LIVING JUSTICE: THE COMMON GOOD PERSPECTIVE

Thomas Massaro, S.J.¹_
Associate Professor of Moral Theology
Weston Jesuit School of Theology

Fr. Massaro delivered this opening address to the Vincentian Center Conference, "Living Justice: Pathways from Poverty and Commitment to the Common Good" on October 20, 2001. In light of the events of September 11, Fr. Massaro offered a hope that the U.S. response to terrorism will provoke a renewed commitment to combat poverty in our nation and that the Catholic commitment to the common good will be a distinctive contribution to developing a national policy to alleviate poverty.

Introduction
By now, it is axiomatic to say that nothing can be quite the same after the terrorist attacks of September 11. Every policy question looks different in the wake of those events. To the list of things that recent events have transformed, I wish to add one item that may have escaped notice up to this point, namely, our entire way of thinking about poverty in the United States. My thesis in what follows is that America's response to terrorism may provoke, as an unintended but not unwelcome effect, the opening up of a renewed national commitment to combat poverty in our midst. It is my fervent hope that this will indeed come to pass. The conduct of "America's new war," as the cable news network CNN likes to call the war on terrorism, may shed some helpful light on an older but often neglected conflict: our nation's war on poverty, something which deserves a second look today.

Like no event in recent history, the terrorist attacks have united us as a nation. They have prompted not only an outpouring of emotion and solidarity, but also an impressive flood of resources. This has unfolded in the private sector, where individuals and corporations have opened their hearts as well as their wallets to meet the emergency needs of the victims and their families. It has also proceeded in the public sector, where government at all levels has pledged substantial resources and altered budget priorities to assist in relief and adjustment efforts. In his well-received address to Congress and the nation on September 20, President Bush officially placed efforts against terrorism on the national agenda when he declared: "We have suffered great loss, and in our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment." Bush outlined three noteworthy initiatives: first, the creation of a Cabinet-level post dedicated to "Homeland Security" to be occupied by departing Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge; second, a commitment of monetary resources, initially set at forty billion dollars, and subsequently expanded to include substantially more funds for clean-up, recovery and economic stimulus and adjustment after the attacks; third, a less specific but quite dramatic expression of an open-ended national commitment to make no compromises in our pursuit of justice and security in the wake of the terrorist attacks.²

President Bush was almost universally praised for his eloquent expression of national resolve at this time of crisis. Some observers called it the defining moment of his presidency, even comparing his call for action to the rhetorical flourish of his predecessor John F. Kennedy who, four decades earlier amidst the Cold War conflict, had challenged our country with the words: "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

No doubt everyone here today wishes America success in its struggle against terrorism, however much we might disagree on what specific measures, whether forceful or diplomatic in nature, that effort entails. We may even quibble about the accuracy or advisability of referring to these efforts as a "war on terrorism," as there are as many differences as there are similarities to previous conventional wars America has fought. Be that as it may, the analogy to war may prove helpful insofar as it prompts renewed reflection about that other "war by analogy." America has supposedly been fighting a war on poverty for decades, but this identifiable yet elusive domestic foe fades in and out of focus as our attention shifts among other priorities.

POVERTY AND AMERICAN SOCIAL POLICY

What ever happened to the war on poverty? How did it happen that the energy and enthusiasm that accompanied President Lyndon Johnson's anti-poverty initiatives announced in 1964 faded so precipitously from our nation's collective consciousness? Although there are many ways to answer this question, allow me to offer two partial explanations, two possible construals of the mechanisms of historical causation at work here.

The Competitive Agendas and Cyclical Initiatives
The first and more modest claim is simply to note that poverty in America gradually migrated off our radar screens. Over the past three decades, America has been preoccupied with other pursuits--new technologies, stock market booms, fashion crazes, the lives of the rich and famous--seemingly everything but the plight of the poor and not-so-famous. Meanwhile U.S. poverty rates have climbed to a level that is twice as high as in other industrialized nations, and certain beleaguered segments of the American population, particularly families with young children, are disproportionately affected by serious poverty. Policy analysts would claim in this context, the familiar words "problem" and "condition" serve as technical terms, with rich connotations for political science insiders who track the ebb and flow of public opinion and legislative history.³ But we need not delve into the jargon-laden discourse of the experts to understand the key insight available here.

Certain events of the early 1960s placed poverty prominently on the national agenda during those years. The publication in 1962 of Michael Harrington's influential book The Other America: Poverty in the United States shocked the nation out of some of the complacency it had acquired in the fifties. It bolstered President Kennedy's commitment to provide federal resources to fight rural poverty, such as the destitution he had witnessed while campaigning in West Virginia in 1960. President Johnson picked up the baton from his fallen predecessor, inaugurating an ambitious panoply of programs to be coordinated by the new Office of Economic Opportunity. The expansion of Social Security, the inauguration of mature Medicare and Medicaid programs, the proliferation of participatory job training and community action programs--all these elements of Johnson's Great Society reflected a serious national commitment to provide income security for all Americans and to welcome the poor into the mainstream of the wealthiest society the world had ever seen.

And it worked pretty well. Despite a surprisingly modest commitment of actual budget resources for Great Society programs, the poverty rate fell from twenty-two percent in 1960 to approximately twelve percent by 1973.⁴ Perhaps the War on Poverty was partially a victim of its own success, as the perception by the middle of the Nixon years was that the bulk of the problem had already been solved. Perhaps concerns about domestic poverty had been further eclipsed by international concerns, such as the War in Vietnam, the Arab-Israeli conflicts of 1967 and 1973 and the resulting OPEC oil crisis. Or perhaps the rhetoric of foes of social policy and champions of low taxes and small government--Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, George Gilder, and Charles Murray among them--at some point had gained the upper hand, convincing Americans that anti-poverty programs amounted to nothing more than throwing money at social problems, and that this strategy was bound to be a costly failure. It was probably a combination of all these factors and others as well that led to a shrinkage in public support for the War on Poverty and the relegation of these issues to the back-burner. Despite a series of recessions in the seventies, eighties, and early nineties, the plight of low-income Americans remained a neglected matter, tolerated as a background condition that policy makers neither felt motivated to tackle nor confident about potential successes.

This brings us to the second possible explanation regarding historical causation. It consists of an observation about the cyclical nature of poverty-reduction initiatives. This is actually something of a pet theory of mine, so please indulge me as I first review a bit of policy history, and then offer my own idiosyncratic speculations about alternative outcomes. Several American historians have discerned an intriguing pattern over the past century by which government legislation to address poverty seems to have moved in thirty-year cycles. There was a flurry of such concern during the Progressive Era, another flood of public measures adopted during the Great Depression, and then the high point of the Great Society programs mentioned just above. Plotting these anti-poverty initiatives on a timeline, we note peaks of activity in the first decade of the twentieth century, centering on 1905, the fourth decade, centering on 1935 (significantly the very year the landmark Social Security Act was adopted) and the seventh decade, centering on 1965 (the year of President Johnson's greatest legislative victories in the War on Poverty). Another turn of the historical wheel would take us to the tenth and final decade of the twentieth century, the 1990s, centering on the year 1995. My pet theory suggests that we should have witnessed a surge of interest in poverty reduction in that decade, and perhaps could have expected ambitious new federal programs to combat the scourge of poverty.

Ending Welfare As We Had Known It
That prediction is about half accurate. After twelve years of Reagan and Bush, President Clinton entered the White House in 1993 with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress and a record of deep concern and considerable expertise about poverty issues as Governor of Arkansas. It is even possible to interpret his campaign pledge "to end welfare as we know it" in a positive light, as a commitment to more ambitious funding of job-training programs and income supports than was ever achieved under the previous periodic federal welfare reforms, including President Carter's 1977 Plan for Better Jobs and Income and the bipartisan Family Support Act of 1988. The number of families receiving welfare benefits had peaked to an all-time high of four million in 1994. Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton had already granted numerous waivers from federal Health and Human Services regulations for individual states to experiment with improved implementation procedures and work incentives to smooth the transition from welfare to work for those families for whom work was indeed a possible route to self-sufficiency. To build upon what had already been learned about successful transition programs, Clinton initially proposed a plan that would earmark approximately nine billion dollars a year to make work feasible and practical for a large segment of the families receiving public assistance. Similar strategies and plans had been proposed or endorsed by several independent voices, including the sociologist William Julius Wilson, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Urban Institute and the Congressional Budget Office, all of whom reaffirmed Clinton's hunch that real welfare reform would require a significant price tag to make it viable and effective for low-income families.

Sadly, Clinton delayed too long. While he pushed his ambitious but ultimately moribund plan for health care reform (itself further evidence of an interest in poverty issues during the 1990s), his welfare plans languished on the drawing board. By the time it saw the light of day in Congress, Newt Gingrich had led the Republicans to sweeping electoral victory, recapturing both houses of Congress in November of 1994 and proposing a far more draconian welfare reform, based on the "Personal Responsibility" planks of his "Contract with America." The Republican version of welfare reform included no new money at all to help families make the transition to work, leaving it to the states to provide job training and other assistance if they so wished and could afford to do so. Instead, the resulting legislation which Clinton reluctantly signed in 1996 included harsh provisions such as strict time limits on benefits, inflexible work requirements, across-the-board funding cuts and the outright elimination of the entitlement principle that had governed the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, now renamed Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) to reflect the change in philosophy from the original New Deal program.⁵

Welfare Reauthorization in 2002
The welfare law is up for reauthorization in the fall of 2002, and we may expect some significant wrangling in Congress over its provisions. Supporters of the status quo can point to a stunning statistic: the halving of the welfare rolls, as families appear to have responded over the past five years precisely as Gingrich and his allies wished to the harsh incentives of the new law which discourages long-term reception of benefits. Opponents of the existing law will have a harder case to make in their quest to soften the provisions of the Personal Responsibility Act of 1996. They will no doubt point beyond the success stories to the millions of families who would have been eligible for welfare benefits under the old system but are now turning up in soup kitchens, shelters and emergency health care clinics because their incomes and remaining benefits are too meager to meet even basic human needs. Even some families which appear on the surface to be success stories, with incomes ostensibly above the federal poverty threshold, find themselves unable to make ends meet through earnings alone, and these families are disproportionately black and Hispanic. While welfare rolls dropped by fifty percent from 1993 to 1998, child poverty rates dipped only 17%. The Census Bureau confirms that one in six American children--over twelve million youngsters--lives in poverty in this new era in American social policy.⁶

Welfare reform may have worked for some, but it has also left millions worse off than before. The proper measure of success, of course, is not how many people have left the welfare rolls, but rather how these low-income families are doing in an economy that is weighted against them, with inhospitable housing markets, unattainable health care, and formidable barriers to entry standing between those people with modest skills or low educational attainment and the jobs and professions that might lift them out of poverty. In coming months leading to reauthorization, it is important to remind policy makers that the central challenge is fighting poverty itself, not achieving an artificial goal such as lowering the size of the welfare rolls.

Fighting Poverty after September 11
Of course, this analysis of welfare policy does not represent the whole of poverty concerns in the United States today, much less the far more staggering problems associated with poverty around the world. We need also to consider the particular barriers that stand between millions of our fellow citizens and the attainment of health insurance, adequate nutrition, income security and affordable housing in safe neighborhoods where they can raise their children. I recount these particular developments regarding welfare policy in the past decade primarily to support my contention that poverty did appear on our national agenda during the 1990s, but became tragically side-tracked because of Clinton's delays, the Gingrich revolution and the palliative of ten years of unprecedented prosperity. Now that the bubbles have burst (the economic one of the sustained stock market boom as well as numerous "bubbles" in the political careers of key figures of the 1990s), I venture to predict that we will witness a re-engagement with the issue of poverty in America. The thirty-year cycle may have been delayed, but perhaps not permanently disrupted in this turn of the wheel. Perhaps the terrorist attacks of September 11 may be the occasion that wakes America up to the fact that we cannot go on with business as usual. Perhaps this is the catalyst we need to place poverty back on the national agenda, not merely as a background condition we can somehow tolerate and in any case feel powerless to do anything about, but now rather as sincerely a problem--something that sparks a national commitment precisely because it is within our power to mobilize resources for improvement.

THE COMMON GOOD AND AMERICAN SOCIAL POLICY

So far, I have prescinded almost completely from religious language. Instead, I have spoken merely as a policy analyst, as an observer motivated by nothing other than a common-sense desire to see our nation thrive. This nation obviously includes a large constituency of low-income people, perhaps fifteen percent of our population, depending upon how one measures poverty and how one considers it as a temporary or chronic phenomenon for certain families. Making progress against preventable poverty would clearly constitute a contribution to national well-being. Strictly secular policy analysis sometimes seeks a certain metaphysical grounding in the language of human rights, proposing arguments about the desirability or even the necessity of respecting the rights of all citizens to adequate resources and opportunities. Discourses invoking principles such as equality, basic minimums and "freedom to develop one's human potential" often supplement rights talk.

I hope it is obvious that I find these motivations only partly satisfying. As a Catholic policy analyst, not to mention my identity as a Jesuit and a theologian, I hasten to add to the rather austere "rights justifications" for enlightened public policy a fuller vision informed by Catholic traditions, particularly the modern social teachings of our church. While rights talk serves as a common default position, a least common denominator for policy discourse in a pluralistic context, it is only when it is supplemented with a narrative about who we are as a people, with a loving God as the source of our lives, indeed as the very grounding of our rights which are always matched with duties and responsibilities to our fellow creatures--only then can we offer a compelling vision, an attractive moral anthropology to support our judgments about social policy.

The Master Concept of Catholic Social Thought
The master concept informing all of Catholic social teaching is a term that appears in the titles of both the present address and of this conference: the common good. The common good is the baseline of analysis from which proceed all the arguments and recommendations offered in papal social encyclicals and similar episcopal and conciliar documents that treat issues of social justice. Catholic social teaching documents define the common good as "the sum total of those conditions of social living whereby people are enabled more fully and more readily to achieve their own perfection."⁷ The key human goods we seek to accomplish are not achievements that can be measured or enjoyed primarily on the level of the individual. There is a fundamentally shared nature to our lives, so that social well-being is always more than the arithmetical sum of private enjoyments, which are transcended by the social dimension. A corollary of this definition is the observation that all members of society have an obligation to promote the common good, in order to provide for their needy neighbors as well as for future generations.

This commitment and readiness to make sacrifices for others, not only those near and dear to us but even for distant strangers, is often precisely what secular policy analysis so sorely lacks. Indeed, I would argue that a lived commitment to the common good is the distinctive contribution that Catholics, with their decidedly communitarian worldview, can make to the social policy discourse of an American society that exhibits a pronounced cultural proclivity toward crass individualism. In the face of a culture that is all too often characterized by exaggerated egoism, materialism and an indifference to the needs of others, the Catholic affirmation of solidarity, mutuality and the robust sense of the common good are particularly welcome contributions to our public life together.

Within this framework of seeing public policy issues from the perspective of the common good, there are two observations that I find especially pertinent to the task of poverty reduction in contemporary American society. Both build upon the social analysis found, in one way or another, in the documents of Catholic social teaching. In fact, as this year marks the one hundred tenth anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII's encyclical on the condition of labor as he discerned it in the year 1891, I am eager to link both of my observations to the type of social analysis he modeled in that first of the modern Catholic social teaching documents.

My first observation regards the necessity of a thoroughgoing structural analysis of poverty as a social problem that touches all aspects of our common life. What observers such as sociologist Gunnar Myrdal and economist John Kenneth Galbraith have termed "the poverty paradox"--the persistence of dire poverty in the most affluent society the world has ever known--is an indication of serious breakdown in all our systems. Glaring inequality represents a failure of political will, of economic functioning and of social and cultural networks. The scandal of poverty is a general one, and the fault cannot be reduced to any one aspect of our society. If progress against poverty is to come, it must occur across all these axes.

Parallel Tracks of Charity and Justice
Pope Leo XIII saw this clearly in his day, at the dawn of the modern industrial society of mass production. He inherited a tradition of constant Christian concern for the poor, dating back to the challenging words of Jesus, the social concerns of the Patristic era and the charitable efforts of heroic saints, religious orders and well-organized lay sodalities. In writing about the Dickensian conditions that forced industrial workers into a modern form of servitude, Leo lifted up the parallel tracks of charity and justice. While the attitude and practice of charity was always a necessity, under the new conditions of modern industrial society it needed to be complemented with the notion of justice, which contains the bite of compulsory moral obligation beyond optional acts of benevolence. Voluntary neighbor-to-neighbor assistance might be part of the answer to the poverty of workers, but it was (and continues to be) necessary to add the enforcement of fair laws and regulations and the countervailing power of organized labor in order to guarantee the well-being of the neediest workers in their struggle to provide for their families. Pope Leo offered what we still need today--a solid structural analysis of the conditions that frustrate workers' aspirations for social mobility and the factors that need to be reformed before we can call our economic, political and social systems truly just and equitable.

The second observation is related, and similarly owes a debt to Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum. If progress against poverty is to be made, it will have to rely on a three-tiered approach that calls us to employ resources across all sectors of our society: the public sector of government, the private sector of business corporations, and the third sector of civil society including voluntary and non-profit associations where so much of the vitality of our society is located. Pope Leo alluded to this insight about the priority of the society to its government when he wrote the words: "Man is older than the state."⁸ In other words, our way of freely associating with our neighbors is never exhausted by the public affairs presided over by political authorities. Government exists to serve the people in all their diversity, not vice versa. Leo's successors, particularly Pius XI in his 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, would elaborate on the proper division of labor in society. In recent decades, Pius's neologism, subsidiarity, has become a core concept of Western social philosophy, reflecting the already familiar principle of federalism upon which American government is based.

A NATIONAL COMMITMENT TO POVERTY REDUCTION

Economic Growth Achieving Full Employment
What does this mean for poverty-reduction efforts today? Obviously, there must be a judicious division of responsibilities among various actors and careful coordination at all levels. I propose that three types of efforts are especially important. The first effort is macroeconomic policy. All our efforts to reduce poverty will be in vain unless our nation's monetary and fiscal policy is marshaled to encourage orderly economic growth and is sincerely dedicated to achieving full employment. Policy has seldom been sufficiently guided by the lofty principles of such well-intentioned but ultimately toothless legislation as the Employment Act of 1946 or the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill three decades later. Our failure to live up to the periodic rhetoric of support for full employment is due to the salience of conflicting macroeconomic goals, such as the battle against inflation, maintaining the value of the dollar against foreign currencies and the desire to balance the federal budget. This is understandable enough, but still makes the United States look like a laggard compared to other industrialized nations. Especially noteworthy are countries such as Australia and Sweden which have much more robust employment policies and fewer qualms about labor regulations and interventions in labor markets to boost employment and benefit workers.

Anti-Poverty Measures: Targeting Within Universalism
Secondly, we face the crucial task of balancing two types of anti-poverty measures: targeted and universal policies. Obviously there is a proper role for each type. Blunt instruments such as adjusting benefit levels for food stamps and other income-maintenance programs must be coordinated with the more precise tools we might use against poverty. Among examples of such targeted policies are job-training programs for specific sectors of the underemployed, such as factory workers laid off because of capital flight abroad who are seeking retraining for high tech or service work. The barriers to self-sufficiency, like the causes of poverty itself, are numerous and variegated. We need to distinguish between targeted and universal policies, and even to adopt sophisticated strategies such as "targeting within universalism" if we are to respond to the true needs of the affected population.

Perhaps the most egregious philosophical flaw I detected in the debates that produced the 1996 welfare law involved the lumping together of many social and economic problems that contribute to poverty and welfare dependency. What we failed to do then was to disaggregate the welfare caseload and engage in the hard work of investigating what a given family or profile of similar families most needs to escape the trap of poverty. What is an appropriate timeline for the progress of this particular family, meeting at this moment for a dialogue with a caseworker? What resources will allow it to leap the highest hurdles it faces? While a job is undoubtedly the best route out of poverty, what are reasonable expectations given the family's history and the specific challenges it faces before work is likely to improve the situation? Congress in 1996 did not muster the patience to seek answers from the employment and social service experts who could have helped paint a more nuanced picture, and so we passed a law featuring rather blunt instruments and unpredictable effects. My most ardent hope for the next round of welfare reform is that we will get beyond stereotyped images of welfare recipients and thus rediscover our ability to adopt targeted policies to empower the poor.

Partnerships between Faith-based Charities and Government
My third suggestion pertains to the organizations that comprise civil society-- private non-profits and religious-sponsored charitable organizations which work with and for low-income citizens. Unprecedented attention has recently been lavished upon church-based groups, starting with the Charitable Choice provisions of the 1996 welfare law and continuing through the 2000 campaign and President Bush's proposals regarding faith-based initiatives. The relationship between religiously sponsored social service enterprises and government has always been a hornets' nest of legal and political wrangling. Rather than steal any of the thunder of the three well-qualified speakers in the next plenary session and others in this afternoon's workshops, I wish merely to underline an obvious point. Close partnership between government and these "third sector" social service providers is absolutely crucial in the fight against poverty. While church-based providers may at times experience a real temptation to "go it alone" and thus avoid compromises and accommodations in mission and style of delivery of their services, it remains important to make the effort to partner with public agencies. There is simply no substitute for the government funding which makes possible so much of what they can accomplish and indeed what they already do. Enlisting the energy and expertise of our charitable agencies is a critical aspect of the fight to invite into the social mainstream many of the thirty million Americans who now live below the poverty line. Providing pathways out of poverty will require all the tools we have: private initiatives, professional expertise, neighbor-to-neighbor care, and the wisdom of religious traditions as well as public resources and enlightened public policies.

Concluding Reflections
In the wake of the terrorist attacks, President Bush often repeated the sentiment that we will do whatever it takes "to deny our enemies their victory." I for one am not sure precisely what this means regarding terrorists--shadowy figures for whom victory seems to include random destruction and serious disruption of an entire society's way of life. But when I think of "denying victory" to our detractors, the issue of fighting poverty looms large in my reflections. Those who despise and resent the American way of life, our society's way of employing its unprecedented freedom, surely take comfort and find much ammunition in the charge that our economic system seems indifferent to the plight of our own poor, much less the destitute of other lands. Frankly, we all look bad when we appear to flag in our commitment to address dire poverty in our midst.
The only good news in this regard is that we have it within our ability to prove our detractors wrong. History shows us the way. At the end of the Second World War, our ally Britain discovered within itself the resolve to adopt much more generous policies to prevent poverty and counteract the effects of destitution. Within a few years during the 1940s, Britain had witnessed the birth of a revolutionized system of national health care, universal unemployment benefits and a sharply expanded public housing system--three faces of a new commitment to the well-being of the poor which, despite their often acknowledged flaws, reflect highly laudable goals and serious national resolve. Indeed, this era of British history and social policy marks a definitive break from the previous classbound system that sharply divided and stratified British national life. The underlying rationale behind these changes, as expressed by such architects of postwar British social policy as Lord William Beveridge and Archbishop William Temple, was to demonstrate to everyone's satisfaction that the wartime sacrifices endured by all British people were not in vain. The wartime solidarity that prevailed amidst the horrors of the Blitz and bloody campaigns of World War II was no mere illusion, but would be honored and amplified in universal national policies to supply income security for all citizens, since members of all social classes had risked and often lost their lives for that nation's freedom and security. This explosion of British income security measures is the best evidence I have ever seen to support the adage that "war rushes history." To demonstrate and honor the reality of national unity, the postwar British government would allow no Brit to starve. Won't we aspire to do as much in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11?

Poverty tends not to capture headlines, as more dramatic threats to our nation and our way of life sometimes do. But poverty does represent a "crisis in slow motion" impeding the life chances of millions, yet rarely impinging in any remarkable way upon our national consciousness. It is then a real challenge to sustain the energy and engage the imagination of a people with such a notoriously short attention span as our own. Beyond the intangibles of commitment and motivation, our efforts against poverty also require sufficient resources and the institutional infrastructure to make an impact. We who yearn to see a redoubling of anti-poverty efforts might be envious of a new cabinet post or an open checkbook-- the resources President Bush recently pledged to anti-terrorist security. We poverty-fighters may have to be satisfied with riding the tide of national solidarity that these terrorist attacks have provoked. It was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt who, during an earlier war, pledged our nation to protect the Four Freedoms. Among the four were "freedom from fear" and "freedom from want." It is my fervent hope that our nation will recognize the linkage between these two, and will turn the "new war against terrorism" into a springboard to launch an equally energetic "new war against poverty."

Is this likely to happen anytime soon? I close now by noting some good news and some bad news on this score. The most encouraging news is that, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, there seems to be a moratorium in the usual clamoring to "get big government off our backs." For the first time in decades, government is seen not as the problem but as the solution, or at least a necessary part of the solution to our social difficulties. The events of September 11 have reminded us of the built-in limits of the private sector. After all, heroic firemen, rescue workers and air marshals are public employees, a category larger than the vilified stereotype of the incompetent, wasteful bureaucrat wrapping us in red tape. The bad news is the lack of imagination so far displayed by our leaders. It is a shame that when our political leaders call on us to demonstrate our patriotism in these difficult days, the best they can do is to tell us to go shopping and fly commercial airlines to stimulate hard-hit sectors of the economy. We have heard hardly anything so far about assisting the chronically needy and counter-acting preventable poverty, beyond the symbolic gesture of encouraging our children to send in dollar bills to relieve hunger in Afghanistan. We need to be more creative in finding constructive ways to take advantage of the latent civic feeling ambient in our polity in this new era. A renewed struggle against preventable poverty would enlist our deepest energies and thus truly honor those lost on September 11.

Endnotes

¹ _Thomas Massaro, S.J. is an Associate Professor of Moral Theology, Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge MA. His research and teaching is in Christian Ethics, Social Justice and Poverty. He has published two books: Catholic Social Teaching and United States Welfare Reform (1998), and Living Justice: Catholic Social Teaching in Action (2000) and is the author of numerous articles. He holds a doctorate from Emory University, a Master of Divinity from Weston Jesuit School of Theology, a Master's in Humanities (Philosophy), from Fordham University and a B.A. in Political Science and Economics from Amherst College.

² See text of this 20 September 2001 speech in "President Bush's Address on Terrorism Before a Joint Meeting of Congress," New York Times, 21 September 2001, B4.

³ For an analysis of these terms, see chapter 3 ("Problems") in John W. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies (N.Y.: HarperCollins, 1984).

⁴ Abundant data and analysis regarding the War on Poverty is available, among other places, in the essays contained in Sheldon H. Danziger and Daniel H. Weinberg, eds., Fighting Poverty: What Works and What Doesn't (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).

⁵ For a detailed analysis of the history and provisions of the new federal welfare law, called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, see Part Two of Thomas Massaro, S.J., Catholic Social Teaching and United States Welfare Reform (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1998).

⁶ These and other Census Bureau statistics are analyzed in Somini Sengupta, "How Many Poor Children Is Too Many," New York Times, 8 July 2001, Section 4, p. 3.

⁷ This citation is from Pope John XXIII's 1961 encyclical Mater et Magistra (par. 65). Almost identical language is used in the 1965 Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes (par. 26).

⁸ Rerum Novarum, par. 6.

---

 

top of page or
return to index of articles for 2000-2001