A reader asks:

Have you written about the CC’s teachings on Social Justice? My daughter teaches first grade in Harlem. Many of her students are products of single parent, welfare culture and live in nearby shelters. How do we provide a safety net without encouraging fathers to abandon their family? I’m 64 and a nurse. When I was a student nurse and doing my outpatient affiliation at Boston City Hospital in the early sixties, one of the head nurses commented that AFDC would be the ruination of the African American family. She was right. My parents were life long Democrats and I can remember my father, who worked hard in a factory as a proto-type assemblyman and machinist, thinking welfare was basically a fraud, but then he’d look at us and say “But what about the children?” He had compassion for those little ones. How does the government provide a safety net without encouraging dependency and abandonment of ones responsibilities. I’d appreciate an article or direction to one you’ve already written about this. The Democrat Party is not the same one I grew up with. There insistence on linking themselves with abortion is destroying the party. Should social justice be the providence of the Churches or the Government or both. The idea that someone gets to stay at home and not work on my dime while my husband and I work hard is frustrating to say the least.

I haven’t written much on the Church’s social teaching for the very simple reason that I haven’t had time to master the relevant literature. What little I have written can be found on my website, Mark-Shea.com. My basic take on the relationship of a Catholic (or at least this Catholic) to the two party system is found in “Israel and Judah“.

I’d suggest a read of the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. Sorry I’m not more help. For all my volubility, what I’ve largely focused on in this blog is just a couple of points where each party asks us to commit clear and obvious evil that *cannot* be reconciled with the Catholic faith. For lefties it’s abortion and sundry other pelvic obsessions. For Righties, it’s torture. In both cases, the principle being crapped upon is “You shall not do evil that good may come of it”. However, beyond that, I have seldom ventured to go because my education is such that I am not competent to discuss the nuances of, say, Catholic social teaching and economics, or the Catholic approach to health care in all its complexity, or what not. I, of course, have various responses to this and that story in the news. So, for instance, I think this story of various corporations living by the motto, “Man was made for economics, not economics for man” is appalling and disgusting and an illustration of why it is so wrong to elevate capitalism to the level of Sacred Tradition. But that’s just my very fallible opinion which is open to correction. That’s why I’d suggest you take questions like this to somebody who is really qualified to talk about the Church’s social doctrine. Maybe your local bishop can recommend somebody or provide you with materials himself.