Time for Civility in Poverty Debate

To the Editor:

In cities all over the country, and in towns large and small, Catholic Charities makes real the Gospel message of helping the poor. Scores of thousands of staff members and volunteers are involved in this work, and hundreds of thousands of people are directly assisted. No doubt, all this is carried out with great generosity of spirit, good will, and brightly burning faith.

Experience shows, however, that many of those most articulate about this work are also partisans of a specific political idea about how to organize society to help the poor. It is not too much to suggest that this idea of theirs is much closer to that of the Democratic Party than to the ideas more conservative partisans present for achieving better results.

Brian C. Anderson’s article (“A Wrong Turn for Catholic Charities,” November 30) was very important for opening up much-needed debate on this topic, The aim of such a debate would be to help the poor in a better way. By and large, “progressive” forces have designed and operated the War on Poverty for 35 years now. How well has it worked? Where are its best successes? What are its greatest failures?

Some years ago, a commission of experts concluded that since 1965 we have much improved the condition of the elderly. But the condition of young people is demonstrably far worse off than it was in 1965.

The fastest growing segment of the poor is unmarried women with young children. Never before in history have so many men abandoned women to bear children and bring them up without help. Nor is this a racial problem. By 1986, the number of white children born out of wedlock began to surpass the number of black children born into such circumstances.

Even if one approves of such behavior morally, one cannot deny its injurious social impact — above all on children, but also on mothers and fathers and whole communities. The point is not to moralize. It is to find better policies that diminish rather than increase the numbers of the poor.

Every year, for example, the United States is refreshed by a steady stream of legal immigrants — about 600,000 per year — nearly all of them poor. Most of these immigrants, avoiding the “honey trap” of welfare, grab hold of opportunity and soon exit from poverty. How can we help all American able-bodied poor to do the same?

Clearly, there is room for better ideas. Perhaps we can at least agree on a goal for new poverty programs: They should not keep the poor in a condition of dependency, so that we can feel sorry for them; but they should help the poor escape from poverty, through providing the assistance they need to succeed by their own skills and efforts.

For those who cannot help themselves in this way, of course, other forms of assistance will always be necessary, and it is quite wonderful that Catholic Charities will be there to assist these most needy ones.

Predictably, of course, those who were put on the defensive by the questions Mr. Anderson raised in his opinion piece were tempted to reply with ad hominem arguments, attacking either Mr. Anderson’s morals or those of others whom they imagine to be their enemies. The fact that so many letter writers, in response to Mr. Anderson’s article, did adopt this technique verifies the point Mr. Anderson made: Many of those associated with the very good work otherwise done by Catholic Charities do exemplify unnecessarily partisan viewpoints.

We need a civil debate on how best to help the poor; we need better policies for fighting poverty. Surely we can invent a better set of social reforms than those we have been employing for the last 35 years. We owe Mr. Anderson gratitude for the high intelligence he has shown in opening up this debate. We even owe gratitude to those others who wrote in reply to him, for proving his point.

Michael Novak
George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy
American Enterprise Institute
Washington