With regret and reluctance, I write my last column.
For 43 years, first under the heading “From the Back Burner” and more currently “On Behalf of Justice,” I have enjoyed your kind reception as the social justice columnist for the Catholic Star Herald. Originally, editor Msgr. Glendon E. Robertson invited me to write.
The subject does not usually endear writer to reader, but then the Gospel usually confronts us. The Good News of Jesus, crucified by two of the most respectable factions in Jerusalem, the Temple establishment and the Roman procurator, challenges us to examine society to see if any person or group lacks modest things like life, liberty, a fair wage, decent working and living conditions and more. Difficulty is: The wealthy feel threatened when asked about those who are not so well off.
Rectify the maldistribution of God’s gifts of creation, meant for all, and take from those who should not rapaciously grab, and give to those who suffer through no fault of their own – an ominous idea.
Some misname this “socialism,” which Webster’s Dictionary calls “a political and economic theory of social organization based on collective or governmental ownership and democratic management of the essential means for the production and distribution of goods.” That’s it. That’s what socialism is, and, assuming Webster was no commie sought by vigilantes like Sen. Joseph McCarthy, it soon becomes obvious that today, as in the days of the “Red Scare,” many mislabel social justice defenders as communists or socialists. When government provides universal health insurance or public schools, it is not trying to own or mismanage production or distribution of goods. In fact, most people favor it.
To point this out is no act of opining. It is an academic affirmation. It is based on Gospel truth, not on opinion. Decades ago, the U.S. Senate held the Army-McCarthy hearings and helped to end the continuous calumny that ruined the careers of State Department loyalists and even of Hollywood stars, so feverish was the aggression against social reformers who decried the evils of the wealthy refusing their social responsibility to pay taxes for social necessities. It’s called progressive taxation.
I have written so often about our bipartisan maldistribution of revenue to defense that readers have opined that senile dementia must be setting in. Two-thirds of discretionary tax money goes to armaments and has since the end of World War II. We outspend Russia, China and many friendly and hostile countries together on defense, then assign defense expenses to whole other cabinet departments, such as Energy being billed for maintaining our nuclear arsenal, at least $50 billion annually. Veterans Affairs pays for the thousands war-injured. The national debt soars out beyond Mars since we keep borrowing. Other nations rely on us for their defense – and save trillions.
Another area of justice topics in my column about which I fear I have changed few minds is guns. I have been as repetitious about it as about defense spending. The only way the United States can stop the violence is to do what the rest of the world has done long ago: outlaw private possession of handguns and automatic rifles.
If it takes repealing the Second Amendment, we did that with the Eighteenth, which had given us prohibition. If it takes confiscating every bullet from the shelves of every ammo store, allowing manufacturers to produce bullets for police and military only, then we should do it. The only alternative is to perpetuate the repetitious show of prayers and thoughts after each massacre.
I am grateful to the Camden Diocese. In 1972, Bishop George H. Guilfoyle sent me to obtain a doctorate in theology at the Jesuits’ Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. My dissertation concerned the academic study of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war, a subject of no little Church interest.
Likewise, I am grateful for the responsibility of this column entrusted to me at a time and in a place when and where non-Christian opinion rages about cautioning readers on defense spending, gun possession, climate change, immigration refuge, racial and gender discrimination, financial inequity and class-ism, vote suppression, trafficking, solar power and more. A Catholic paper gambles when treating these and similar subjects, as disgruntled readers and advertisers make known to editors.
Saint Pope Paul VI and the 1971 Rome Synod of Bishops: “Action on behalf of justice … fully appear(s) to us as a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the Gospel.”
Peace.
at the bottom and then tap “Add to Home Screen”
