From the desk of
Fr. John Estrem,
Chief Executive
Officer |
May 2006
If you’ve been paying attention to our legislative sessions over the past three years, you know the results have not been kind to Minnesota’s most vulnerable citizens — children, the disabled, the uninsured, the poor in general. In the noisy public debate over whose interest will win, it is easy to drown out the softest voices.
But I believe there is another, unspoken reason why those in need continue to lose ground each year: the decision makers feel confident that people of good will fill the vacuum, that philanthropy alone can take care of the needy.
Thus far, we haven’t proven them wrong. Each year, as the cuts in funding to social service programs thrust deeper, we have been forced to respond in two ways: by making sacrifices that are painful to Catholic Charities and those we serve; and by relying on increased charitable contributions to fill the gap. Eventually there comes a point where one more sacrifice will dissolve a program altogether, and even our most generous contributors are tapped out. We are coming dangerously close to that point.
As Catholics, we are called to respond to the poverty in our midst. In the story of the Last Judgment in Matthew 25, God condemned His people for failing to act in the face of human need. It was the sin of “obliviousness” that caused God to show such disfavor toward those who had not fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and freed the oppressed. Yet, to spend an evening volunteering at the food shelf and call it a day is addressing only half our responsibility as Catholics.
In Catholic social teaching, we learn that there are two ways we are expected to respond to the poor in our midst: as a private individual, and through the systems we construct as a community. Both are required of us.
If one person’s turning away from another in need is immoral, how much more heinous is it when we do so as a group, in an organized fashion? Yet, in terms of how our current economic, social and political institutions fail to address poverty and the intertwined issue of racism, we are sinning collectively, with all the power and influence a collective act summons, yet we all will answer for it individually. We can’t excuse ourselves by claiming that the issue is too complex, because the issue is actually very simple: “When you did it to the least of them, you did it to Me.” And we can’t turn the blame on the choices our legislators make because in this democracy, we are the government. When we don’t vote, or speak out, or act in support of the poor, we are upholding the system that keeps them down — in other words, we are part of the problem.
Fighting poverty, racism and economic inequality is not only the right thing to do in moral terms, it is also the smart thing to do in purely practical terms. The existence of an almost permanent underclass of poor, mostly non-white individuals, concentrated in the urban core, is a threat to the health and well being of our entire community. Business and community leaders are beginning to realize what our moral values have told us for centuries: we cannot have a healthy society if the poor are neglected and cut off from the life opportunities available to the rest of us. As Paul’s letter to the Corinthians says in Chapter 12, “If one member of the body suffers, all suffer as one.”
If our legislators mirror our priorities as a community by what they choose to fund, ask yourself whether that’s the kind of community in which you want to live. If not, you have almost a year to think about what you’ll do about it — when the agenda is set for the next legislative session.
Fr. John Estrem, Chief Executive Officer
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