Paul Ryan sought to defend his maligned budget Thursday morning, appearing at Georgetown, a Catholic university, to give a speech entitled America's Enduring Promise.
Ryan's budget has come under increasing criticism from Catholic leaders, with the fiercest coming in a letter (link is a Google document) from 90 Georgetown faculty members and priests: "In short, your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ." That's gotta hit a guy like Ryan right in the John Galt.
What's a Catholic fiscal conservative say to that? Here are the money lines, as picked out by Matt Lewis at the Daily Caller:
The work I do as a Catholic holding office conforms to the social doctrine as best I can make of it. What I have to say about the social doctrine of the Church is from the viewpoint of a Catholic in politics applying my understanding to the problems of the day.
Serious problems like those we face today require charitable conversation. Civil public dialogue goes to the heart of solidarity, the virtue that does not divide society into classes and groups but builds up the common good of all.
The overarching threat to our whole society today is the exploding federal debt. The Holy Father, Pope Benedict, has charged that governments, communities, and individuals running up high debt levels are “living at the expense of future generations” and “living in untruth.”
Where in that Ryan sees a reconciliation between Christian care for the poor and his budget is beyond me. Ryan's budget savages social services for the poor to pay for tax breaks for the rich, and cuts infrastructure, transportation, education and veteran's program funding, in some cases almost to zero, depleting all funds for civil society while maintaining massive defense spending. Ryan's budget seems destined to create an overwhelming underclass by drastically reallocating wealth upward; I don't think that's the classless and groupless society he means.
But Ryan has yet to offer an alternative narrative, instead using the inflated direness of the federal debt to create a false choice between complete laissez-faire and overreaching government. "I do not believe that the preferential option for the poor means a preferential option for big government," Ryan told his Georgetown audience. Whoever said one meant the other? There are quite a few shades of gray between the black of his budget and the white of his boogeyman socialist handout society. As the Georgetown faculty reminded him, there's nothing Catholic about his strong arming morality into drastic capitalism:
While you often appeal to Catholic teaching on "subsidiarity" as a rationale for gutting government programs, you are profoundly misreading Church teaching. Subsidiarity is not a free pass to dismantle government programs and abandon the poor to their own devices. This often misused Catholic principle cuts both ways. It calls for solutions to be enacted as close to the level of local communities as possible. But it also demands that higher levels of government provide help—"subsidium"— when communities and local governments face problems beyond their means to address such as economic crises, high unemployment, endemic poverty and hunger. According to Pope Benedict XVI: "Subsidiarity must remain closely linked to the principle of solidarity and vice versa."
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Related: Catholic Bishops Decry Ryan Budget (#Finally)
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