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Jewish World Review Feb. 12, 2001 / 19 Shevat, 5761

Chris Matthews

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http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- PRESIDENT BUSH'S push for federal aid to "faith-based" social action has sparked a healthy, necessary debate over separation of church and state. No American should want Congress either telling clerics how to perform their sacred duties or giving them public money to carry them out.

Overlooked in this current argument over the mixing of funds is the beneficial role that faith-based social commitment has played in contemporary U.S. social philosophy.

Michael Harrington, a 1947 graduate of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., authored "The Other America" (Collier Books, 1997), the book that inspired Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty. Harrington was himself inspired, biographer Maurice Isserman has noted, by the Roman Catholic philosophy he learned from the Jesuits.

Like other students of his day, Harrington derived his life long work among the poor from the late 19th-century papal encyclical "Rerum Novarum," which warned against the excesses of unchecked capitalism. Men and women, the 1891 document instructed, were not to be treated as mere factors of production to be used when necessary and discarded when not. They were to be treated not as cogs in an industrial machine but as human beings.

This Catholic social philosophy grew in the early 20th century to a commitment to a whole range of prescriptions: old-age pensions, unemployment insurance and workers' rights to organize. Each of these goals would become, thanks to Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, the modern American social "safety net."

For Harrington and others of his religious training, "Rerum Novarum" would continue to animate the drive for even greater social progress.

The late Gov. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, another Holy Cross grad, is best known for his opposition to abortion. For this position, he was crowned a "conservative" by the media. A fuller look at his 8-year record shows him to be anything but.

Casey enacted family and parental leave laws in his state before the rest of the country. He won child care for teenage mothers, health insurance for children, and a whole list of other advances. A "pro-lifer" to the popular press, he was in fact committed, in his words, to "protecting all the powerless."

Joseph Califano, yet another Holy Cross grad, was a top aide to Lyndon Johnson and a top Washington lawyer before giving it all up to devote his life to fighting drug addiction: "I've made money at (the law), but now I wake up every morning ready to roar."

Tony Fauci, still another, has spent two decades leading the fight against AIDS and HIV at the National Institutes of Health.

I cite this quartet because of unabashed pride for my college and because of my own belief in the values of "Rerum Novarum" -- especially the still unmet need for each American worker to receive a living wage (and that includes health care).

I also want to underline the obvious point that some people are motivated by more than money. They share the belief voiced by John F. Kennedy the day he became president "that here on earth G-d's work must truly be our own."

There's a messianic strain at work in such lives. That, too, can be a public good. Even when his faith faltered, Michael Harrington held to his belief that life should be directed at some greater purpose than pleasure, security and survival.

"From the time I was a little kid, the church said your life is not something that you are supposed to fritter away; your life is a trust to something more important than yourself."

It's that kind of deep social commitment that we Americans might, in this early 21st century, find some safe way to assist.



JWR contributor Chris Matthews is the author of Hardball. and hosts a CNBC show of the same name. Send your comments to him by clicking here.

Up

02/06/01: Use of office
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