Writing in the National Catholic Reporter, Michael Sean Winters criticizes the economic thinking of the Trump Administration, particularly the priorities of Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought (the article is linked below). This paragraph particularly caught me:

The marriage of fiscal austerity with Christian values strikes many of us as absurd, even morally repugnant, at least when the initial round of austerity included shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development, which helped alleviate the suffering of desperately poor people around the globe. But the marriage is not without a distinctly American and Christian pedigree. Thrift and austerity ranked high among the virtues for the Puritans who landed in New England in the first half of the 17th century.

Joining “fiscal austerity with Christian values” is “absurd, even morally repugnant”? Especially so when among its first targets was the U.S. Agency for International Development? Where to start?

The first sentence embodies precisely the mindset I have been criticizing (see here) in these pages. There seems to be some implicit assumption (which Winters makes explicit) that, somehow, a “Christian” must be for largesse, handing out other peoples’ (i.e., taxpayers’) money freely “without counting the cost” and certainly without judging what it’s being used for, as long as it’s stamped “for the poor.”

No, what’s “morally repugnant” is precisely that position, which credulously hands out hard-earned tax dollars simply because someone pronounces it is for “the poor” and maybe throws in a “Good Samaritan” allusion (a parable that has been somewhat abused as of late). That position is especially risible when the example of such “moral repugnance” is USAID, which — together with the State Department’s Bureaus of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) and usually Human Rights, Democracy, and Labor (DRL) — has been in the forefront of anti-life Western agendas to push birth control and abortion on developing countries for decades, often conditioning that aid on yielding to that cultural anti-life globalism and/or legalizing abortion.

But that’s not the essence of my criticism of Winters’s view. Regardless of what one thinks of USAID, the idea that a Catholic public official does not first have a fiduciary responsibility for what is done with his own taxpayers’ money is, to me, problematic. Do the wealthier nations of the world have a responsibility towards the poor? Yes. But they also have other priorities, all of which must be addressed on a fixed budget which, even in a prosperous country, is fixed. When a country faces a $35 trillion deficit ($35,000,000,000,000.00 in case you want to see that in figures), there can be few sacred spending cows. A public official — even a Catholic public official — has a responsibility towards the long-term financial health of his country. No country will be financially healthy that continuously incurs further debt.

This is not just a markets or financial question. It is a personal question. A country in which ever-growing amounts of taxes must be collected just to service its debt is imposing monstrous costs on future generations. Young people today are already complaining that their chances for enjoying the lifestyle their parents did are ever slimmer. How does one factor that element into where “fiscal austerity” fits?

A Catholic public official must take responsibility for the poor into account. He must also take into account his country’s fiscal situation, present and future. And, when it comes to making those social justice determinations, assuming that the public official is privy to far more detailed information than external critics, I would argue greater leeway must also be given to such an official’s judgment in conscience about what is and isn’t possible. Mind you, I am deliberately counterposing myself here to the “conscience” arguments of Mario Cuomo, Joe Biden, and the Catholic Lite politicians, mostly in the Democratic Party, who suddenly invoked their “personal convictions” versus their “public responsibilities” to defend the indefensible, to promote practices Vatican II called “offenses against God and man.” Truths about human nature — including the inviolable right to life — are not historically contingent; there is no room here to pretend “in conscience” that the Catholic public official has some greater insight to “justify” prenatal killing than the Church does in opposing it and rightly calling him to public account. Those “conscience appeals” were ruses to push one’s political agenda in spite of one’s faith obligations.

But economic forecasts, financial priorities, fiscal trends, and overall national needs are historically contingent, incredibly complex, and detailed, while the resources available to address them are finite. This is precisely where well-formed conscience comes into play and where, in general, clerics need to leave matters to responsible lay public officials acting in their proper domains.

Yes, as Perry Miller once claimed, America’s story — or at least much of it — can be explained in terms of the Puritan experience and reactions to it. But, that said and pace Winters, “thrift” in public policy hardly should be deemed the strange preserve of Calvinists with whom responsible Catholics can find no “common ground.”

Winters is right in recognizing the corrosive effects of secularism and how Protestantism, with its individualistic theology, paved the way for secular individualism. Once man replaces God as definer of right and wrong, human bonds all become arbitrary contracts. He speaks of “covenant theology” as a factor mitigating that individualism among the Puritans (although, in practice, their ecclesiology of the “elect” made it hard to know just with whom one might be in covenant). But he then draws it into a shot at Vice President Vance, writing his “misunderstanding of the ordo amoris is a kind of stepchild of lost covenant theology, which included the elect and the elect only.”

Again: well, no. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the ordo amoris controversy is the result of both Pope Francis and J.D. Vance loosely using terms they don’t first define. To Francis’s credit: yes, “love” as a spiritual moral obligation is universal and demands an ever-expansive outreach. But I would not suggest that is something Vance theologically denies. Rather, both seem to be using “love” equivocally: for Francis, it’s a concept expressing a spiritual obligation; for Vance it’s a substitute for the concrete measures taken to give that concept tangible material expression. And those concrete measures — normally, material goods which by nature are limited and diminish through division — require some prudential principle for their proper allocation. Ordo amoris as a progressively outreaching way to allocate finite resources justly seems rather Catholic, not a “stepchild of lost covenant theology.”

I address these issues precisely because I think we have not had an honest and comprehensive discussion about money and how it is made in the Church. Far from idealizing a “poor Church for the poor,” I agree with those authors who maintain the Church needs her own independent financial resources and ecosystem to sustain her ministries, not on a cheek-to-jowl but a grand and long-term scale. Poverty is an evangelical counsel, not a commandment. That means we need an honest discussion of many of the barnacles that have attached themselves to and want to identify as “Catholic social teaching” which, in fact, are policy or economic choices that genuine Catholic social teaching does not entail. This includes baked-in assumptions that being financially austere or questioning whatever is simply packaged as “for the poor” is “absurd, even morally repugnant.” Nor is it just about economics. It’s also about the proper role and conscience of the lay Catholic in his rightful sphere of “discernment” and responsibility.

[A link to the April 2 Michael Sean Winters article is here.]