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(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
Yet if one were to take a sweeping overview, it would be easy to make the case that it is our side that has emerged triumphant from the culture wars. Seriously. Look around. The trendy Marxism of the 1960s now seems tired and trite. Few outside the academic fever swamps still yearn to have this country emulate Mao’s China or Fidel’s Cuba. Even fewer cling to the “criminal as victim” school of thought.
Equally discredited is the notion that the poor should be reflexively assumed noble strivers beaten down by heartless corporate overlords. We are learning that there is more to alleviating poverty than attacking the “system.” This point was underscored for me while browsing through a collection of articles on rebuilding New York City published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, especially one originally written by Myron Magnet for the October 8, 2001 issue of Forbes magazine. (Magnet is the editor of City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute.) The piece is dynamite, a persuasive and forceful reaffirmation of what was once the consensus Catholic understanding of how to care for the poor. It makes clear how and why our side was right, and how the 1960s counterculture made a mess of poverty programs in this country.
Magnet throws the spotlight on the difference between the way the Church’s charitable agencies cared for the poor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the methods of the modern welfare system. The Church, he says, “concentrated on education and acculturation, on moral reclamation – on turning lives around and getting people on the right track.” In contrast, poverty programs from the 1960s on “shifted from the personal to the systemic, and from the moral to the political. If people were poor and in need, no longer were they assumed to be victims of misfortune or in need of developing the skills or moral qualities to succeed on their own. Instead, they were victims of the vast, impersonal forces of capitalism or racism that doomed them to failure, regardless of their own efforts on inner qualities.”
Magnet offers the work of the Catholic Protectory to make the point. The Catholic Protectory was a residential school in New York for orphaned and abandoned street kids. It cared for something like 100,000 youngsters between 1863 and 1938. And it worked. By using “a clear set of faith-based values, stressing responsibility and respect” and “assuring kids that they were the children of a loving, all-powerful God, even if their parents had abandoned them,” the Protectory transformed its charges into productive members of society, skilled tradesmen for the most part. Some even went on to college, something rare for even middle-class youths from solid families at the time.
It was this understanding of poverty that the 1960s social reformers cast aside. Magnet observes that the change in attitude can be seen by examining The New York Times’ “Hundred Neediest Cases,” the fund-raiser conducted by the Times each year around Christmas. (Oops, sorry: the “Holiday Season.”) In the early years of the last century, the appeals were conducted on behalf of the “deserving poor,” individuals facing great difficulties through no fault of their own: a wife working long hours to support her family while her husband dies of tuberculosis, for example, or orphans working to support their brothers and sisters.
In contrast, the 1960s Times’ appeals featured stories of drug addicted and alcoholic single mothers, dependent on welfare, individuals “whose dysfunctional behavior the Times ascribed to the environment to which society had consigned them. No one suggested that any of these needy individuals was creating her own misery (and that of her children) – or that true charity might help her stop the self-destructive (and immoral) behavior that was her real problem.”
By the 1970s, the new thinking could even be seen in the literature of New York’s Catholic Charities. The organization shifted its focus from the moral reclamation that worked so well for the Catholic Protectory, to combating “the root causes of poverty and oppression” and “making a contribution to the formation of public policy.”
Magnet understands the consequences, and believes that country is catching on as well. He attributes the passage of the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 to society’s growing awareness that “the modern approach to helping the poor has been a tragic failure, luring millions of people into lifetimes of dependency, stripping away their dignity and making poverty an intergenerational inheritance even as the national economy has boomed and opportunity has proliferated. Nearly $6 trillion later, the U.S. has proved that money alone does not solve problems.”
The irony is striking and poignant. The Left scolds traditional Catholics who refuse to back the big government programs of the Democratic Party, accuses them of ignoring the Church’s call to care for the less fortunate. One wonders if those who make this charge are devious, or merely caught up in an ideological enthusiasm. I would submit that the goal of most informed Catholic critics of modern poverty programs is not to selfishly harbor their tax dollars at the expense of the poor, but to find a system of attacking poverty that works, such as that employed by the Catholic Protectory. In other words, they are seeking to apply the Church’s social teachings, not ignore them. A big difference. Tough love is love.
