Bishops' Upside-Down Morality: Tom Gallagher Looks at Money Trail, Critics Look at Ryan Budget

At NCR, Tom Gallagher looks at the money trail (i.e., the massive flow of federal money to Catholic institutions), and wonders why His Eminence Timothy M. Cardinal Dolan (and His Grace William Lori, and USCCB employees Anthony Picarello, Richard Doerflinger, and Sister of Mercy Mary Ann Walsh) imagine they can keep making--with a straight face--the claim that the Obama administration is attacking Catholics:

What makes Dolan look again and again as a not-ready-for-prime-time political amateur is the fact that the Catholic bishops’ conference itself and Catholic, non-hospital and university organizations (separate from Catholic hospitals and universities’ receipt of federal funds) happily accept hundreds of millions of dollars a year from the federal government, including from the Obama administration.

Meanwhile, the group Catholics United is calling on the USCCB to have priests read letters from every Catholic pulpit in the nation denouncing the Paul Ryan budget, which attacks the poor in order to keep enriching the rich.  If you wish, you may click on a link at this site to sign the petition to the USCCB asking for such letters to be read in Catholic churches.

What's morally wrong with the budget proposed by Catholic Paul Ryan?  Where to begin?  As Bill Boyarsky notes at Common Dreams, it deliberately and callously targets the poor, cutting much-needed social safety-net services, while cutting taxes to the rich and to corporations:

The Ryan-Romney plan would cut taxes to the affluent and corporations, increase arms spending and cut expenditures for almost everything else, including environmental programs, child care, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, aid to college students and funding for transportation, which includes air traffic control. Medicare would be cut, the health care reform law repealed. If you think the health reform law is too kind to insurance companies, you’ll be amazed at the way Ryan-Romney lets big insurance really run things.

And the U.S. Catholic bishops say in response? "But remember, children, it's the Obama administration's attack on Catholic moral values you need to concern yourself with.  And the proposal that health insurance plans cover evil, evil contraceptives.

Let us bishops worry about the rest, about those other pesky minor matters like yanking away social safety nets for the poor while pouring more money into the coffers of the rich.  We want you to be concerned about the real moral challenges that confront you and us bishops as Catholics, after all.

Not to be distracted by niggling details like the poor."