Paul Ryan and the Catholic Bishops

Excellent piece at the Wall Street Journal on Paul Ryan's budget proposal and the charge by Catholic bishops that the proposal is immoral.  The piece is by Antony Davies and Kristina Antolin. 

Key lines:

"Perhaps we dehumanize the poor when we treat them as nothing more than problems to be solved, and we dehumanize the rich when we treat them as wallets to be picked." 


And:

"The bishops dance with the devil when they invite government to use its coercive power on their behalf, and there's no clearer example than the Affordable Care Act. They happily joined their moral authority to the government's legal authority by supporting mandatory health insurance. They should not have been surprised when the government used its reinforced power to require Catholic institutions to pay for insurance plans that cover abortions and birth control.

To paraphrase J.R.R. Tolkien (a devoted Catholic), the government does not share power. Paul Ryan knows this. The bishops would be wise to listen to him."

I found the first reader comment by someone named Jonathan Stignant particularly helpful.

"SHOULD we look to kings and princes to put right the inequalities between rich and poor?

Should we require soldiers to come and seize the rich person’s gold and distribute it among his destitute neighbors?

Should we beg the emperor to impose a tax on the rich so great that it reduces them to the level of the poor and then to share the proceeds of that tax among everyone?

 

Equality imposed by force would achieve nothing, and do much harm. Those who combined both cruel hearts and sharp minds would soon find ways of making themselves rich again.

Worse still, the rich whose gold was taken away would feel bitter and resentful; while the poor who received the gold from the hands of soldiers would feel no gratitude, because no generosity would have prompted the gift.

 

Far from bringing moral benefit to society, it would actually do moral harm.

Material justice cannot be accomplished by compulsion, a change of heart will not follow. 

The only way to achieve true justice is to change people’s hearts first—and then they will joyfully share their wealth."

 

St John Chrysostom, Collected in “On Living Simply” by Robert van der Weyer, Sermon XLIII. Available from Amazon UK and Amazon US."

Amen.