Catholic Charities Changes LivesIn Defense of Article on Catholic CharitiesAuthor Responds to Criticisms

To the Editor:

Your November 30 My View column on Catholic Charities (“A Wrong Turn for Catholic Charities,” by Brian C. Anderson) seemed more an outcry of a disgruntled ideologue than a reflective analysis of the reality and challenges of the Catholic Charities USA network of service provision.

The fact that The Chronicle would publish such a prejudicial column during the height of the giving season raises questions about your journal’s objectivity in informing the philanthropic community and the public at large.

Having served as president and C.E.O. of Catholic Charities USA from 1982 until 1992, I will offer an insight into why that organization equally values advocacy and service. In 1982, the Catholic Charities national network reported that it served approximately 3.5 million clients, of whom 23 percent needed such survivor support as food and shelter. By 1992, our services reached well over 10 million people, of whom more than 60 percent needed food or shelter.

Obviously your commentator would view such a dramatic growth of clients with extreme needs as indicative of a massive failure in the human behavior of countless numbers of people who would choose food pantries over local supermarkets and overnight shelters over independent living.

In point of fact, Catholic Charities was an invaluable part of the safety net in this country as the effects of the shift from an industrial economy to a service-based economy unfolded. When steel mills and other manufacturing plants were closing, they put many workers into the ranks of the unemployed. This was not an era of increased sloth, but of economic dislocation. The duty of Catholic Charities to the economically dislocated had to exceed just offering food and shelter. All charities had a moral imperative to represent and empower their clients by challenging the public policy and market-driven forces whose decisions helped create that clientele.

Catholic Charities did it well, and continues to empower the powerless to be heard. And that bothers people such as your My View writer. It is sad to think that it must also annoy The Chronicle of Philanthropy, judging by its publication of such an unreflective and untimely distortion of Catholic Charities in the United States.

Thomas J. Harvey
Senior Vice President
Member Services Division
Alliance for Children & Families
Milwaukee

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To the Editor:

I was recently quoted in your My View column by Brian C. Anderson and must respond to correct errors and misrepresentations in that article.

For the record, Catholic Charities/Catholic Family Services of the Archdiocese of Hartford Inc. does not have, nor have we ever had, a full-time or even part-time paid lobbyist. We, and our colleague agencies in the archdiocese, do have a far-reaching advocacy network of volunteers who are the equivalent of a full-time lobbyist. Because they do volunteer work with refugees, the homeless, abused children, the chronically mentally ill, and serve the hungry in our food pantries, and so on, they have a unique and informed judgment about what works and what does not work with these populations. They share their ideas and informed opinions with our public policymakers.

Some of these volunteers Mr. Anderson would easily characterize as conservative, and others as liberal. We do not screen our volunteers on the basis of their political beliefs. Our archbishop and board of trustees, whom I would characterize as conservative to moderate traditionalists, set the policies by which I do my work.

Mr. Anderson interviewed me for about five minutes over the telephone many months ago. He knows little or nothing about me or Catholic Charities.

I supported welfare reform in Connecticut, and our mission in my local agency calls us to “improve the capacity for self help” among all that we serve. Had the economy not been as strong as it is, many welfare-reform policies could have been a disaster, as Father Fred Kammer, president of Catholic Charities USA, predicted. We have had great success moving people from welfare into employment, but we have a growing number of children in poverty in Connecticut. Welfare reform has not reduced poverty in my state or in the nation. We are actively working with our volunteers, supporters, state administrators, and legislators to correct this injustice.

Also, Mr. Anderson would like us to pretend that racism does not exist in our society. It is one issue with a long and destructive legacy. In Catholic Charities, we try to get it on the table, call it by name, and find ways to render it impotent.

Patrick J. Johnson Jr.
Director of Charities
Catholic Charities
Catholic Family Services
Archdiocese of Hartford
Bloomfield, Conn.

To the Editor:

The virulent letters in reaction to Brian Anderson’s article on Catholic Charities are depressing, if not surprising, evidence of how very hard it is to achieve civility and clarity in the discussion of changing approaches to social policy.

It is surely no help when Vincent Schiraldi of the Justice Policy Institute in Washington dismisses the article as a “diatribe against Catholic Charities” and accuses the Manhattan Institute, with which Mr. Anderson is associated, of being a “right-wing think tank” interested only in securing “tax cuts for wealthy contributors.”

Fair-minded observers across the political spectrum have praised the Manhattan Institute and its City Journal for being in the forefront of innovative reforms in welfare, education, criminal justice, and other areas — reforms that have helped the poor and lifted the quality of life in New York and other urban areas.

The defensive response by Father Fred Kammer, president of the national coordinating office of Catholic Charities, charges that Mr. Anderson “seems more inclined toward blaming the poor than recognizing the complex realities of poverty — personal, social, economic, and, at times, spiritual.”

As I understand Mr. Anderson, he is raising a serious challenge to all that is implicit in the “at times” in that sentence.

In its founding, and in its admirable history before it fell under the control of government funding and policy direction, Catholic Charities understood that the spiritual is the central dynamic of the personal and social. In an older language that is now being rediscovered, the aim of work among the poor and disadvantaged is not so much to deliver services as to transform lives.

Father Kammer is right in saying that there will always be a need for delivering services, but with respect to empowering people to take charge of their own lives rather than letting them languish in dependence upon government welfare, Father John B. Farley of Colorado, another respondent, offers an equally important truth when he writes, “In our urge to help people, Catholics have not always been diligently accountable for what our helping has accomplished.”

That is the gist of Mr. Anderson’s article, and it deserves to be engaged with civility of manner and clarity of argument.

The Rev. Richard John Neuhaus
President
Religion and Public Life
New York

To the Editor:

I’d like to respond to the various criticisms that appeared on your letters page in the December 14 issue regarding my article on Catholic Charities.

One letter is insulting, and I’ll respond to that one first.

Vincent Schiraldi of the Justice Policy Institute describes my article, which sets forth a series of arguments against the current direction of Catholic Charities, as an emanation of the vast right-wing conspiracy.

He’s particularly exercised about what he calls disproportionate minority incarceration rates — something that I view as largely a myth once you take into account the severity of crime and past record. He claims the Manhattan Institute — the think tank that publishes City Journal, the magazine I work for — wants to make black crime a “wedge issue,” whipping up “fears among conservative voters and blue-collar whites” so that, when these folks go to the polls, they’ll elect politicians “favorably disposed toward tax cuts for the wealthy contributors who fund the Manhattan Institute.”

You’ve got us, Mr. Schiraldi! I’d better go tell the Rev. Floyd Flake, John Dilulio, and the other Manhattan Institute fellows tirelessly working to help poor minority kids in the inner city get educated, stay off drugs, and avoid crime to give it up, since the Justice Policy Institute has discovered our nefarious scheme to make the rich guys who fund us richer still. Please. Does Mr. Schiraldi really think we all sit around cynically plotting about tax cuts for the rich?

I challenge him to attend one of our regular luncheons in Manhattan, where invited speakers discuss all manner of things — from education to social mores to technology to crime policy — aimed at improving our lives together. Or maybe actually to read City Journal. His letter is an ad hominem attack, and a bad one at that.

On to the more serious criticisms. Father Kammer, the outgoing president of Catholic Charities USA, argues that I’ve placed undue emphasis on the Catholic principle of subsidiarity and neglected other important ideas of Catholic social thought, including charity, justice, and human dignity. Moreover, I’ve misunderstood subsidiarity, he claims: In fact, government-funded social services by religious and other nonprofits are a form of subsidiarity, guaranteeing “diversity of values and services, consumer choice, and community responsiveness.”

The article I wrote originally appeared in City Journal, which isn’t a Catholic publication, so it couldn’t go too deeply into Catholic social theory. But, I’d argue, Catholic Charities’ value-neutral provision of services and the extensive lobbying efforts it undertakes, on a federal and state level, for a bigger welfare state aren’t the best means of realizing Catholic social thought — and may even be in violation of it.

Value-free services and a big welfare state, after all, have helped foster illegitimacy, long-term dependency on government, and lives of passivity and despair among a sizable minority of American citizens. How is this to support human dignity or justice? I don’t think government-funded services are of necessity a breach of subsidiarity, but certainly the way the federal welfare state evolved after the 1960’s has been, displacing the responsibilities of families, neighbors, local communities, and states — in that order — for taking care of their poor.

Father Kammer suggests that I all but equate poverty with sinfulness. I think Father Kammer makes things more complicated than they need be. We know who the long-term poor in this country are: They’re mostly unmarried mothers or people who are leading self-destructive lives through drugs and alcohol or petty crime. Aren’t these moral problems?

All it takes to escape poverty in America’s open economy — and reams of research support this — is to graduate from high school, get married, and hold down any job for a length of time. Shouldn’t Catholic Charities, then, be battling against the teachers’ unions who’ve steadfastly opposed school vouchers, which would let poor minority kids floundering in lousy public schools attend private schools? We’ve seen the wonders Catholic schools have performed in inner cities, yet, to the best of my knowledge, Catholic Charities has remained silent on vouchers.

Shouldn’t Catholic Charities be tirelessly advocating the sanctity and importance of marriage? One Catholic Charities agency for mostly Hispanic unwed mothers I visited in Brooklyn seemingly did little more than hook young mothers up to government services; even its office, filled with stuffed animals and cheery posters, sent the message that illegitimacy was a normal part of everyday life.

Instead of getting poor parishioners to form agitation networks to lobby for more social services from government, as the Rev. John B. Farley, the pastor of a Catholic Church in Rocky Ford, Colo., defends, shouldn’t Catholic Charities be pointing out to the poor the opportunities blossoming all around them in these economically prosperous times?

Millions of immigrants continue to find America a land of remarkable opportunity and freedom. The long-term poor can, too, if they’re given the right kind of help — help that doesn’t foster dependency but that sparks initiative and self-control.

Father Kammer also takes me to task for the “damages” I do to the 300,000 staff and volunteers of Catholic Charities who are out working with the poor. I do no such thing; these are admirable people. Doubtless the work they do helping people adopt children or helping refugees from war-torn hellholes across the earth or from devastating natural disasters is God’s work. But not all services are equally effective in addressing the problems they’re meant to address.

The thrust of my article is that much of what Catholic Charities has undertaken on behalf of the poor since the 60’s — political activism aimed at securing ever more government services, the ask-no-questions provision of services, the stress on the vast forces of society and the economy instead of on the individual as the chief cause of poverty and dysfunction — doesn’t help the poor, but risks trapping them in lives of dependency.

With a new administration in Washington keen on expanding the value-rich provision of government-funded services by religious charities, now is the perfect opportunity for Catholic Charities to admit the wrong direction it took over the past few decades, and rediscover its rich moral heritage.

Brian C. Anderson
Senior Editor
City Journal
Manhattan Institute
New York