Marian Ronan

Catholic Social Teaching? What’s That?

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.