By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
A coalition of Christian clergy, including representatives of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, met with President Barack Obama on Wednesday to plead with him to keep cuts to social programs off the table in debt crisis negotiations.
According to the Huffington Post, leaders from the largest religious denominations and organizations met for 40 minutes with the President on Wednesday in the White House’s Roosevelt Room to talk and pray with him about the ongoing budget talks. In attendance were representatives from the Roman Catholic Church, the the National Council of Churches, the National Association of Evangelicals and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, as well as representatives from social service groups such as the Salvation Army and Bread for the World.
The meeting came in the wake of a letter sent by 5,000 pastors to the president and congressional leaders last week that reminded the Administration that the “moral measure of the debate is how the most poor and vulnerable fare.”
Barbara Williams-Skinner, co-facilitator of the National African American Clergy Network, opened the meeting by holding Obama’s hand and saying a “prayer for God’s wisdom for his team on the decisions they make,” she told the Post. “I told him there are over 2,000 verses of scripture [that apply to the fiscal debate]. As a Christian, he, too, knows that is the word of God.”
Obama responded to the group’s concerns by saying he shared their desire to protect the vulnerable as well as their concerns about potential cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and other entitlement programs. However, as the president knows, any deal struck to raise the nation’s $14.3 trillion debt limit is likely to include significant cuts to these programs.
“We came here not to advance a particular plan, but a fundamental moral principle: put the needs of the poor first in allocating scarce resources,” said Bishop Ricardo Ramirez of La Cruces, New Mexico, speaking on behalf of the USCCB.
“As religious leaders, our concern is not which party wins the current political battles. But we know if we don’t speak up who is likely to lose: the families trying to feed their kids, the jobless looking for work, the children who need health care, the hungry and sick and hopeless around the world.”
Ramirez said this new era of recession has created a new face of poverty, such as college graduates and lifelong middle class workers join the lengthening ranks of unemployed in our nation.
Writing for Front Page Magazine, Mark D. Tooley, President of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, suggested that there should be more to this discussion than just protecting social programs.
“Would Jesus bury America in debt? Would Jesus suffocate America with confiscatory taxes? Would Jesus entrap the needy as permanent wards of the state? Presumably, these questions did not arise during the religious summit at the White House.”
There is much more to Christian charity than just calling for an unlimited welfare state, Tooley writes. He questions where is the concern for “working families struggling with higher taxes, young people forced to pay into transfer payment schemes from which they likely will gain no just return, struggling potential entrepreneurs who would like to found new businesses, for the chronically unemployed who would like jobs and not welfare, or for all who dream of charting their own future destinies rather than submit to the state as permanent wards?”
Tooley concludes by saying it’s unfortunate that these people are not afforded the same “circle of protection” from budget cuts that recipients of welfare and other social programs are currently enjoying.
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