquiring what is, in justice, his. 

In that scenario, the miserly rich man is the thief. 

Bishops think their own parishioners are just a pack of thieves.

Bishops wonder at many lay people's low opinion of bishops.
Given the evidence, laity may legitimately wonder at the bishops' low opinion of us.

Solidarity... With the USCCB

In the last five years, I have visited The Catholic Thing only twice, because their commentary is consistently stupid. That having been said, someone recommended an article to me that is so incredibly stupid I could not refrain from writing this post.


Peter Brown attempts to lay out the differences and similarities between subsidiarity and solidarity. Insofar as he sticks to just that, he does a fair-to-middlin' job of it.


But, Lord, have mercy!
His examples are simply, incredibly, inexorably, inexecrably stupid. 


Take this jaw-dropping whopper of idiocy, for instance:

The Knights of Columbus was originally set up along the friendly society model. ... A small community could provide for the health care that was available in 1870. It was much harder in 1910. It would be impossible today with the cost of care for, say, cancer or heart disease easily running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. If subsdiarists really want the 1870 community model , then the tradeoff is accepting 1870’s health care. Any takers? 

Who in the name of God's green earth does he think pays for health care today? Tooth fairies? Does he think NO ONE pays for health care? That bodies pile up in the streets, unshriven, unwashed and unburied?


Insurance companies are, in terms of financial subsidies, functionally identical to friendly societies. There is zero difference between them in that utilitarian sense. 


And of course the cost of modern medical care for cancer or heart disease is NOT "impossible today". If it WERE impossible today, then no one would be able to pay for such care. In fact, hundreds of thousands of people successfully pay for such care every year, and most of them DO NOT pay for it out of their own pockets. 


These bills are paid off by the modern equivalent of "friendly societies" - insurance companies. It's just that Blue Cross/Blue Shield run a much tighter financial ship and are much better businessmen than say, the The Union of Illustrious Catholic Parishioners of East Timbuktoo. Well, and BC/BS doesn't hold as many prayer meetings. 


Furthermore, "friendly societies" are not moribund. If Brown had bothered to do ANY research, he would have discovered that the Knights of Columbus has one of the highest-rated life insurance companies in the nation. Brown apparently fails to realize that the vaunted "solidiarity" can be attained through either secular or sacred institutions. Both work. Obviously. 


So, the community DOES already pay for health care.
Community members pay via whichever insurance company each member of the community chooses to join. Those who don't choose to join STILL have their health care paid for by another community institution - the Catholic hospital - or by yet another community institution, the state or federal government.




When Did Friendly Societies Begin to Fail?


According to Brown:

"The friendly societies actually began collapsing well before the emergence of the modern welfare state."

Maybe the man could pick up a book and read it sometime. Originally, the monasteries were the source of everything we consider "welfare". The modern government-run welfare state doesn't begin anywhere in Europe until the governments destroy the monasteries. England didn't need welfare and poor houses until Henry VIII destroyed the monasteries. Europe didn't need government-run welfare until Napoleon destroyed the monasteries. 


In the 1880s, Bismarck began old age pensions, medical care, unemployment insurance and all the rest of it as part of his Kulturkampf - his bid to destroy the power of the Church in Germany. He had lost the battles he created through overt attacks on Church authority in the 1870s, so he went to more subtle and nuanced attacks in the 1880s. He followed Julian the Apostate's strategy. As we now see, it worked. 


Friendly societies fell apart because the government TOOK all the money that had been given to friendly societies. If Brown had just read Chapter 7 of Larry Elder's "Ten Things You Can't Say In America", he would have known that:

"In 1871, the Chicago fire nearly destroyed the city, yet it entirely rebuilt itself without any government aid.... Economist Thomas Sowell notes that nearly 70 cents of every welfare dollar never actually makes it to aid the intended victims.... In 1910, before England's massive welfare state, there were 26,877 registered mutual aid societies, and some estimate there were nearly as many unregistered ones... When, however, England decided to federalize welfare, the number of mutual aid societies plummeted.... since government took over aid to the needy, individual assistance was no longer required. And, since individuals saw taxes go up to support a welfare state, they felt less inclined to give more on top of that which the government already required."

Even if they wanted to give more, they couldn't. The government had taken their excess.


Then Brown makes the absolutely ludicrous claim that friendly societies can't work in a highly mobile society such as ours. 

Another thing that killed the friendly societies was the other modern capitalist phenomenon: social mobility. With people increasingly moving from farm to city and from city to city, the social solidarity that made the societies work fell apart.

I ask the dear Lord in heaven, how any man can write anything so stupid and still get it by editors, still get it published? Of course, friendly societies were created PRECISELY in response to a highly mobile society. Why did the Knights of Columbus form, for instance? To care for millions of Irish immigrants who had each journeyed thousands of miles from their homes. Where did the English friendly societies originate? Why, in the mobility forced upon English farmers as a result of the enclosure movement. 


Friendly societies have always been a RESPONSE to mobility. They are welcoming committees, stabilizing influences for a mobile people. He's got the cart firmly in front of the horse, and now wishes the horse to dance backwards to match his tune. 


The Coup de Grace


And, to prove that Peter Brown is a complete idiot, he testifies to it:

But what would replace the friendly societies after the world wars and the Great Depression delivered the coup de grace? There was really no one left but the state and some private insurance beset by the same adverse selection problems that killed the societies. As the adverse selection problems inherent in private insurance have grown, the state has assumed an ever greater role. 

Oh, those poor governments! They just stood by and sighed while two world wars and a great depression broke out for no reason at all! The governments had nothing to do with any of that! And of course, the state just HAD to step in to save all those poor insurance companies, who would barely survive if it wasn't for benevolent government assistance!


Horrors! Think, Emily, think what the world would be like if government was too small, too weak, to save us from the nasty wars and depressions we inflicted on ourselves! If only our governments had been stronger then, we would NEVER have had such terrors! 


Oh, whoa is me! I faint at the thought of small, weak government! Oh, hold me!


Yeah.
Whatever.


At the turn of the last century, with the racist Woodrow Wilson at the helm, the American government stole power from the people, passed laws to eviscerate and emasculate people, so it could accumulate the power it wanted. 


The government stole the friendly societies' money, stole their social power, broke their legs and blamed it on ... what... social mobility? And Peter Brown actually expects us to buy into this claptrap?


The government is currently destroying the secular equivalent of friendly societies by destroying insurance companies and related organizations. And we're going to blame it on some nebulous "problems of modern society"? 


Really?!?! 


Peter Brown may or may not be a theologian.
He is certainly an idiot.
But he is not a completely useless idiot - he highlights how our bishops think.


So, if you ever wanted to read something by a USCCB stalking horse, Peter Brown is your man. 

Warp and Woof

What would you say to a couple that insisted on aborting a perfectly normal child because they dearly wanted a disabled child?

It happens.

Deaf couples not uncommonly desire only deaf children.
They do not want children who can hear because such children would not fit into their tightly knit deaf community. Consequently, some deaf couples would be willing to undergo genetic testing only to assure themselves that their child will, indeed, be deaf. Children who do not carry the gene for deafness would be aborted.

This came to mind over the recent lesbian-inspired brouhaha in Canada, wherein a lesbian took offense at the presence of a Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) quote in a pamphlet distributed in her childrens' school.

Seems she finds the CCC offensive.
She wants the Catechism passage removed.

Now, there would be no shortage of bishops in the United States who would undoubtedly strike the offending CCC quote from all teaching materials, lest some sodomite be offended (Cardinal Wuerl, call your office!)

But the case made by the deaf parents strikes to the heart of an argument raised by Catholics - the notion of "intrinsic disorder."

What does it mean to be "intrinsically disordered"?
Deaf people would disagree with hearing people.
Deaf people would be wrong, of course.
They would, however, still strenuously disagree.

Eyes are meant for seeing.
If you are blind, you suffer from intrinsic disorder.
Ears are meant for hearing.
If you are deaf, you suffer from intrinsic disorder.

It doesn't matter if you have a wonderfully tight-knit community despite your hearing disorder.
It doesn't matter if you have a wonderfully tight-knit community because of your hearing disorder.
You suffer from a disorder.
Insofar as your community is built around a disorder, so does your community.

Same goes with being homosexual.
Sex organs are made for procreating.
Using your sex organs in ways that can't lead to procreation is disordered.
It doesn't matter if you have a wonderfully tight-knit community despite or even because of your sexual disorder.  You suffer from a disorder.
Insofar as your community is built around a disorder, so does your community.

There are many wonderfully tight-knit communities that are intrinsically disordered.
La Cosa Nostra is a wonderfully tight-knit community, but it's centered around a disorder.
Amish communities are wonderfully tight-knit, but centered around a basic theological disorder.

Too many people are so fascinated by community that they are willing to forgive literally anything as long as community is promoted. But, while Christianity is about human community, human community is not the point.

If promoting human community were the point, becoming a hermit would be a sin.
Since becoming a hermit is a virture, it cannot be the case that human community is the point.

It is communion between God and man that matters.
Any community which arises between man and man as a result of the pursuit of communion with God is just gravy.

Someone might want to mention this to the lay and ordained socialists who inhabit our parish and chancery offices.

Snips and Snails and Rattlesnake Tails

There is a certain poignancy to this story.

It seems Cardinal Dolan and his staff got schooled in what Catholicism actually teaches by Barack Hussein Obama, and his Muslim friends in the White House.

The poor Catholic sods apparently didn't understand Catholicism very well, so Barack put his grade school Catholic education to good use and explained to the bishop and his staff what it all meant.

Now Thomas Peters is all outraged and stuff at Barry's incredible hubris.

But, I think, in deference to the bishops and their endless charity, we should put the Christian charity of the doubt on this whole story.

I mean, look at it from Barry's point of view.
And, in case you don't understand Barry's attitude towards the bishops, we'll bring in expert analysis to explain it:


The bishops supported ObamaCare.
They pushed it and pushed it and pushed it.

And after they helped Barry push it through, they were suddenly shocked, SHOCKED to find that Barry was going to throw them under the bus, make them look like fools in front of the Pope.

And to a certain extent, isn't this what the whole loud row is about? After all, have you ever heard any priest, any bishop, anywhere teach that contraception was a mortal sin until now? Really?

Have they preached on the evils of sterilization, protested the distribution of condoms? Spoken out against any of the contraceptive eugenics attitudes that were slowly destroying the fabric of American society? Of course not.

So why such a sudden change of heart?
Let's put it this way: what are the chances any American cardinal has towards the Papacy if such a mandate goes uncontested?

When RvW came out, the Catholic bishops protested only legal abortion and said not a word about the contraceptive mentality that spawned RvW. Now that contraceptives are being mandated, they protest that, but continue to promote the eugenic socialist philosophy that spawned the contraceptives.

And now, here they were, trying to work with him, but he pulled the rug out from under them. What a shock, huh?

How good a good ex-socialist, ex-Muslim, ex-Alinskyite do such a thing to such nice guys?

It's a poser, no doubt about it.

I mean, I still have not figured out how they ended up on the raw end of such an otherwise perfect deal, and I'm really, really smart and all, so I just cannot imagine how thoroughly non-plussed the bishops must have been when it all fell apart around them.

After all, who could have guessed that the only man in public office who had publicly promoted legalized infanticide would mis-treat a Catholic bishop?

You can see how anyone would have been blind-sided.

That's why, even after Barry shows a preferential option for skinning the fleece right off the sheep, and stomping on the little lambs to boot (pardon the pun), the bishops still went ahead and helped him accomplish a few other of his pet projects.


I guess they figured that if they just kept helping Barry rape the nation, B. Hussein would throw them some scraps. Which, heaven knows, is a perfectly reasonable position to take.


So, imagine the scene from Barry's point of view. Here they come, the bishop and all his staff waddling into the White House. If you're inside Barry's head, you can almost hear him chuckling and see him shaking his head as they trundle up, faces all aglow, looking for the handout they thought they had earned.

It must have been comically sad for him, to watch the poor little Catholic tykes sniffing around his shoes, hoping he would throw them a scrap or two.

But, never fear! Like Jesus, B. Hussein patiently sat down and explained to them that it is not right to feed the dogs with the food that belongs to the children... well, the voters.... well, Barry's supporters. You know.

Groups like Big Pharma, who supported ObamaCare and will make out like bandits now that they are a line-item in the national budget. Or Planned Parenthood and the eugenics, environmental green crowd, upon whom Barry has already spent billions and intends to spend billions more.

Or even the poor American Muslims, who find it so difficult to pay zakat.


Drugs, environmentalism, Islam: these are the religions that really matter.

And Barry has to explain that to the poor foolish bishop and his imbecilic staff.

In short, he has to preach Alinsky's Gospel to them.

So, to speak in Christian charity, I'm sure they never saw things from his point of view until just then. Assuming they even did so then.

You can't blame a rattlesnake for being a rattlesnake.
You can only look in wonderment at the children who keep running back to play with it.

More Fool I

Alright, this is just absurd. On the one hand, the USCCB is attacking Obama for forcing them (the bishops) to pay for contraception. On the other hand, the USCCB is pushing forward the idea that taxpayers should pay to extend unemployment insurance (again).

And that's just the beginning of the rich irony.

You see, almost NONE of the parishes in the United States pay unemployment insurance. They get dispensed from the mandate to do so because they are religious organizations. So, if you are employed by a Catholic parish and you get laid off, so long, sucker.

You can't collect unemployment because your bishop hasn't paid into unemployment for you.
And, you'll be lucky to wring a month or two (8 weeks) of severance pay out of them, never mind 99 weeks. When the bishops started complaining about the HHS mandate, I thought they were, perhaps, finally waking up to economic and moral realities.

More fool I.

At the risk of being absolutely gauche, might I point out that if the bishops REALLY wanted unemployment benefits applied, they might try paying into the system themselves?

I mean, isn't it remarkable that a system they are recommending so strenuously to others is something they themselves deliberately refrain from participating in? It's almost as if they really don't care about social justice, isn't it? And if they did pay into the unemployment system themselves, and thereby paid for something which is most assuredly in line with Catholic teaching (preferential option for the poor, don'cha' know), then wouldn't it give them a lot more social capital (pardon the pun) on other issues... like.... oh, I don't know... can anyone think of an issue that's in the news in which the bishops might require some social capital? It might even involve paying for something that is NOT in line with Catholic teaching? Can anyone think of such an issue? Bueller? Bueller? Anyone? Bueller?

Better yet, how about the bishops stop volunteering other people's money and double down on being Catholic? That is, how about they use the coffers of the parishes and the dioceses to care for the poor? Again, it may be tactless to point this out, but that's what the Church did for over a thousand years before Bismarck created the welfare state, in what has turned out to be his successful effort to compete with the Catholic Church.

The Church used to boast of saintly bishops who gave up every vestige of personal wealth and offered all of the money to the poor as an example to others. When was the last time that happened?

I want to have rich, opulent churches to worship in - God is Beauty, after all.
But I kind of wonder about million-dollar mansions for the bishops.

There are roughly 300,000 individual Protestant congregations in the United States.
There are 195 Catholic dioceses and roughly 19000 parishes.
There were roughly 45,000,000 poor people in the United States in 2010.

If each Christian congregation adopted 140 people (at four people per family, that's roughly 35 families) and cared for just those 35 families, that would end poverty in America.

The Amish help each other.
The USCCB goes rent-seeking.
Any questions?


Update:
Oh, and for those who are wondering, Sister Keehan, the pro-ObamaCare head of the Catholic Health Association, makes  $962,467 a year.

Isn't it comforting to see that our Catholic religious follow the examples set by the bishops?


UPDATE:
Welcome Gloria TV readers!

To Hell With Who?

Pittsburgh's bishop Zubek has famously declared that Barack Hussein Obama is telling Catholics "to hell with you!"

In possibly the only united political front the USCCB has presented on any subject in over forty years, America's episcopate has universally decided to fight Kathleen Sebelius' ruling that all Catholic organizations have to pay for employee's contraceptives in their insurance coverage.

There isn't a single dissenting voice.
It's remarkable.
It's almost like they were all ... Catholic bishops.

As Michael Voris points out, it is also kind of sad and pathetic, but that's not the point of this essay.





While Michael Voris is dead on accurate, he hasn't yet pointed out the logical conclusion.

The 2012 Elections
That's right, they're coming this year.
Who knew?

And what happens if, despite the fears of conservatives across the nation, Barack Hussein Obama is re-elected?

You see, the bishops have not publicly excommunicated a sitting politician since the civil rights movements of the 1960s. Since the media disliked discrimination, violence against blacks was judged a mortal sin, but since the media didn't dislike sexual misadventures, contracepting or killing children in the womb was just a social faux pas that could be overlooked in the pursuit of greater political harmony.

So, for the last fifty years, the bishops haven't yet declared a single politician excommunicate over issues of contraception or abortion. Indeed, as I document, they have gone out of their way to say they don't have the right to do such a thing. But it's not for want of candidates.

Since today is the kick-off for Catholic Schools Week across the nation, let us pause and meditate on the glory that is the Catholic school. Barack Hussein Obama, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Senator Kerry, Mario Cuomo, the thankfully deceased Ted Kennedy, and countless other pro-contraceptive, pro-abortion politicians were all taught in Catholic schools. In his entire career, Barack has gotten only one honorary degree, and that one from Notre Dame. Huzzah for Catholic schools!

Because of Despite their sterling Catholic education, most of the members of that previous list are definitely candidates for eventual excommunication. By their actions, they have already objectively chosen hell.

The question is, given that he is clearly not going to change his policy, if Obama is re-elected will the bishops be compelled to eventually point out the possibility of excommunication to any of the Obama-bot CINO's in a more formal way?

In short, when do the bishops formally excommunicate these fine products of conception Catholic education, informing them that they are, objectively speaking, going to hell?

There is no telling, of course.
I will only note in passing that the winter has been unusually mild.