The morality of Paul Ryan’s budget

The USCCB in criticising Ryan's budget has inadvertently provided alibis for Democrat Catholics like Vice President Biden, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius, who do support what Bishop Morlino describes as intrinsic evil, i.e. unrestricted abortion and same-sex marriage.

After he was chosen by Mitt Romney to be his vice-presidential candidate, Paul Ryan was interviewed by David Brody of CBN News for his “take” on “this big schism between the social justice Catholics and the pro-life Catholics." Ryan's comments distinguishing “non-negotiable issues” like life and marriage from prudential judgments were reported in Catholic World News:

I, as a conservative Catholic can no more claim sole justification for my political views than a liberal can for theirs. The social Magisterium is very broad in allowing the lay [faithful] to exercise what we call prudential judgment to apply their principles to the problems of the day.

Now, there are key issues, intrinsic issues, life and marriage and things like this, that are really non-negotiable, and the Church is very clear on that,” Ryan continued. “But on other issues, of economics and such like that, that’s a matter of prudential judgment.

Now what we believe as practicing Catholics, as conservative Catholics is that our job is to go after the root cause of poverty, to try and eradicate poverty. When we talk about ideas, principles like subsidiarity in conjunction with solidarity and preferential option for the poor what that means is we believe in civil society. We believe in individuals in their community and solidarity with one another working to create a better common good for everybody; helping people in need, protecting the voiceless like the unborn. These things are central to who we are and the notion that you can divorce these principles, these matters of faith between private life and public life that doesn’t jive with the thinking of a Catholic.

And so sure there are differences of opinion on how to achieve an end. We believe in attacking the root cause of poverty not simply treating the symptoms so it’s more tolerable and that means having a vibrant civil society and when government gets too big and too intrusive and too dictatorial then it crowds out civil society. It makes it harder for those institutions that are the mediating institutions between the person and their government to flourish; churches, charities, civic organizations.

When my boys go to Cub Scouts they learn values at Cub Scouts. When we put the Pinewood Derby together or the Raingutter Regatta, when my daughter gets involved in her local charities or things like this, this is what ties people together and the notion that the government is the center of our society, of our economy, in our life is just a notion that is foreign to us who are people of faith who believe in these principles.

George Weigel, noted author and biographer of Pope John Paul ll, suggests that the debates of the 2012 political campaign reflects the contrasting visions of the political theorists Thomas Hobbes and Edmund Burke. Liberal Democrats, Weigel argues, seem to favor the ideas of Hobbes, who in his famous work Leviathan argued that all power should be held by the state, for the benefit of the people. Burke, on the other hand, argued for the liberating and civilizing influence of intermediate institutions.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to have more clarity in its teaching, notably that policies promoting abortion and same-sex "marriage" are not negotiable, while budget details and economic policies are. Much the same could be said for some of the "social justice" statements emerging from the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference.

There is no moral imperative in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church that a particular amount of government funding for food stamps etc is a must and may not be reduced at all even though federal debt is unsustainable. However, there are economic necessities to fix broken programs such as Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare before the US becomes like Greece and is forced to institute drastic austerity measures which hurt the poor and unemployed. Increasing its debt of 16 Trillion is not the best way for the US to help the "least of these".