By DEXTER DUGGAN
SAN FRANCISCO — It might seem surprising to the out-of-towner that liberal San Francisco, resplendent in liberal Democrat-controlled California, has so many panhandlers. The traveler might think that here, of all places, the needy would have their desires adequately addressed by government.
If the visitor plans to stay here a while but doesn’t want to finance downcast supplicants’ possible bad habits, he might want to get a supply of small cards to hand out with contact information for local charitable agencies. If the supplicants need that reminder.
Does government liberalism breed more dependency, as conservatives assert?
It hurts to see a woman near City Hall with a cluster of blisters on her hand ask for money “for a hit,” but a charity’s intake specialist is more experienced to assess her requirements and map out her road to rehabilitation than a passing visitor. You’ve got to be cruel to be kind, as pop artist Elvis Costello sang right here in San Francisco.
Earning economic success is a sensible goal of most people, when that’s understood to mean what may be called “a decent living,” of which adequate nutrition, shelter, clothing, and education are the minimums. One doesn’t have to have mansions or aspirations like Mitt Romney’s or Barack Obama’s to seek or have a dignified life.
One must also heed the Lord’s overwhelming reminder that earthly life, no matter how long and well-provisioned, is only the tiniest of fractions in time as measured against the everlasting reward or punishment to come.
Yet when Pope Francis affirmed Blessed Pope Paul VI’s teaching against contraception in Humanae Vitae, which presciently also warned of the negative social consequences to follow, some letters to the editor in the San Francisco Chronicle asserted the connection between babies and poverty to be unquestionable.
Said a portion of one letter published January 25 in northern California’s largest daily paper:
“The Chinese are the only major power which has tried to address this, but religion, timid politicians, and an uninformed public have been holding the rest of the world down. It’s time we listen to science and reason above dogma. Is a baby being born the only sanctity we should uphold? How about the sanctity of a long, happy, healthy, prosperous life lived in a world of clean air, water, food, and natural surroundings for every human being?”
Well, suffice it to say that if births are welcomed only with this plethora of blessings guaranteed, there would have been or will be few births indeed. Including our own selves. A birth dearth may be the aim of the “sufficiency” movement. But it wasn’t how the United States grew to be the world power it was in the mid-20th century.
Families of five or six children were common, and productive. However, the environmental and population scares generated by sixties radicals generally implanted a real fear of having babies — with the result these days that a coming population collapse in the West appears more likely, with births persisting below replacement level.
Yet to read shuddering letters to the editor in the Chronicle, one might think that eight or nine waifs is the current common U.S. family size and condition.
Still, a letter beneath a four-column-wide Chronicle headline on January 21, “Admitting the Church’s mistake,” may have seemed true to many readers. It noted that Pope Francis embraced “the discredited and bankrupt Church dogma condemning artificial birth control in the Philippines, an overpopulated, poverty-stricken Catholic nation, of all places.”
Who doubts there are lots of babies and poverty there — as well as in Latino nations that the manipulative globalists would like us to believe are beyond hope unless they can sneak tens of millions of their inhabitants into the U.S. forever.
Correcting corrupt oligarchies and rejecting socialism are where the solution begins, not promoting forced abortion or massive illegal immigration. But reform has trouble beginning as long as many self-interested groups refuse to seek a truly moral solution and pretend that a lawbreaking trek to the north is the answer.
Catholic Church leadership in various nations must share the blame for enduring this corruption, and allowing it to endure.
An analysis posted January 22 at The Wall Street Journal’s “Houses of Worship” column addressed the ill effects of growing corruption and cronyism, even in the U.S. It was titled “Teaching Capitalism to Catholics” and was written by Tim Busch, a CEO in California who serves on the board of the Catholic University of America, in Washington, D.C.
“Such collusion leads to the corruption and collectivism that are anathema to Catholic social teaching,” Busch wrote. “It assumes that government intervention is the answer to social and economic problems, misunderstanding the Catholic principles of solidarity and subsidiarity. And it subordinates the individual to the state, perverting or ignoring the Catholic understanding of the common good, human dignity, and personal freedom.
“Societies and economies that operate in this fashion inevitably harm the poor, even as they claim to do the opposite,” he continued. “For this reason, Pope St. John Paul II, following other popes, explicitly condemned such economies in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus. He argued that [Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical] Rerum Novarum’s claim that ‘the working man himself would be among the first to suffer’ had been borne out by the collectivist societies of the 20th century. He also commended ‘an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, [and] private property’.”
Busch observed that Rerum Novarum, along with thinking by subsequent Popes, offers “the qualities that must be present in a just economic system. Among other things, the list includes the protection of private property and human freedom, a concern for the common good, and, most important, a deep respect for human dignity and a ‘preferential option’ for the poor.
“Capitalism meets these criteria better than any other economic system. It is also the single most effective means of alleviating poverty. In the past 20 years alone, it has lifted more than a billion people out of extreme poverty, according to The Economist. It is also single-handedly responsible for creating a global two-billion-person middle class over the past 300 years,” Busch wrote, emphasizing the importance of having the setting of “a moral culture.”
As for Pope Francis being portrayed as an enemy of modernity and development because he affirmed Humanae Vitae, The Wanderer asked Fr. Frank Pavone for a comment. Pavone is national director of the New York-based Priests for Life. He replied:
“It is easy in liberal circles to create a false division between the affirmation of Church teaching on birth control and Church teaching on the need to take care of the poor. But both teachings are in fact best understood in the light of each other. We care for the poor for the same reason we welcome life: The lives of all of us have been entrusted to one another.
“The first and greatest source of material poverty is precisely the lack of the first and most precious of our resources: human lives. People in a society are not just passive recipients and consumers of other resources; they also are producers,” Pavone said. “Poverty does not rise or fall based in simple numbers, but on how people in that society are educated, employed, and empowered. Moreover, Church teaching acknowledges the prudence to be taken in planning families, in the context of generosity.”
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress