Timothy Cardinal Dolan will join other prominent leaders Thursday in Midtown for a familiar New York ritual: the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, which raises millions of dollars for low-income children.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, who’s delivering the keynote address, can be expected to give a good speech — but he has never honestly reckoned with the damage he’s doing to the values he espouses.
A former altar boy, Ryan speaks frequently about how his faith shapes his political worldview, even as his positions on immigration, health care and budgets consistently leave the poor behind and often clash with the advocacy of Catholic Church leaders.
President Trump “made the right call,” Ryan said after the President rescinded a program that protected 800,000 young undocumented immigrants from deportation. These Dreamers, brought to the United States as children, should “rest easy,” the speaker assured, because Congress will figure out a solution.
Telling young people who contribute to their communities, are leaders at universities and who embody American values to chill out while the powerful play politics is simply arrogant and callous. Pope Francis weighed in on the topic when asked about Trump’s decision during a news conference last month. His moral clarity stood in stark contrast to Ryan’s slippery spin.
“I have heard it said that the President of the United States presents himself as a man who is pro-life, and if he is a good pro-life man then he will understand that the family is the cradle of life, and that it must be defended as a unit,” the Pope said in defending the program.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops also spoke out against Trump’s DACA decision. Catholic bishops called the move “reprehensible,” and a “heartbreaking moment in our history that shows the absence of mercy and goodwill, and a short-sighted vision for the future.”
That’s more like it.
Ryan’s key role in trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act has also sparked much-needed Catholic pushback. Last week, he applauded Trump’s decision to end subsidies that help low-income families pay out-of-pocket costs. Sister Carol Keehan, CEO of the Catholic Health Association, the largest group of nonprofit health care providers in the nation, described the decision as “devastating for working families.”
During a CNN Town Hall forum in August, Ryan met his match when a Catholic sister from his congressional district asked him why his positions on health care, taxes and the budget often seem at odds with the Church’s social teachings. “Trickle-down economics has never worked,” Sister Erica Jordan told me in an interview. “The budget is cutting programs in a way that hurts the poor. I wonder how often he talks to poor people. I don’t think he has much opportunity to really talk to people who are struggling.”
After Pope Francis released an encyclical that questioned “the absolute autonomy of markets,” and highlighted what he called “an economy of exclusion and inequality,” Ryan scoffed.
“The guy is from Argentina, they haven’t had real capitalism in Argentina,” he said.
So if the Pope isn’t his moral model, who is? The House speaker has cited the late libertarian writer Ayn Rand as an inspiration for entering politics. The author of “Atlas Shrugged” promoted a philosophy of radical individualism and was openly contemptuous of Christianity.
“More than anyone,” Ryan said, Rand “did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism.”
Little wonder Ryan and House leaders are now rallying behind tax plans that would mostly help big corporations and the wealthiest Americans.
Ryan has pointed to Catholic Charities USA as a model for the kind of approach to fighting poverty he endorses. But Catholic Charities gets a significant portion of its operating budget from the federal government. Budget proposals Ryan has led over the years would severely weaken the agency’s effectiveness.
Along with other powerful people who will toast in the Hilton’s grand ballroom tonight, Ryan is supporting an important cause that helps those on the margins. But given his legislative record and preference for policies that hurt the poor, he might recall the words of St. Augustine: Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.
Gehring is Catholic program director at Faith in Public Life, and author of “The Francis Effect: A Radical Pope’s Challenge to the American Catholic Church.”
