I've officially had my fill of the slobbering love affair so many Catholics have carried on with "social justice" over the past decades. Especially since this has usually been expressed in a cozying up to socialism as its best implementation.
Outside St. Thomas last Sunday there was a table where we were invited to write letters urging the Federal government to be sure to continue spending large amounts of money to "help the poor".
Now, if more of the money we're already spending was going for programs that actually succeeded in teaching people how to get out of poverty, that would be worth saving. But I can remember when today's enormous social programs got their start in Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty". What great social changes we were promised back then! All those hundreds of billions spent, only to have poverty grow greater in scope, amid a deepening degradation in the culture in which the poor occupy the lowest and most vulnerable layer.
I may have missed something in catechism class, but why is it in the interest of the Catholic church for alms given voluntarily as an expression of personal charity to be replaced with welfare checks funded by state coercion (via taxation)? Especially when that means more and more power being concentrated in the hands of a central government?
In 1867, Matthew Arnold wrote "Dover Beach", a haunting poem evoking the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the Sea of Faith. As a boomer who finished Catholic elementary school in 1964 and then watched my Church falter, I've found the roar all too audible. So here I wait, listening for the whispers of that Sea's invincible return.
