Two-tier morality? Catholic Bishops' anti-poverty advocacy lags

Though Dolan’s office did not return repeated requests for comment on this article (see bottom box called “Missing Voices”), Kathy Saile defended Dolan by saying that a letter he sent to bishops last September urging “the Bishops and the Clergy to be leaders in their own communities to overcome poverty” was a marker of Dolan’s commitment and leadership on poverty advocacy. To Krueger, however, “Cardinal Dolan has given us a mixed message.”  Instead of reasserting that the Ryan budget was inconsistent with Catholic social teaching, Kruger says, Dolan  “left the interpretation as to whether the Ryan budget was in conformance with Catholic social teaching open to question.” That is one reason that Kruger characterizes the force of the Bishops’ collective voice on anti-poverty advocacy as “uninspired and tentative at best.”

The road not taken (any more)

The USCCB’s own history provides insight into how it could advocate more strongly on poverty in ways that combined both the concerted media attention and engagement with Catholics in the pews identified as fruitful avenues to pursue by contemporary critics of the USCCB. In November 1986, after over two years of hearings and three drafts, the Bishops’ Conference released “Economic Justice for All,” a more than 100 page pastoral letter on the U.S. economy, which confronted squarely the challenges to social justice during the Reagan era. When the Bishops released the first draft of the letter, a New York Times article noted that unlike Josef Stalin — who famously disparaged the influence of the Catholic Church with the quip, “The Pope! How many divisions has he got?” — “Today nobody is likely to make the mistake of dismissing the [Bishops’ Conference’s] potential influence on United States economic policy.”

Economic Justice for All argued that “the market system contributes to the success of the U.S. economy; but so do many efforts to forge economic institutions and public policies that enable all to share in the riches of the nation.” It called, among other things, for increases in the minimum wage, a more progressive tax structure, and further support for Social Security and Medicaid.

Father Fred Kammer is the director of the Jesuit Social Research Institute at Loyola University in New Orleans. From 1990 to 1992, he worked on health and welfare issues for the USCCB and, from 1992 to 2001, he served as president and chief executive officer of Catholic Charities USA. Kammer says that a significant part of the influence of Economic Justice for All came not simply from its release, but through the extended focus on poverty issues achieved by the bishops in the course of conducting lengthy hearings held with experts around the country while developing the document. The protracted process of producing the document, according to Kammer, engaged Catholics and other Americans in a conversation about economic justice: “a lot of education took place by virtue of having the drafts out” and circulating in the press, he says.

More concretely, Kammer recalled, “After they did the letter, they set up an implementation office for three years, and that office put out bulletin paragraphs, to try and get the thing into a form where a pastor could just drop the thing into his bulletin, … they put out slideshows, they put out materials for parishes, materials for schools.” Within weeks of the release of the final draft, state-level bishops’ organizations also began making specific recommendations to their legislatures, and by December 1986 the Maryland bishops had already called for parish priests in the state to devote the third Sunday of advent to preaching about Economic Justice for All.