In the tradition of Catholic social teaching, helping the poor requires both individual and communal efforts. It is the second demand for communal efforts that is skirted by many Catholics. The bishops surfaced these themes in the summer of 1996 as both Congress and the president approached agreement on the largest reduction in welfare spending and services since the New Deal. These do not sound like the pronouncements of fuzzy-headed idealists so much as the concerns of seasoned realists. The Catholic Church, through Catholic Charities, provides direct services to over 11 million needy people each year.
Catholic hospitals constitute the largest private health-care delivery system in the nation.
Its inner-city schools provide quality education to many thousands of desperately poor children of all faiths. All means-tested programs for the poor account for only 13 percent of the federal budget. They are hardly budget busters. These are the injustices which the bishops denounced using powerful arguments drawn from both their moral and their practical wisdom. And, as the bishops have correctly reminded us, when we balance the budget by taking from the poor to give to the rich, we challenge not only the fundamental social-justice teachings of the Catholic Church but perhaps the very fabric of American democratic society.