Final March, the Republican Examine Committee proposed altering the provisions of the Social Safety program by elevating the total retirement age from 67 to 69. The committee, which represents 80 percent of the GOP House members and all the House Republican leadership, has discovered assist for its plan from numerous exterior teams.
Chief amongst them is the Heritage Basis. Stephen Moore, one of the coauthors of the Heritage Basis’s Project 2025, has labeled Social Safety a “Ponzi scheme,” and has inspired school college students to burn their Social Safety playing cards.
Social Safety is the crown jewel of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Nevertheless, few individuals understand how deeply concerned the Catholic Church was in creating this system.
Catholic Charities, led by Catholic College of America professor Monsignor John O’Grady, founder of the college’s Nationwide Faculty of Social Service, labored tirelessly to safe congressional assist. Marshaling assist from across the nation, O’Grady mobilized his huge community to foyer members of Congress to assist this system.
Arthur Altmyer, creator of the 1935 Social Safety Act, called O’Grady “probably the most priceless supporters of the invoice,” and credited him with influencing “a terrific many members of Congress to assist the invoice who in any other case would have opposed it.”
O’Grady had one other ally: his Catholic College colleague, Monsignor John A. Ryan. Ryan, often called “The Right Reverend New Dealer,” hailed the Social Safety legislation as attaining “an elementary measure of social justice.”
Thanking him for his help, Franklin D. Roosevelt later paid tribute to Ryan: “With voice and pen, you will have pleaded the reason for social justice.”
Collectively, O’Grady and Ryan adhered to the precepts of the Catechism of the Catholic Church which held that authorities establishments and applications should be designed “always with a view to the common good.”
Upon signing the 1935 Social Safety Act into legislation, Franklin Roosevelt said it “represents a cornerstone in a construction which is being constructed however on no account full.”
Roosevelt was proper. Over time, each Democratic and Republican administrations have labored to guard and improve this system. In 1972, Richard Nixon tied Social Security benefits to cost-of-living increases. Eleven years later Ronald Reagan labored with Democrats to ensure the long-term solvency of the program.
Nevertheless, opposition was sturdy when the Social Safety Act was signed into legislation. In 1936, Republican presidential nominee Alf Landon assailed it as “unjust, unworkable, stupidly drafted and wastefully financed.” Others have been much more vociferous, calling the legislation “communistic,” a cost Monsignor Ryan said was “hurled by the beneficiaries of social injustice.”
Ryan was so incensed on the allegations that Roosevelt was a communist that he gave a nationwide radio tackle titled “Roosevelt Safeguards America.” In his October 1936 speech, he mentioned anybody making that accusation towards Roosevelt was guilty of violating the Eighth Commandment: “Thou shalt not bear false witness towards thy neighbor.”
Monsignor Ryan won’t be stunned on the reprise of false costs being flung by Donald Trump, who routinely accuses Kamala Harris of being “a communist” who will “destroy America,” conferring upon her the derogatory nickname, “Comrade Kamala.” If Ryan have been alive, I believe he, too, would accuse Trump of violating the Eighth Commandment.
In that long-ago radio tackle, Ryan lamented “the quantity of false assertions which have been accepted as true on this marketing campaign” — so many who one is tempted “to lose faith in American intelligence.”
The professional-Trump group, Catholics for Catholics is ignoring the important position that the church performed in guaranteeing some measure of social justice. Because the Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us: “Extreme financial and social disparity between people and peoples of the one human race is a supply of scandal and militates towards social justice, fairness, human dignity, in addition to social and worldwide peace.”
Pope Francis lately reemphasized this level saying, “Sadly, it’s usually exactly the wealthiest who oppose the conclusion of social justice or integral ecology out of sheer greed.”
Leonard Leo, a member of Catholic College’s Board of Trustees, promises to dedicate a portion of the $1 billion Marble Belief Fund that he controls to not alleviate any financial or social disparities however to operationalize and weaponize “those ideas and policies to crush liberal dominance at the choke points of influence and power in our society.”
Amongst his said enemies are a “progressive Ku Klux Klan” and “vile and immoral current-day barbarians, secularists and bigots” who demonize individuals of religion and transfer society farther from its “natural order.”
Leo’s tradition warrior associate is the Heritage Basis. Along with railing towards Social Safety, Heritage has taken to listing which universities subscribe to its conservative views on the subject of opposing “diversity, equity and inclusion” and instructing critical race theory. Right this moment, Heritage lists The Catholic College of America as a “great choice” for potential college students.
Catholic cultural warriors usually don’t bear in mind the Catholic Church’s historical past in selling important social justice applications like Social Safety. Worse nonetheless, there are these Catholics who wish to rewrite that historical past altogether.
Collectively these tradition warriors, together with the authors of Project 2025, usually are not solely undermining the work of the Catholic Church however Catholicism itself.
John Kenneth White (johnkennethwhite.com) is a professor emeritus at The Catholic College of America. His newest e book is “Grand Previous Unraveling: The Republican Celebration, Donald Trump, and the Rise of Authoritarianism.”
