What’s Wrong with the World

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What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

Tell me again about how the left cares about the poor

The next time you hear some fuzzy-headed Christian tell you that he is a Democrat because the left cares about the poor, while the right doesn't, please point him to this story. The Little Sisters of the Poor (you savvy them?) are on the verge of having to suspend their operations in the United States because of the Obamacare HHS mandate. Unless the mandate is overturned or the religious exemption is forcibly expanded by SCOTUS, it looks like that is what is going to happen. Steve Skojec says,

When the sister speaking at the Mass I attended mentioned this, it both made me angry and broke my heart. When did we become a country mentioned in the same breath as nations known for oppression, human rights violations, and an environment hostile to freedom of conscience?We’ve all been fighting this battle against the coming darkness for quite some time, but something about this small, unassuming nun telling the parish that they would be forced to discontinue their care for the elderly poor, and even worse, to leave the country altogether, really drove it home. This is what it has come to. We are no longer the land of the free and the home of the brave. We have become something else.

This is not the America I grew up in. This is not the America I want for my children. I want to recommend a course of action, some concrete thing that people can do to put a stop to this madness, but like the relentless evil of legal abortion that came before it, there’s only so much that can humanly be done. The only thing for it is to keep praying, keep fighting, and keep teaching our children what America was, and should be again.

One wonders: When people mouth platitudes about how the left cares for the little guy, have they been living in a cave? Do they know nothing about, for example, the shut-down of Catholic Charities' adoption services in Boston? Nothing of the threat right now to all manner of Christian charitable works from the HHS mandate? I fear that they are, in Anthony Esolen's apt phrase, "of the world but not in it." Will getting out more information make a difference? I don't know. But whether it does or not, it behooves us to have the information, to know the truth, and to teach it to our children.

Thus speaketh the Lord of hosts, saying, Execute true judgment, and show mercy and compassions every man to his brother: And oppress not the widow, nor the fatherless, the stranger, nor the poor; and let none of you imagine evil against his brother in your heart. But they refused to hearken, and pulled away the shoulder, and stopped their ears, that they should not hear. Zechariah 7:9-11

Comments (21)

Virtually no one in America is poor (with a few, mostly rural exceptions - not the people the Dems are thinking of). In America there is relative poverty but almost no absolute poverty. There is no need for a party to advocate for the poor when there are no poor.

"Caring for" the poor and actually you know, caring for them as the Little Sisters do, are completely different things. This ground has been covered so many times, only the wilfully blind can fail to see it. No Christian has any good-faith excuse remaining to him to repeat these absurd cliches about the left "caring for" the poor--not that those arguments ever had much to recommend them, even before the absolute failure of left-wing legislation to alleviate poverty and strengthen Christian charity became manifest.

But don't you realize? Hoe selfish they are! If they only provided health insurance for contraception (which isn't that big of a deal anyway, right?), they'd continue to be able to help the poor. How evil they are to care more about contraception than the poor and lowly!

Clearly it's their fault, right?

About there being no "absolute poor", maybe so, but here's a story. I had a wonderful theology teacher who more or less converted me, with some help from Dr. Feser, from cafeteria Catholicism. He told us one year that he volunteered at a soup kitchen. Around Thanksgiving each year they gave out turkeys for free to people who need them.

He says that one day, after they'd finished for the day, he found a guy sobbing in the street-literally sobbing. He had burnt his turkey, and that meant his family had no meal for Thanksgiving. Of course, they got the poor guy another turkey.

Maybe there are no absolute poor, but there are still people who are living paycheck to paycheck-and just barely.

Of course. The lack of absolute poverty doesn’t abolish charity. I’m merely responding to what the left says.

"Virtually no one in America is poor (with a few, mostly rural exceptions - not the people the Dems are thinking of)."

There is a lot of absolute poverty in America - if one ignores money, that is.

The Chicken

Sage, excellent point about the distinction between two sense of "caring for."

I wouldn't mind if people "cared for" the poor in the sense of merely "being emotionally concerned about" the poor, even if they didn't have anything practical to offer. The trouble with the left is that it can't just "care for" the poor while letting other people get on with the job of actually caring for the poor in the sense of doing something positive and worthwhile. The left has to meddle. And more often than not, that results in less real help being given. Sometimes that meddling is well-intentioned foolishness of some sort. In the case of the HHS mandate, it isn't even that. It's raw demagoguery, and those promulgating it really don't give a damn about whether the Little Sisters are driven out of the U.S., because they don't care if the poor have fewer people serving them, so long as those who do serve them do it the left's way. Sometimes I wish the left would just stick to sitting in an ivory tower thinking thoughts about the poor, if they'd leave the rest of us alone to do good works.

To answer your question, no, they don't know about this stuff. The reason why is because most people get most of their information from television, and action McNews doesn't cover these stories. Our media is, essentially, a collective and organically-emerged liberal version of Pravda.

On the contrary, yes, they absolutely know it, and they blame us. In Boston, for example, they blame the adoption shutdown on insitutional homophobia. They have no sympathy for the Little Sisters and will blame any shutdown on the Sisters' intransigence. It will be further evidence that the Catholic Church is *voluntarily* leaving the public square, so to hell with them. You get the picture.

GKC, I think you and Untenured are talking about two different groups of people. The entrenched liberal elite meet the description that GKC gives. The useful idiots among Christian liberals simply do not want to be informed, so they do no extra homework and gulp down the pablum served up by the MSM. They are well described by Untenured.

I admit, however, that there are probably borderline cases that don't fall on a clear line between these two groups.

"There is no need for a party to advocate for the poor when there are no poor."


To the extent that "no poor" is true (in the "sleeping under bridges" sense), it is largely due to liberal initiatives like Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid/HUD for the elderly, unemployment insurance/food stamps/Medicaid for the unemployed, and EITC/Medicaid/HUD/SCHIP/food stamps for the working poor.

During the present economic downturn these programs kept millions from falling into poverty and also kept AD from further collapsing.

"'Caring for' the poor and actually you know, caring for them as the Little Sisters do, are completely different things."

We have to note that the good Sisters are able to "care" in their way for the two to three thousand souls in their homes because they chose to make use of the opportunities afforded to them by many of the above programs, ones championed by liberals and, sadly, opposed by conservatives.

We need to keep in mind that non-profits like these are basically pass through entities. They are set up to use funds derived from various sources to achieve certain socially useful ends.

I checked out the web sites for most of the individual homes and the 990s for several. It seems that about 60 - 70+% of their incomes are from Medicare and Medicaid as well as charges to their residents, which in the case of poor seniors are likely to come from their monthly Social Security cheques. The balance is from the "donation, grants" line and the sources are unitemized so other government grants could be on that line.

"The Little Sisters of the Poor (you savvy them?) are on the verge of having to suspend their operations in the United States..."

Or not. Their statement,

http://www.littlesistersofthepoorsanpedro.org/the-news/100-statement-of-the-little-sisters-of-the-poor-on-the-hhs-mandate

seems less definite but there may be some issues here also (sadly the Sisters seem to have internalized a most unlikely slippery slope scenario - perhaps they read this blog).

1. They have made moral commitments and likely have deep personal relationships with their charges, especially those who are in the last months of their lives. Unwinding those commitments will take a while.

2. Taken together their various properties are likely worth well into nine figures. Unwinding things in an orderly manner will also take a while and are complicated by HUD 202 commitments.

3. The implication here is that the poor seniors are going to be tossed into the street. There are many other entities that do this sort of work and the Sisters have a turn-key operation with a guaranteed income stream. Does anyone here really think that they would just bail on their clients without providing for an orderly transition?

I do hope the Sisters decide that the very real good they do trumps mere dogma but that is their choice.

(Am I the only person to find the China reference in the linked article inapt and odious?)

I do hope the Sisters decide that the very real good they do trumps mere dogma but that is their choice.

Speaking of inapt, odious remarks...

Personally, I hope that the administration decides that the very real good the Sisters do trumps Secretary Sebelius' completely unnecessary, ideologically-driven point scoring, which serves no practical purpose whatsoever.

But hey, that's just me.

And I'd add that the comment I quoted there was a perfect distillation of the leftist mentality, in all its unapologetically destructive glory:

"We will attack and undermine your entire incentive for doing what you do, but we expect that you will keep on doing it just the same."

As though "mere dogma" were not the entire reason the Sisters get up every morning and do the good they do.

"We will attack and undermine your entire incentive for doing what you do, but we expect that you will keep on doing it just the same."

Indeed. Tear down the load-bearing wall but demand that the ceiling stay up. Reality is forced to fit ideology.

I do hope the Sisters decide that the very real good they do trumps mere dogma but that is their choice.

Me:

But don't you realize? How selfish they are! If they only provided health insurance for contraception (which isn't that big of a deal anyway, right?), they'd continue to be able to help the poor. How evil they are to care more about contraception than the poor and lowly!

Clearly it's their fault, right?

Man, not like that wasn't predictable.

Marc Anthony, you beat me to it. Al has perfectly fulfilled your prediction. Odious? Yes, pretty odious: "You've got relationships with your dying clients. You're not just going to throw them out into the street, are you??"

al, I can imagine how you might consider conservatives telling themselves "just so" stories about this: the underdogs, the Little Sisters being beat up by Big Brother (say, is that a great headline, or what?). Gentle little charity workers cast out in the cold by bureaucrats, along with their patients. And then imagining yourself popping that pretty little "just so" story with your cold hard facts: that the Sisters are largely supported by money from the government, money from programs instituted by liberal, progressive political movements.

There's just one problem with all that: history. The Little Sisters started in 1839, and started in this country in 1868, entire generations before even the earliest of the liberal programs entered the fray. As with all intelligent agents, they make the best they can with the resources at hand to complete the tasks before them. If they are being offered government money to pay for care, they use it. If they aren't offered government money, they keep on trekking without it. I think we can safely say that the Little Sisters are not turning a PROFIT on the care provided with government pay. If every such dollar they use, that passes through gov hands (NB: it never originates in those gov hands), evaporated today, they would attempt so far as possible to continue to provide such care as they could manage. And so, whatever happens to the elderly if the Sisters must shut down a facility, that consequence is to be laid at the feet of ACA, not the Sisters.

The other half of your misguided attempt to burst the conservative story is this: as with other liberal programs, the end result TENDS toward annihilation of the intermediate communities that make up society, leaving only the bare naked individual and the massive impersonal federal government. This happens bit by bit even when it isn't the direct, intentional outcome. The role of the highest level of government is to bolster and support lower levels, including lower communities and lower levels of government to HELP them carry out their own distinctive missions, not to eradicate them when they could use a hand.

I do hope the Sisters decide that the very real good they do trumps mere dogma but that is their choice.

How despicable. To write such words declares that you simply don't credit that people who disagree with you politically have consciences. Or that you don't really understand matters of conscience at all. Either way, despicable.

I'd like to pick up on an excellent observation by Tony:

The other half of your misguided attempt to burst the conservative story is this: as with other liberal programs, the end result TENDS toward annihilation of the intermediate communities that make up society, leaving only the bare naked individual and the massive impersonal federal government.

I was permanently changed by an article I read years ago from a poor person who was "helped" by government compassion. She described the help as "throwing bread from the back of a truck." Of course, any bread helps when you are hungry, however it might be delivered. But she was deeply aware that she had a deep need for more than bread. She needed to experience the care of others in relationship; to take a seat at someone's table.

Soon after reading that, I had the rare chance to speak for a very liberal church in town (the minister was away, thank God). I opened with Jesus' statement: "For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always." (Matt. 26:11, ASV). He was defending the extravagant use of ointment FOR HIMSELF rather than selling and donating to the poor. Did Jesus not care? Was He selfish?

I think the truth is that Jesus realizes that care for the poor, apart from attention to Him, is going to be futile. Bread may be tossed, but relationships will not germinate.

Government care is futile because, as Tony notes, that care is always impersonal. And as such, it cannot foster responsibility (the only true poverty left in America is that caused by the irresponsible use of resources, as when a child's food goes to a parent's crack pipe). Such "help" will be no better than what is offered by the mental health profession: relief of symptoms, but no treatment of the root cause, and a corresponding diminishing of self.

The mandate's line of reasoning is that anything done outside a place of worship is not religious. The Little Sisters of the Poor, a religious order is not religious, because they do not stick to the four walls of the church.

It's an attempt to confuse worship with conscience and tell Christians shut up and pray, but do not show up in public.

The left's attitudes towards sex as consumerism, in fact adopts the same capitalistic ideas they claim to oppose.

Exactly.

That message needs to be shouted from the rooftops of every academic institution in the country. It is not recited nearly enough.

People need to learn and hear that, and either reject their shallowness or acknowledge it.

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