Footnote 53: Census Welfare

I like Dr. Manion’s points, but there is a much more central problem he does not address that would solve all these problems ‘up the tree’ before they even start, a problem at the roots he ignores. The problem we have is that we do not have a Catholic confessional state, and all else stems from that. Yes, charity should come with the teaching of the Faith, but when the two activities are so localized, it really becomes impossible. Do you have catechism class before or after handing a hungry man a bowl of soup? Do you hold back the baby diapers from the woman who is in an irregular ‘marriage’? After all, you’re offering the diapers to keep her from opting for an abortion–so when do you teach her not to have sex outside of marriage in the first place? There’s little opportunity in the current situation, but if we had a Catholic state the two necessities could be separated and still happen. In the Catholic state, there is teaching on many fronts, in the media, in schools, not to mention in churches, so that you can give the guy the soup and give the woman the diapers without the lecture, and it still all works together, they will still get the teaching. And the same with the notion of poverty and what help we must give, or not, as the case may be. In fact our predatory economic system churns out poor faster than we can sign them up in ‘means tested welfare programs.’ But the Catholic state would de-commoditize humans, land, and money, and reduce poverty thereby. Wages and profits would be regulated. Workers would earn enough, excess profits would be controlled. (Surely Dr. Manion does not buy the protestant fictionb of Free Markets!) And of course there is the effect on population and consequent effect on economics that a fertility-minded Catholic Church (for She is) in union with family-fostering state policies could provide. We need more babies. That’s an economic reality. I know we have almost forgotten that there ever was a Catholic state, so pervasive has been the media blackout on the truth of the matter, but 1. five hundred years is not so long. 2. we can’t solve these problems without a Catholic state.There is no solution. By eliminating the Catholic state from the discussion (as Vatican II did) we go back and forth between ‘spoil the poor’ to ‘abandon the poor,’ but never to arrange society so that the poor, whom we shall always have with us, are really helped as much as possible by the restoration of their ability to own, not just earn. That’s what distributism does, but it cannot be implemented under either capitalism or socialism. It requires a Catholic state. And we can restore it, people are fed up with the current system all around the world. They hunger for religious states of all kinds. Secularism is wrong.