I question whether that was WSJ’s underlying assumption.
The article notes (I presume correctly, though I haven’t checked it) that all but one of the Catholic legislators who are part of the official “Catholics for Obama” effort have a 100% rating from NARAL. That is indeed grave scandal, and McGurn has every right to point it out. However, he then seamlessly moves from this statistic to broader statements about “liberal” Catholics. The assumption at work, then, is that anyone who criticizes Ryan on grounds of social justice is a “liberal” Catholic of the sort NARAL would approve of. I know that this is simply nonsense. The folks who write at the “Catholic Moral Theology” blog to which I frequently link–several of whom are personal friends and acquaintances from graduate school–do not fit that stereotype. Using this stereotype is a way of shutting down serious debate.
The way I understood the article was that Ryan’s positions are not inconsistent with Catholic social teachings and can be viewed as completely consistent with them, depending on implementation. And that’s true.
That’s a view championed by some conservative Catholics, including at least one bishop (Mr. Ryan’s own bishop, which is certainly an important consideration for Mr. Ryan as a faithful Catholic). I do not find the arguments convincing. The piece to which I linked above makes substantive arguments showing ways in which Ryan’s policies conflict with Catholic social teaching. I don’t see Ryan’s defenders actually engaging these kinds of serious arguments. They simply repeat ad nauseam that it’s all about “implementation” and that these questions are “prudential” (a word which they pervert to mean "beyond moral/theological considerations and thus outside the purview of the bishops’ authority). The WSJ article in question explicitly makes this argument. It’s the right-wing equivalent to Cuomo’s "personally opposed but. . . . " And no, it’s simply not true that abortion is in a completely different category here from the other Catholic teachings. Or rather, it’s true only in the narrow sense that specific policy initiatives (such as Ryan’s proposals regarding Medicare) are not intrinsically wrong in the way that abortion is intrinsically wrong. Agreed. And that is not what Ryan’s critics are arguing (speaking of strawmen).
Setting up the strawman…or strawwoman…of Ayn Rand to shoot at adds nothing to a discussion of whether or not proposals or policies are consistent with Catholic teaching.
It’s not a “straw woman” at all, when you can point to ways in which Rand’s ideas are reflected in Ryan’s thinking, and when Ryan has a track record, over years, of expressing enthusiastic and unqualified admiration for Rand with regard to economic/social policy.
Sure, some left-wing commentators (mostly on MSNBC) have said silly things, implying that simply the fact that Rand was a Jewish atheist means that a conservative Catholic like Ryan is somehow hypocritical for admiring aspects of her work. But there’s a substantive case here–and, again, it’s a case that Ryan’s defenders have not answered effectively. Instead, they distract by straw men of their own, claiming that Ryan’s being pilloried simply for reading Rand, or pointing to Aquinas’s use of Aristotle as a parallel.
The problem is that Rand’s rejection of charity and the common good is central to the
specific aspects of her thought for which Ryan has expressed admiration, and that Ryan’s policies then match those specific elements.
The WSJ further perpetuates the noxious falsehood that “charity” can’t be a matter of legislation (this is in the earlier piece by Davies and Antolin). That’s not Catholic teaching, as far as I know, at all. It’s utter nonsense. Of course the state can and should require people to act charitably
when such charitable action is needed for the common good.
Ryan isn’t Rand, and their positions are not at all the same in many ways.
Fine. So point to the specific differences that are relevant here, as Ryan’s critics have pointed to the specific similarities.
No one claims that Ryan admires every aspect of Rand’s thought. The problem is in the specifics, which is why Ryan and his defenders avoid the specifics.
Now, when one says “all” the teachings of the Church on social justice, one has to ask what any particular person means by saying that.
Again, read the piece I linked to, which gives specific citations from specific encyclicals and other Church documents.
One of the problems I have with understanding liberals who talk about “social justice” is that they are often short on specifics and long on slogans.
The point made in Dave’s article is that
Ryan doesn’t have any specifics for what caring for the poor means. Of course we can debate the value of specific policy proposals. But his critics have said: "look, your plan reduces benefits for the poor, adds tax cuts for the wealthy, and doesn’t actually produce fiscal responsibility because the tax cuts are greater than the spending cuts. . . . "
All the specifics I’ve seen have been on the “liberal” side. Ryan simply seems to be acting out of faith–faith that if you reduce government spending on the poor and instead give the rich a breather, they will invest to create jobs and private/local initiatives will do whatever is necessary to take care of the poor.
Edwin
We were all fetuses once. I don’t doubt Paul Ryan’s devotion to the Catholic Church, but I understand this is politics. I also think that he might be distancing himself from Todd Akin after the foot-in-mouth remarks he (Akin) made earlier this week. Which by the way, have been blown entirely out of proportion.