Attack on Catholic Charities: a Distorted View of Good Works

To the Editor:

It is sadly astonishing that the good work of Catholic Charities agencies across the country continues to be distorted and demeaned by Brian Anderson, who is waging an apparent media campaign to mislead the public about our true role and our members’ good works. The most recent attack appeared in your November 30 edition (“A Wrong Turn for Catholic Charities,” My View).

First, Mr. Anderson doesn’t know a whole lot about Catholic Charities. As cover for his first attack last winter in City Journal, he visited two Catholic Charities sites.

There are 1,400 around the country — independent, locally governed, guided by more than 8,000 local board members, and responsible to diocesan bishops. Each is unique and inspiring in many ways. A visit to two sites, even exemplary ones, hardly makes Mr. Anderson an expert.

Second, Mr. Anderson’s real beef is with Catholic social teaching and the leadership of the U.S. bishops in applying Catholic teaching in the United States. Mr. Anderson’s attacks are really an effort to challenge public-policy positions taken by Catholic Charities USA, the national organization that I head.

When I responded to Mr. Anderson’s article on Catholic Charities in City Journal last winter, saying that the positions that we took were in keeping with Catholic social teaching and consistent with those of the U.S. bishops, Mr. Anderson responded that the bishops were, “with notable exceptions, a reflexively left-wing group for decades now.”

Mr. Anderson’s problem, like that of many on the extreme right or left, is that Catholic teaching does not fit neatly into either traditionally conservative or liberal categories.

We believe in personal morality and social responsibility, in individual effort, family duties, and governmental action. Mr. Anderson divides the world into simplistic categories that reflect neither the complex realities of life nor the rich fabric of Catholic thought.

In November 1999, the U.S. Catholic bishops unanimously approved a statement praising the balanced work of Catholic Charities agencies. “In All Things Charity: A Pastoral Challenge for the New Millennium” reiterates church teaching on the purposes and roles of charitable work by Catholic agencies.

The bishops stressed the responsibilities of individuals, families, parishes, voluntary groups, church agencies, and government in meeting the needs of the poor and vulnerable. We all have a role to play.

Catholic thought has developed over centuries a wide range of insights and principles — for example, charity and justice, human dignity, a living wage for families, subsidiarity, social responsibility, solidarity — that help us to shape concrete practices in specific times. Mr. Anderson seems only to talk about subsidiarity, and not very comprehensively. He fails to understand even that delivery of government-funded social services by religious and other nonprofits is in fact an effective form of subsidiarity that guarantees diversity of values and services, consumer choice, and community responsiveness.

The bishops, as the de facto heads of local Catholic Charities agencies, regularly see the agencies’ work, meet with their staffs and boards, and talk with the people they serve. Their judgment, according to the bishops writing in “In All Things Charity,” is “to extend our heartfelt gratitude and encouragement to those countless individuals who, over the years, have been engaged in Catholic Charities service at the parish, diocesan, and national levels.” In “In All Things Charity,” the bishops also quote Pope John Paul II: “Our support and promotion of human life must be accomplished through service of charity, which finds expression in personal witness, various forms of volunteer work, social activity, and political commitment.”

Mr. Anderson’s form of charity is a lot less robust than Pope John Paul II’s and seems more inclined toward blaming the poor than recognizing the complex realities of poverty — personal, social, economic, and, at times, spiritual.

I also was surprised that a publication of your stature would print a piece that damages those who do the everyday work among the poor. More than 300,000 staff and volunteers, in the name of the Roman Catholic Church, daily carry the burden of helping Christ among eight million of the poor, homeless, addicted, pregnant, immigrant, disabled, and elderly who come to us for help each year. The work of these dedicated women and men involves caring outreach, expectations of personal change, high standards and religious values, and, far less often than needed, efforts to change society and public policy.

In contrast to Mr. Anderson’s practically equating poverty with sinfulness, my experience of living and working among people who are poor for 25 years and visiting Catholic Charities agencies nationwide for the past eight years is that most who come to us are religious people who pray, attend church, and read holy writ.

Like all of us, they need forgiveness and a closer relationship with God. They come to us because they are hungry, cannot afford housing, have fled persecution and war as refugees, want to adopt a child, or are abused as children, elders, or spouses. They need our love, better wages, affordable housing, safe day care for their children, and help for disabled family members.

The Rev. Fred Kammer
President
Catholic Charities USA
Alexandria, Va.

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To the Editor:

I would have to conclude from Brian Anderson’s commentary that Catholic Charities is doing a lot of things right. Apparently, the people who run Catholic Charities recognize, as Mr. Anderson does not, the importance of government involvement in fighting poverty. They also seem to realize that it is just as important to work for justice by raising the minimum wage, for example, as it is to provide for poor people’s immediate needs.

As the director of a small, interfaith, independent nonprofit program that serves the homeless in Santa Fe, N.M., I have to struggle daily with the injustices in our social systems that keep people poor and homeless. Low wages, lack of affordable housing, lack of services for underprivileged children, and a Social Security system that makes people fight for two years to get disability benefits are just a few of the things we need to change in our system in order to end poverty and homelessness. Given that many of these problems could be fixed by improved government policies, advocates for the poor should, of course, do their best to try to make our system fairer.

I respect Mr. Anderson’s right to disagree with the political agenda of Catholic Charities, but he has no business criticizing them for expressing it. If anything, those of us who work with the poor need to be more active in the fight to change those government policies that hurt the poor.

Hank Hughes
Executive Director
St. Elizabeth Shelter
Santa Fe, N.M.

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To the Editor:

As the pastor of several Catholic churches on the eastern plains of Colorado, a frontline provider of Catholic charity, I was appalled by Brian Anderson’s views.

The values that Catholic Charities promotes are among the most traditional: truth, life, justice, and peace, the various works of mercy.

Catholic social teaching is about more than direct service to the poor. Faith pushes Catholics to work for justice as well as to provide charity; justice not in a contractual “you get what you deserve” sense, but in a sense of what conditions and circumstances fit best with human dignity and the humane development of society around us. This demands change in the systems in which humanity is enmeshed.

The Catholic view puts the person squarely at the center of moral accountability for creation. Everything else is secondary and easily judged by its service of the person, especially the poor.

About some specifics of Mr. Anderson’s recycled article: Public assistance rolls have been cut, but what has really happened to the people who used to be on them? Perhaps the point of Catholic Charities’ focus on racism is not that crime is justified for blacks but accepted and overlooked for whites? Demanding social change is not about demanding more entitlements but about opening our eyes to the entitlements of the status quo and establishment. Perhaps Mr. Anderson hasn’t read that section of the Constitution that says people have the right to organize — assemble — and appeal for a redress of grievances: a change in the status quo system.

I do concede one point. In our urge to help people, Catholics have not always been diligently accountable for what our helping has accomplished. It is probably a venial sin to help someone too much. I am certain it is a mortal sin to help someone too little.

As for subsidiarity, Catholic Charities exists in more places than does any other nonprofit organization helping the poor: in the District of Columbia, New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, and in Gallup, N.M., Rapid City, S.D., and Yakima, Wash., and all those points in between. That is where charity happens in this country: on the street and in the parishes.

Over the last 40 years, Catholic Charities has changed its vision almost in step with the wider church, the active faith of supporters, and the needs of people to be served. It is not the Gospel that is changing. We are beginning to understand it better.

The Rev. John B. Farley
Pastor
St. Peter Catholic Church, Rocky Ford, Colo.
St. Peter Catholic Church, Ordway, Colo.
Mary Queen of Heaven Catholic Church, Fowler, Colo.
St. Joseph the Worker Catholic Church, Manzanola, Colo.

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To the Editor:

Brian Anderson’s diatribe against Catholic Charities made me want to immediately forward the organization a donation. I figure that any group that gets under the Manhattan Institute’s skin so much that the Institute’s senior editor is writing books and articles about it deserves my money.

Mr. Anderson derides Catholic Charities for its efforts to reduce the disproportionate confinement of minority youth, an issue that is a familiar whipping boy of the Manhattan Institute. But there is a large and growing body of research, which the institute is well aware of, that shows that minority youth are progressively overrepresented at every stage of the juvenile-justice process, even controlling for delinquent behavior. For example, a recent report by the Building Blocks for Youth Initiative compared what happened to white and black youth with no prior record of institutionalization who were arrested for drug offenses. Despite the fact that they had similar prior records and were charged with similar offenses, the black youth were incarcerated at 48 times the rate of the white youth.

Why would a major right-wing think tank care that much about the rate at which black youth are incarcerated? Because by making this a wedge issue, the institute hopes to whip up fears among conservative voters and blue-collar whites. As such voters go to the polls in droves, they elect politicians favorably disposed toward tax cuts for the wealthy contributors who fund the Manhattan Institute. This divisive strategy began to work well in the South several decades ago and has since spread to the rest of the country.

Mr. Anderson accuses Catholic Charities of losing its soul by sticking up for poor minority youth. But the Catholic Church has a long tradition, dating back to its founder, of fighting the oppressive use of the state’s power against outgunned minorities. For my money, that’s the kind of work toward which philanthropic dollars should flow in droves.

Vincent Schiraldi
President
Justice Policy Institute
Washington