Religious Leaders Slam Ryan For Using Catholic Faith To Justify Cutting Programs That Help The Poor

By Travis Waldron/Think Progress

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) told Christian Broadcast Network earlier this week that the House GOP’s budget, which he wrote, was driven by his Catholic faith. “A person’s faith is central to how they conduct themselves in public and in private,” Ryan said, and Catholic principles are what led him to cut programs for the poor so as to keep people from becoming “dependent on government.”

As ThinkProgress noted Tuesday, Ryan’s budget seems toignore Catholic social teaching that calls for protecting the poor and improving access to food, jobs, health care, housing, and the social safety net. And now religious leaders are making the same case. The founder of the PICO National Network, the largest national coalition of religious congregations, slammed Ryan’s claim of adherence to Catholic teaching as “the height of hypocrisy” in a release circulated Wednesday:

“It’s the height of hypocrisy for Rep. Ryan to claim that his approach to the budget is shaped by Catholic teaching and values,” said Fr. John Baumann, S.J., founder of PICO National Network. [...] “A central moral measure of any budget proposal is how it affects “the least of these” (Matthew 25). The needs of those who are hungry and homeless, without work or in poverty should come first.”

“By these measures,” the release says, “the Ryan budget is a severe failure,” noting that it cutsMedicare, Medicaid, Pell Grants, food stamps, and “other programs that help vulnerable working families make it through tough times and live better lives,” while giving massive tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans and corporations. Overall, 62 percent of Ryan’s budget cuts come from programs that benefit the poor. “The mission of the Church is to ‘bring good news to the poor’ and to protect the vulnerable, not to justify the impoverishment of the very young, the very old and the sick in order to enrich the wealthy,” the release says.

This isn’t the first time religious leaders have criticized the House GOP budget. When Ryan released the budget in March, Bishop Gene Robinson called it an “immoral disaster” that “robs the poor,” and Father Thomas Kelly, a constituent of Ryan’s, said he was “outraged” that Ryan defended the budget “on moral grounds.” Last year’s Ryan budget faced similar criticism, as religious leaders blasted it for adhering more closely to the policies of anti-religion, anti-government author Ayn Rand than to the teachings of the Bible.

Catholic League: Church Abuse Scandal Is A Crisis Of ‘Homosexuality,’ Not ‘Pedophilia’

By Igor Volsky

Recently, the Catholic Church — and even the Pope himself — have been coming under increasing criticism for failing to appropriately discipline church officials who had sexually abused thousands of children. On March 24th, the New York Times characterized “Pope Benedict XVI’s latest apology for the emerging global scandal of child abuse by predatory priests,” as inadequate, noting that Benedict “made no mention of the need to discipline diocesan leaders most responsible for shielding hundreds of priests from criminal penalties by moving them from parish to parish to continue their crimes.”

The Catholic League responded the op-ed by running an ad in the New York Times criticizing the paper for its editorial and blaming the scandal on homosexuality:

The argument itself is confusing and contradictory. If “homosexuality does not cause predatory behavior” then why is is the “pedophilia crisis” a “homosexual crisis”? Most of the molesters were also over the age 30 but the Catholic League does not rename the “pedophilia crisis” an “older man crisis” or an “white older man” crisis or anything of the sort. But all this misses the point. What the Catholic League is trying to do is imply that there is a connection between homosexuality and molestation, just like segregationists once accused African Americans of raping white women, and Jews were accused of murdering Christian babies.

In reality, pedophilia has little to do with the gender of the child or the orientation of the molester; pedophiles are attracted to youth and control. “Accessibility is more the factor in who a pedophile abuses,” psychotherapist Joe Kort writes. “This may explain the high incidence of children molested in church communities and fraternal organizations, where the pedophile may more easily have access to children.”

Last night on Larry King Live, Catholic League President Bill Donahue tried to dismiss this argument by claiming that “it’s not a pedophilia” because “most of the victims were post pubescent,” as old as 12 or 13 years of age. Anything older than that is the fault of gays.

Update Maureen Dowd writes, "Donohue is still talking about the problem as an indiscretion rather than a crime. If it mostly involves men and boys, that’s partly because priests for many years had unquestioned access to boys."

Update The Interfaith Alliance strongly denounced the ad today. "I find [Donahue's] reasoning repugnant. To claim this is a ‘homosexual crisis’ rather than a ‘pedophilia crisis’ is a misguided insult to the millions of gay men and women who find this scandal as devastating as their heterosexual counterparts," the group's President, Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy, said in a statement. "Rather than pointlessly pointing fingers, Mr. Donahue should start focusing on the need for accountability and transparency," Gaddy added.