Congressman Paul Ryan Defends Budget, Governing Vision, with Catholic Social Doctrine

By Deacon Keith Fournier
4/13/2012
Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)

The truths are true for all people and for all time. The Church calls us to offer them as leaven to be worked into the loaf of human culture

Principles in Catholic Social Doctrine require the exercise of prudential judgment in their application. Agree or disagree with Congressman Ryan's exercise of his prudential judgment - and his proposed legislative solutions to the fiscal crisis- he has done what a Catholic in public service should do with the Social Doctrine of the Church.Let the debate begin.

Congressman Paul Ryan

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WASHINGTON, DC (Catholic Online) - In June of 2011 then Archbishop (now Cardinal) Timothy Dolan, the President of the US Bishops Conference, and a Conservative Catholic Congressman named Paul Ryan exchanged letters which will most certainly have an impact in the upcoming 2012 Presidential race.

Paul Ryan is articulate, intelligent and controversial. He is also considered one of the most probable among the possible Vice Presidential nominees on the Republican ticket. He recently submitted the "Path to Prosperity Budget" which was approved by the House and became fodder for the Obama reelection campaign.

The political wordsmiths are again trying to lay claim to that field of moral theology referred to as "Catholic Social Doctrine" as the 2012 campaign for the US Presidency begins in earnest. Prior to 2004 the phrase "Social Teaching" of the Catholic Church referred to the teachings rooted in the Sacred Scriptures, expounded upon in the Christian tradition, developed in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, explained within a contemporary series of encyclical letters, apostolic letters and exhortations, and summarized in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Sadly, many people had not read these sources. So, what claimed to be the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church was too often the "spin" of self styled "experts" with political agendas. Very often those agendas would be characterized as "left" or "liberal" within common political parlance.
Then on April 2, 2004, the Memorial of Saint Francis of Paola, Cardinal Renato Raffaele Martino, President of the "Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace" released the "Compendium of the Social Doctrine of Church."

The social doctrine confronts what Pope Benedict properly called the "Dictatorship of Relativism" even before he assumed the Papal office. It insists there are unchangeable truths which are revealed by the Natural Law, can be known through the exercise of reason and should inform the social order in every just society.

At the foundation of those truths is the dignity of every human person at every age and stage. To be Pro-Life is NOT simply to be "single issue" in your political positions, it is about a world view. It is the dignity of the human person which requires a respect for every human life whether that life be in the first home of the womb, a wheelchair, a jail cell, a hospital room, a hospice, a senior center or a soup kitchen.

Another one of these truths is that marriage is between one man and one woman, intended for life, and ordered toward the bearing and raising of children in the family. Marriage is not some social construct which can be redefined by courts or legislatures. It is the foundation for family and family is the first society, first church, first school, first economy, first government and first mediating institution. The first community which humanizes and civilizes all of us is the family.

Another, is that all human persons created in the Image of God are created for relationship and called to human community. We can never fully experience human flourishing outside of social relationships. These relationships are perfective of our human person because we are by nature - and grace - made for these relationships. Catholic Social Thought does not begin with the individual but with the family. The social doctrine affirms our obligation in solidarity to one another. We are our brother/sister's keeper.

The social doctrine rejects a notion of "freedom" which begins and ends with the isolated, atomistic, person as the measure of its application. Authentic human freedom must be exercised within a moral constitution. We will only grow in freedom when we choose what is good and what is true. Otherwise "freedom" becomes a counterfeit and enslaves us, as individuals and as nations.

The social doctrine offers principles to help us order our economies. It does not propose any particular economic theory. It insists that every economic order be at the service of the human person, human freedom, human flourishing and the family. We are to give a love of preference to the poor, recognizing our solidarity with them. However, this call to solidarity is to be applied through the application of the principle of subsidiarity, rejecting all forms of dehumanizing collectivism, either of the left or the right.

The market economy has been affirmed in recent social teaching - when properly understood and morally structured. However, the Catholic Church stood against the materialism of the atheistic Marxist system and now properly cautions Nations which have adopted a form of liberal capitalism of the dangers of "economism" or materialism which promotes the use of persons as products and fails to recognize the value of being over acquiring.

The truths and principles contained within Catholic social doctrine are not merely ...

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1 - 10 of 16 Comments

Joe
1 year ago
The USCCB just smacked down all of you who say that Ryan's budget reflects Catholic Social Teaching based on it's protection of tax cuts for the wealthy.
Vance
1 year ago
Rob, You're complaining about contributing payroll tax money to Social Security and Medicare but this is the broke system your guys invented. Now, it is broke but the Marxists do not want to fix it. They simply want Social Security, Medicare, and the nation to go over the cliff. They have demonstrated this on a daily basis. The irony is that we have a GOP politician who is trying to save SS and Medicare. Apparently the Senior citizens want Social Security and Medicare but the young 20 and 30 somethings don't care. Neither does the Marxist Democrat Party. If nothing is done, SS and Medicare will be over the cliff in ten years. What needs to go over the cliff is the Marxist Democrat Party.
Pete Brady
1 year ago
Walk the talk. Congressman Ryan espouses the social doctrine of the Church, in particular the Church's 'preferential option for the poor.' It has been observed that his budget proposal would take THIRTY YEARS to address the National Debt and that he proposes a simplification of the tax code to just two brackets, 10% and 25%. Will that do it? Or is he merely putting a "band-aid" on the gaping "sucking wound" of a triage patient in need of much, much more? Is it walking the talk or just simply kicking the can down the road? Congressman Ryan says that "big government (should not) crowd out civic society" but it would appear that he is, to the contrary, enabling "big government" to continue to do just that. Would not cutting $1 trillion from CURRENT big government spending as Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul advocates, deal with our almost insurmountable debt problem far more effectively? His Catholicity may proceed from the Church's social doctrine, but to it I would add the words of the Spanish Scholastics. Jesuit Juan de Mariana (1535-1624) would say that government should not "go into debt or consume its reserves in payment of interest that will grow daily... If the expenditures of the Crown grow to be larger than taxes, evil will be inevitable." To that the Dominican, Domingo de Soto (1495-1560), would add: "Great dangers for the republic spring from financial exhaustion, the population suffers privations and is greatly oppressed by daily increases in taxes." When it comes to 'taxes' Mariana also had this to say: "But if a prince is not empowered to levy taxes on unwilling subjects and cannot set up monopolies for merchandise, he is not empowered to make fresh profit from debased money. These strategies aim at the same thing: cleaning out the pockets of the people and piling up money in the provincial treasury." Taxes are at the "consent of the governed" --- Hear that Washington?!? And yet the current ongoing discussion in Congress goes more to buttressing Obama's call for us to "pay our fair share." Thank you, NO! Count on it, whenever politicians say that a piece of legislation will do one thing, its announced purpose, it actually does the exact opposite. Look no further than the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) to prove that. But really, what is my "fair share?" Zero would be just fine with me. But in the interim I'll take what was put forward as good enough for the American people in 1913 when the Federal Income Tax was instituted as the 16th Amendment. And that was "1%!" If Congressman Ryan is truly an advocate of the Church's preferential option for the poor than he should attend to these two other quotes from the Spanish Scholastic Pedro Fernandez Navarrete; first, "excessive spending leads to poverty; and second, "The origin of poverty is high taxes." But the truly low, mean, and despicable means to attack the poor, to perpetuate and prolong poverty, lies in the debasement of the currency, in our modern world done by a "central bank," and in the U.S. by the Federal Reserve. Juan de Mariana had the definitive word on that: "He asks for counsel and receives... the iniquitous and equally useless suggestion of altering the value of money... Can you imagine any more easily executed or faster means of extracting the prince from his terrible plight (of excessive spending)... A nation, a prince, should never act against justice. Such means, considered from every perspective, are and always will be plunder (latrocinium)." Vote to increase the debt level; don't vote to audit and abolish the Federal Reserve, and you thereby become actively engage in "plunder" and other acts counter to the Social Doctrine of the Church.
Jake
1 year ago
So this is how Congressman Ryan explains how his budget plan and our doctrine intertwine? This is indeed a very sad misrepresentation of our doctrine.

"On Tuesday, Mr. Ryan pushed back. In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, he said that in fact the Catholic Church's "social magisterium" had informed his House budget. One goal of that teaching, he said, is to prevent the poor from staying poor. Nor, he added, should individuals become lifelong dependents of their government. "

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304356604577337922580242292.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
DENISE M. SHARAR
1 year ago
GO PAUL RYAN! I'D LIKE TO SEE ROMNEY AND RYAN WIN THE 2012 ELECTION. YOUR BUDGET IS GREAT! DUE TO THIS BEING A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION YEAR THEY PROBABLY WILL PLAY POLITICS INSTEAD OF PASSING IT.
Rob
1 year ago
vance, I will agree with you that at least Ryan is putting himself out there and proposing something to deal with the state of affairs, the lopsided payments versus revenues situation and the bad idea a payroll tax cut is. But I think we have to put all of this into perspective. The Ryan budget still holds the largest retirement generation harmless. While I understand you can't pull the rug out from the elderly, why is the cut off 55? Are folks that are 55 unable to work a few more years? That decision is almost purely political as that represents the population that is very active politically. That is no different than Obama taking care of unions. And it presupposes a lot of things. First, it presupposes that an affordable market to care for the elderly is automatically going to pop up once the government withdraws and moves to a voucher program. I don't think people understand how much the government subsidizes the care for the elderly currently, thus subsidizing the rates the non-elderly pay today. I also think that people do not realize that a person will incur the greatest amount of healthcare expense in their elderly years barring a catastrophic sickness. Once the elderly start hitting those roles the impact on rates across the board will be devastating. A $7,000 voucher would barely pay for 2 months of nursing home care in a mediocre facility. And as far as the the principle of subsidiarity goes, I'm all for it. But explain this to me. As a person under 55, how am I to continue to finance the healthcare of all those over 55, increase my pension contributions to account for the loss of social security and healthcare benefits and do so with wages remaining mostly flat? I will support the Ryan plan 100% if they refund my money, in full, and allow me to invest so I can take care of my family. This plan of "end the benefits for everyone except me" is ridiculous. And you already know how I feel about the government's state of affairs in regards to revenue. We did that to ourselves. What I would prefer is that we have a budget that puts people over wars, special interest and the whole host of ideological driven, wasteful spending that goes out the door every day. It is within our means to provide care for our elderly, we just don't want to make it happen. We don't bat an eye spending billions on the next war machine, but spend some bucks to care for people, it's socialism I tell you! We've chosen profits over people and we try to cloak that choice by calling it freedom. But as for this plan, I'm not suprised coming from a politician that will enjoy the best healthcare and pension our money can buy. Who cares about everyone else right?
Jake
1 year ago
@ Vance....

"Because the Marxist/Communist Democrat party wants our country to go over a cliff, they are demagoging Paul Ryan's efforts to death."

Like the republicans have had nothing to do with the economic train wreck either? Both parties are the 21 Centuries version of the Pharisees and Sadducee's.. Congressman Ryan's budget plan along with President Obama's plan are nothing more than political grandstanding. One of these day we will get serious before it's too late...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-10/don-t-tell-obama-and-ryan-but-their-budgets-are-similar.html

The Truth Is Out There! All you have to do it really want to find it!
Vance
1 year ago
Social Security and Medicare are not going broke, They Are Broke. There is more "Benefits" being paid out than Tax Money coming in. Obama and the Marxist Democrat Party succeeded in passing the Payroll Tax Cut which further DEFUNDS Social Security and Medicare. The Payroll Tax was instituted by Franklin Roosevelt to fund Social Security. Paul Ryan is stepping up and proposing a SOLUTION to fix the problem of a Broke Social Security and Medicare System and Stopping this 'Run Away Freight Train' National Debt. Because the Marxist/Communist Democrat party wants our country to go over a cliff, they are demagoging Paul Ryan's efforts to death.
Jake
1 year ago
After reading Congressman Ryan's budget proposal. I have to ask the Congressman if his political life meets the description of Our Holy Fathers doctrine on social magisterium or his belief in Catholic Social Teachings? Or are we allowed to pick and choose like his budget proposal does?
J. Bob
1 year ago
Paul Ryan, brings out a points to often neglected by those who seek their own ends. There are numerous examples, particularly in Europe. Right now a number of countries are close to insolvency due to mounting "social" costs. If the whole economy crashes, what good are all those "social" benefits? With Medicare & SS on the road to bankruptcy, 2024 & 2037, at least Ryan has started to implement the Simpson-Bowles plans. In meantime the estimated costs of the new Health Care law, are escalating, according to the CBO.

What will happen when the government continues to print money, that is reduced in value, &, contributes to inflation inflation? At least Ryan is taking action.

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