When Catholic hierarchs speak about economic issues, I beg them to keep in mind the following.

Vice riddles the soul. You can no more raise a vice-ridden person out of poverty than you can fill with water a bucket punched full of holes. Vice does not necessarily result in poverty, but it does keep the poor where they are.

Every tax, every economic restriction, every plan to redistribute money, every establishment of a welfare entitlement, comes with consequences that extend far beyond the immediate need of some beneficiary. So, also, with every cut in tax rates, every economic permission, every rollback of redistribution, and every cancellation of an entitlement. Some of these consequences can be foreseen. Some cannot because they will depend on what is, by nature, incalculable or on the chances and changes of human affairs. Almost never will the consequences be all good or all bad.

The main concern is not to redistribute money but to establish solid and self-reliant families whose providers do work that genuinely earns sufficient money to enable one parent to build up, from home, both home life and neighborhood life. We are embodied beings. It is not good for households to stand in splendid isolation. Virtuous household management is both the foundation and the aim of economic action.

The main concern is not to redistribute money but to establish solid and self-reliant families whose providers do work that genuinely earns sufficient money to enable one parent to build up, from home, both home life and neighborhood life.Tweet This

Such economies, that is, such households, cannot be built up without solid virtues. Those include diligence, self-denial, honesty, chastity, courage, and promise-keeping. The feelings we associate with love are not enough. Love is enough, but it is a lifelong lesson to learn how to love, while it does not take so long to learn to save the marriage bed for marriage, or to learn to keep a promise.

Every law or social custom that subjects one of those virtues to contempt, or that rewards their violation, undermines the family and is, therefore, a dagger aimed at the most vulnerable among us. The rich can pad their vices with money. The poor cannot. If truth cannot move you to preach the whole teaching of the Church on sex, marriage, and the raising and educating of children, then let care for the poor do it. 

If you do not do it, and if instead you imply or assert openly that man and woman are not made for one another but that any two people who are fond of one another can “marry,” then I believe nothing you say about poverty. You are like someone who demands the renovation of buildings in the slums but who pours sulfuric acid down the pipes, seeds the timbers with termites, drills holes in the shingles, and takes a kickback from contractors who will never be out of work repairing buildings that will never be in repair.

Try to keep in mind that taxes and charitable giving are not the same kinds of things. The former are impersonal, taken under compulsion, and greatly attenuated by middlemen. They demand much from the wallet—for me, they demand all that I earn from January 1 to about the first or second week of June; but they demand nothing at all from the heart and soul. 

Charity is otherwise. At its best and most powerful, giver and receiver see one another. The appropriate response to a free gift is gratitude, the virtue whereby the receiver of the gift participates in the freedom and generosity of the giver. I am deeply grateful to my friend who is up on the roof with me, repairing the trim and removing rotten wood. 

Charity is otherwise. At its best and most powerful, giver and receiver see one another. The appropriate response to a free gift is gratitude, the virtue whereby the receiver participates in the freedom and generosity of the giver.Tweet This

Women who knew each other because they spoke to each other all the time, in their homes or on their porches or in the street, could take care of a child or help with the laundry or pick up some groceries or cook a meal. These are gifts. 

The welfare check is not a gift. I am not saying that there should be no welfare checks. I am begging you to keep in mind that true charity is like a wave whose ripples spread out far and wide, all of them good. The welfare check, quite a different thing, cannot take its place.

It is entirely possible that a policy meant to assist the poor can mire them in poverty by perversely rewarding the single mother at the expense of the two-parent working-class family, so that the strong homes I have in mind are never formed in the first place. 

Charity differs from law in this regard also: the law, in its vast generality of application, must be evaluated also by the generality of its effects—not only by what is intended for this or that individual case but all the effects, globally as it were. Such evaluation must rely on a sober assessment of human nature, both its strengths and weaknesses, its wisdom and folly, the spurs to virtue and the curbs against vice. Such an assessment in turn must rely on a careful study of history and of human cultures. We are not mere chemicals whose interactions are limited and predictable.

Finally, do try to distinguish between men and women. We are not the same. The direst necessity facing the poor in the United States is fatherlessness, which our welfare state, I believe, has encouraged. 

If you remember that men and women are motivated by different things, that men need to be needed,that boys do not simply become men by musculoskeletal accretion, that manliness is a difficult virtue that must be learned, then we may imagine new customs or new social movements aided or spearheaded by the Church, ones that might actually work toward building up those homes for whose benefit in the first place we dredge the harbors and fell the trees and quarry the stone and furrow the fields and do all the other things that turn materials from air, water, and earth into something profitable for man.

I will end with a further suggestion. We want to raise people who not only have the freedom of economic action but who seek it, enjoy it, and use it. But whatever leads people to suppose that they will be under surveillance, that they require special licenses to do rather ordinary things, that wherever they turn there will be a law to thwart them, and that in any case they will have to give up at least a third of what they earn, will dull their drive to do anything at all. It will blunt or obliterate their economic imagination. 

We have, for example, raised at least two generations of children for whom sport implies organization and oversight by adults. The results are empty backyards and empty fields. I think the lesson here applies also to small businesses and independent workers. We might give them a little consideration too.