Once again the pace of posting has become a little sluggish here of late. Personally, I have spent the last few weeks 1) finishing piles of grading from last semester, 2) writing a paper and then giving it at a conference, 3) attending a seminar on religion in the post-Soviet world, and 4) taking care of house guests. Now that these tasks are all through, I am settling into my summer routine, and I should be able to manage a post at least once a week for the coming months, and hopefully more often. What’s happened to my slugabed companions I can’t say… but check back! I’ll try to keep controversy brewing here. Among the things I hope to post in the next week or two are some reflections on whether or not Scott Roeder is really a murderer, and a self-indulgent recapping of my naming debate in which I clear up the misconceptions of some of my deluded commenters. :)

But for today, I thought I might start by throwing out this quote from a recent article in America magazine:

This polarization must stop; otherwise our identity as a faith community will be torn asunder and Catholicism will cease to be an elevating force for change. How can we decrease the polarization? A vital first step is to seek out our common ground in the major civic areas where almost all Catholics agree: religious liberty; the sacredness of all human life; the goal of reducing and eventually eliminating abortion; support for social programs that provide a safety net for the poor; the elimination of segregation, racism and discrimination; and respect for differing religious and social traditions and diverse cultures. Few are the Catholics who do not share these principles, which provide a ready-made common ground.

Okay. I don’t want to go into detail about the article itself; it’s precisely the kind of silly, hypocritical rhetoric you would expect from that publication. Mostly hand-wringing about the polarized atmosphere among American Catholics today (as if America doesn’t contribute plenty to that tension), and strong implications that evil conservatives, and especially the bishops, are mostly to blame, especially for being so stubborn and mean about tired old issues like abortion. I’ll leave you to pick that one apart yourselves, if you want to.

But I did find this list to be moderately interesting. It’s rare to find such a straightforward listing of all the issues that liberal Catholics take to be “settled” and thus “common ground.” It’s great to see that the list starts with… religious liberty. Ha! Could anything be further from a settled issue within the Church today? Then we proceed to the sacredness of human life. That, of course, is settled from a doctrinal standpoint, but is precisely the thing that orthodox Catholics feel has not been settled in practice, since a significant portion of American Catholics continue to work at undermining the Church’s position here. How the editors of America feel about this can be seen from the wording of the next item on the list, where they speak of “reducing and eventually eliminating” abortion… obviously they’re pretty fixated on this being a gradual process. Most of the Catholics I know would find a much stronger way to put that.

Elimination of racism is, I suppose, something most all of us can agree to be good, though we may not all agree on how significant a problem it is within our present society. I’m very happy to see racism dealt with in particular localities if it should arise, but there are much bigger social evils to be dealt with in our time. As for the last item on the list, respect for cultures, that’s mainly a collection of buzz-words, the actual implications of which would have to be more carefully defined before I could grant it to be a “common ground” for all Catholics. I think I have a genuine appreciation for many kinds of cultural diversity (which is one reason why I’ve done so much traveling in my life), but not all religious traditions and social customs command equal respect from me.

The item that I most wanted to discuss, however, gets dropped into the middle of the list: support for social programs that provide a safety net for the poor. We hear this thrown around a lot these days as a sine qua non of all Catholic thought. Sometimes this is used in connection with the Obama administration, with the idea basically being that, yes, his position on abortion is bad, but clearly everything else about the man, especially his support for social programs, is so obviously in keeping with Catholic tradition that we should all really love him, even if some of us feel we have to voice reservations on account of the abortion issue.

Well, naturally I agree that our president’s firm and enthusiastic support for the killing of infants is his most glaring and egregious failing. But I think we also need to push back against this supposedly obvious conclusion that more social programs for the poor are such a wonderful thing. I wrote about this a bit last fall in my brief post asking about the “preferential option.” (And as a little aside about that: a friend of mine was a bit shocked by that post and told me I should read the segment from the CCC on poverty. I duly read the suggested passage, and didn’t find anything very helpful with respect to my question about “preferential option” language (the origins of which I still regard as highly suspicious), though there were a few interesting quotes on the general subject of poverty. But of course, no context was given for the quotes, and they raised far more questions than they answered. I concluded that it was yet another subject on which the CCC is almost totally unhelpful, making certain provocative suggestions but not really explaining or drawing the distinctions that would be needed to make sense of the issue.)

Anyway, I thought now might be a good time for saying a bit more about why good faith Catholics certainly can, and to my mind should, oppose large-scale government entitlement programs.

I often like to begin such conversations by explaining that government entitlement programs are an attack on human dignity. This is of course startling to many liberals, because in their minds nothing could be more dignified than to be given everything one needs for survival and even comfort. Lack of food, shelter, medical care and education are to their minds the main threat to human dignity. A related concern, to them, is the possibility that people might feel that they have to beg or in some other way prostrate themselves to greater powers in order to obtain these fundamental goods. The foundation of dignity, to the liberal mind, is having one’s needs met, and not feeling beholden to anyone else on account of this.

If this is the foundation of human dignity, then government entitlement programs are the obvious answer. The rich are forced (but through a bloodless, mechanized process) to put their money into a giant pot, which is redistributed to strangers through a similarly regulated process. No human interaction is fostered on any side. The rich simply find themselves poorer, while the poor receive checks in the mail from a large, faceless entity for whom they are little more than a statistic. Thus, needs are met without anyone having to feel beholden to anybody else, and without interference in the organization of family or community life.

I concede that, at least in the natural order, having one’s basic needs met can help to foster a sense of dignity. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that food, shelter or education are necessary for human dignity (my patron St. Francis would surely object to that), but within the natural order, one way of respecting another’s dignity is to respect his basic needs. Depriving a group of people of basic needs is often a way of attacking their dignity; it is most often slaves, prisoners, or ethnic groups that are viewed as inferior, that are forced to live under harsh conditions. Providing for another’s wants, by contrast, can be a way of indicating, “you are a person with moral value. You are worthy of attention and care.”

But liberals are mistaken in thinking that the best way to foster dignity is to make these goods guaranteed, such that no one need feel beholden to another. This mistake presumably arises out of the core liberal idea that autonomy or self-actualization are some of the most central goods for human life. As Catholics we should not let ourselves become enamored with such notions. We should understand that it is fitting to feel beholden to those who provide for us, and the core of human dignity is not in inventing ourselves but in discovering what we have been created to be, and in learning to live in conformity with our God-given nature. Being provided with care, as we are in infancy, is an important beginning, because it is through that showering of gratuitous love that we come to understand ourselves as beings with moral worth. But if we are to mature morally, we need to move beyond the “I’m special” message, and come to understand ourselves as having responsibilities and obligations. At some point we must learn to see ourselves beings who are answerable for what we do, and who are rightly expected to contribute in various ways to our families and communities. For a mature human being, dignity involves much more than just having food and shelter. Dignity is being held accountable for one’s actions. Dignity is being expected to fulfill one’s obligations. Dignity is being respected as a contributor to one’s community.

There is no way to devise blanket, government-managed entitlement programs that does not attack this element of human dignity. Government programs don’t have the ability to distinguish who is “blamelessly” needy, and who is poor through some fault or failing of their own. And in truth, it is contrary to the very ideology of such programs to try to make such distinctions. All needy people are addressed in exactly the same way — with a handout. For some, this might be the appropriate response. For others, this should rightly be viewed as a personal disgrace. But the implicit message behind such a program is “don’t worry about it. All that matters is that you’re fed.” A parish priest or a small, private neighborhood organization could exercise discernment, giving generously to the widow with six children who has no other means for support, and chastising the young able-bodied father who just needs to stop drinking so he can hold down a job. A government program glosses over all these distinctions. Responsibility doesn’t matter. Respect doesn’t matter. All that matters is earthly bread.

In a way, everyone is degraded by such a system, even the widows or orphans or others whom we might think deserving of aid. When the parish provides for them, this can be seen as an act of love, and an acknowledgement that their needs are legitimate and not a cause for shame. A check from the welfare office provides no such reassurance — it is an acknowledgement only of poverty. And when that status as “welfare recipient” is shared with drunkards and fornicators and people who are simply too lazy to look for work, it would be difficult for the virtuous person not to feel some shame, even if his misfortunes are genuinely not any fault of his own.

Meanwhile, entitlement programs, because they are so systematized and faceless, teach many people not to feel shame in their moral failings. I think an excellent example of this is in the black “macho” culture that has become so prevalent within America’s inner cities. It’s interesting to note that, while African Americans have been statistically poorer than whites throughout American history, they have not always suffered from the breakdown of family and community life that we see in so many American cities today. In the 1950’s and before, black communities were noteworthy for their particularly strong family structures. Divorce rates were low, and a high percentage of households were headed by married parents raising their natural offspring. Then in the 1960’s we implemented much more comprehensive welfare programs, and things began to unravel. Today less than a third of black children live in two-parent households, and African Americans have particularly high rates of illegitimacy and abortion, together with multiple other problems that have followed from these. Now, obviously, the factors contributing to this are multiple. But we can certainly get a lot of clues as to where the problem lies from examining the expectations of young males within inner city black communities, for whom marriage and family life are often seen as unmanly or “white” pursuits. Having multiple women (and likely multiple illegitimate children) but remaining “free” and unfettered from family obligations, is the way to command respect from one’s peers (and even, ironically, from women, who are left to choose between high-status males who will probably abandon them, and low-status males who might stay.) Naturally, it follows on this that many unwed mothers are drawing welfare checks to help keep their single-parent households functional.

How likely would this be to happen in a world without welfare? A man has to be heartless indeed to feel pride in watching his children starve, or else spend their days neglected at home while their mothers scramble to work three jobs. The only way such a culture could arise is under the auspices of a welfare system, which keeps people far enough above water that they can learn not to feel shame in shirking their natural responsibilities. And when one grows up in a community filled with people devoid of any proper sense of human dignity, one learns not to feel the disgrace too sharply.

Of course, it isn’t only African Americans who exhibit these unfortunate trends. Inner city African American culture provides just one illustrative example of a tendency that comes with all large-scale entitlement programs. The important point is that we, as Catholics, should be extremely concerned about this assault on human dignity. We should be insisting that men be treated as men, and not as children. We should be disdaining the idea that, in a country as rich as ours, communities can’t step up and care for their own without the federal government reaching its hands into everything. We should be, but we aren’t. Instead, we’re talking about the wonders of entitlement programs as though this were a settled part of Catholic doctrine.

Whatever happens, I wonder, to talk of “subsidiarity” when liberals come to power? We hear much about it when capitalism is on the chopping block, but as soon as large-scale federal entitlement programs are on the board, that conversation suddenly stops. What happened to all those copies of Rerum Novarum that liberal Catholics were passing out so eagerly in years gone by? It seems to me that that conversation needs to be resurrected. Of course, none of the thoughts I’ve offered here are meant to suggest that government programs to alleviate poverty are never acceptable, or that these questions should be open and shut for any orthodox Catholic. Helping the poor is important, and figuring out how best to do it is one of the really difficult questions within Catholic social thought. This is not a subject like abortion or gay marriage, wherein the Church has already told us rather definitively what the moral implications are. There is some room for debate here… but let’s have one, shall we?