Catholic Social Teaching? What’s That?
June 7, 2011 at 4:39 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | 1 CommentTags: abortion, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, Catholic sexual teaching, Catholic social teaching, condoms, Congressman Paul Ryan, contraception, family planning, principle of subsidiarity, Ryan budget, subsidiarity, the common good, the New Deal, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, USCCB
Perhaps you’ve heard that Congressman Paul Ryan, a Roman Catholic, has defended the Republican budget plan, of which he is the main author, by arguing that it’s an example of the principle of subsidiarity, one of the fundamental principles of Catholic social teaching. Basically, as Michael Sean Winters explains in The New Republic, subsidiarity means that ”social ills are best solved at the lowest level of social organization possible.” In this case, Ryan is arguing that according to the principle of subsidiarity, the social safety net secured by federal programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and (eventually) Social Security, ought really to be secured by the states, as in the Medicaid voucher program the Ryan budget proposes.
Some of the debate about this question circulates around a letter from Archbishop Timothy Dolan, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, in response to Ryan’s assertion that his budget exemplifies Catholic social teaching. Some interpreters of Dolan’s letter think he was agreeing with Ryan; others say he was merely welcoming the fact that Ryan was taking Catholic social teaching into account. Winters notes that the archbishop seems not actually to take a position on the budget itself one way or the other. Heaven forfend.
Let me begin my response to all this by saying that it drives me completely nuts that Paul Ryan is a Catholic. I thank God every day that Sarah Palin and Donald Trump have left Holy Mother Church behind. Good luck to their new ecclesial communities. But now we’ve got Ryan, adulating Ayn Rand in public, that narcissistic, atheistic, denouncer of altruism. Next thing we know, Ryan will be claiming that Atlas Shrugged is one of the books of the New Testament. Even Newt Gingrich had the sense to denounce Ryan’s budget, not that I’m terribly happy to have Newt in the fold either.
All this aside, the main point I want to make here is that this conversation between Ryan and Archbishop Dolan and some pundits is a total non-starter. If you stood outside a Catholic church after Mass on any Sunday morning and asked the people coming out whether they believe in the principle of subsidiarity, you’d do well to find two who had the faintest notion what you were talking about. In my fifty-plus years of listening to sermons in Catholic churches, I have never once heard a priest discuss Catholic social teaching explicitly, and even discussions of social justice more generally have been few. It would take another whole blog or two to explore why this is the case, but trust me, this is the reality for the vast majority of US Catholics.
This is not to suggest that Catholic social teaching, or, more simply put, the commitment of the US Catholic church to the common good, to the survival of the poor immigrants who made up the majority of is members from 1850 to 1960, was not a very serious one. Some scholars argue that the US Catholic commitment to the poor was a major component of the fashioning of the New Deal, that is, the federal social safety net that Ryan is now determined to dismantle.
The fact is, however, that since Vatican II, for reasons I explore in Tracing the Sign of the Cross, Catholic social teaching has taken an unambiguous back seat to Catholic sexual teaching. Archbishop Dolan did not stick his neck out and condemn the harm to the poor that Ryan’s budget guarantees. Admittedly, two other bishops, Stephen Blaire and Howard Hubbard, heads of USCCB commissions related to justice, wrote a letter to the Senate in February protesting the harm to the poor embodied in the budget. Michael Sean Winters predicts that USCCB will eventually come out strongly against the Republican budget. At the moment, Winters believes, they’re just trying to finesse a complex political situation. I hope he’s right.
My own fear, however, is that by not taking a position against the Ryan budget, Archbishop Dolan is hedging his bets that somehow that budget will make family planning, sex education, and condoms for use against HIV less available. If some Catholic public figure had claimed that the principle of subsidiarity means that a couple has the right to use contraceptives to limit their family to the number of children they believe they can responsibly raise, the archbishop’s outrage would have echoed from sea to sea.
Only Sex Matters
May 15, 2010 at 8:24 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | 8 CommentsTags: Archbishop John J. Myers, Catholic sexual teaching, Catholic social teaching, Seton Hall gay marriage course, Seton Hall University
Waiting for New York Theological Seminary’s graduation to get underway this morning, I came across an interesting tidbit in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Seems that Seton Hall, the Catholic University in South Orange, New Jersey, is considering canceling a political science course on gay marriage. They are doing so because the archbishop of Newark, John J. Myers, says such a course would conflict with Catholic teaching.
Now I would not be so foolish as to suggest that cancelling this course is a violation of academic freedom. I suspect that the archbishop includes academic freedom in the same category as secularism, individualism, and moral relativism.
I do note, however, that the course the archbishop objects to is NOT a course in Catholic moral theology. I understand why a bishop would object to such a theology course, assuming, of course, that it opposed the church’s position on gay marriage. But the course in question is a course in political science. As Seton Hall’s vice-provost says in an article in the Newark Star ledger, reviews of the course suggest it’s “not an advocacy course… but a ‘special topics’ course intended to examine objectively all sides of a significant current public policy issue,” including, presumably, the Catholic church’s side.
It may be, of course, that the archbishop believes all courses in a Catholic university should present only the Catholic position on the subject at hand. Were such a state of affairs to come about, however, the college or university in question, would, it seems to me, be ethically obligated to renounce its secular accreditation and apply instead for accreditation from the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada because it would have a become a theological school (of sorts). Such an action might, however, impact applications from students wanting to study other subjects. To wit, the whole thing is too silly to be taken seriously.
I have a deeper concern about the bishop’s statement, however: once again, an American Catholic bishop has communicated–as in the bishops’ health care embarrassment a while back–that sex is the only thing that matters to him..
You probably know what I’m getting at here, but just in case you don’t, consider this: Seton Hall offers eleven different MBAs–Master’s degrees in Business Administration–including one in Financial Markets and another in International Business. Given the enormous harm done to millions of human beings by the ongoing global recession, it is quite inconceivable that courses in the Seton Hall business program do not regularly teach concepts that, when applied, massively harm the “common good,” that beloved centerpiece of Catholic social teaching. But can you for a moment imagine the archbishop ordering the university to cancel those courses because they go against Catholic teaching?
And the priests serving under these bishops understand this ideological hierarchy very well. I have never–and I go to Mass regularly–heard a priest preach that we American Catholics, by virtue of the billions of particles of CO2 that our cars and refrigerators and computers spew into the air, are sinning against “life.” Ditto war. The pastor of a church I attended when the Iraq war broke out actually preached that although that war was a violation of Catholic just war theory, those who supported it were still valued members of the parish. This is the way it is, of course, because Catholic teaching on abortion, homosexuality, divorce, pre-marital sex, and the “complementarity” (i.e., subordination) of women to men are the only teachings that matter, practically speaking, to very many of the US bishops.
The thing is, I can’t imagine God bothering to take on our humanity just to get control over human sexuality. Can you?
Maybe I Need to Read Catholic Social Teaching After All!
September 4, 2009 at 9:36 am | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a commentTags: American Catholic bishops, Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann, Bishop Blaise Cupich, Bishop Robert W. Finn, Catholic social teaching, health care reform debate, Michael Sean Winters, principle of subsidiarity
After my last blog, I vowed to write nothing further about American Catholic bishops for a long time. They get plenty of coverage already, thought I.
But on September 1, Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann of Kansas City, Kansas and Most Reverend Robert W. Finn of Kansas City/St. Joseph Missouri issued a “Joint Pastoral Statement on Principles of Catholic Social Teaching and Health Care Reform.” The bishops oppose any government-based health care reform plan because it ostensibly violates “subsidiarity,” a fundamental principle of Catholic social teaching.
In an on-line article on September 2, the National Catholic Reporter discussed the bishops’ statement under the rubric “Who Speaks for the Bishops?” The article quotes Rapid City Iowa Bishop Blaise Cupich’s statement that “All people need and should have access to comprehensive, quality health care, the costs of which must be controlled so that all can afford it. All should be able to receive health care irrespective of their stage of life, where or whether they or their parents work, how much they earn, where they live, or where they were born.” This, for the NCR, is closer to the statement of the American bishops on health care than the Kansas City statement. The larger problem, for the NCR, is that the two Kansas City bishops are undermining the previously united voice of the American Catholic bishops on the need for health care reform.
Whether you agree with the NCR on this may have to do with whether you think the Kansas City bishops are in fact deviating from the position of their fellow bishops or choosing to amplify the already significant “abortion neutrality” qualification of their statement on health care reform, (to which I allude in my August 27 blog).
Michael Sean Winters, writing on-line for the Jesuit magazine America, however, believes the real issue to be that the Kansas City bishops misunderstand the principle of subsidiarity altogether. He writes:
“Subsidiarity…seeks to answer the question…what level of society should treat a given issue. …subsidiarity suggests that issues be treated at the lowest level possible…This part of subsidiarity is ably repeated in the Kansas City text. But the text does not grasp the moral obligation of the higher levels of government. As Pope Leo XIII wrote… “Whenever the general interest or any particular class suffers, or it is threatened with evils which can in no other way be met, the public authority must step in to meet them…I think it goes without saying that the current entirely private method of delivering health insurance is not working. In addition to those whose pre-existing conditions are not covered, there are some 47 million Americans who are not covered at all. …when you read a warning that “The teaching of the Universal Church has never been to suggest a government socialization of medical services,” be advised that you are reading a GOP talking point and not an application of Catholic social doctrine to the circumstance the nation faces…”
Gads. In order to keep up with this stuff, I may actually be forced to read some Catholic social teaching, which I have ably avoided all these years because of its utterly soporific written style. Who’d a thunk it?
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