Since I have little appetite for vitriolic American right-wing ideology disguised as Catholic teaching, I generally try to steer clear of Thomas Peters’ site. But every now and again, morbid curiosity gets the better of me. And so, here is the latest installment from young Master Peters – the unveiling of a “Catholic Vote” video that is suffused by “awesomeness”! Trust me, you will want to see this for yourself – no comment of mine can possibly do justice to this epic masterpiece…
Apparently, this is geared toward Fox News, and Sean Hannity in particular. No real surprise there, for this is clearly the manifesto of an angry (white) tea-party activist. There is nothing Catholic about this video – and to their credit, numerous commentors make this point. It is designed to push the buttons of the contemporary American secular right. It would leave Catholics in the rest of the world completely bewildered.
But (surprise, surprise!), I want to turn back to health care. In his attempt to defend the video, Master Peters makes some telling comments, comments that confirm what I have saying all along . Let me quote him in full:
“it completely violates the Catholic principles of subsidiarity. No Church document has claimed there is an obligation of the government to provide the “right” to health care to all of its citizens. I believe, prudentially speaking, that this bill will result in worse care for more people. This is a prudential conclusion that, as you would, say, I am entitled to.”
All along, Catholic opponents of healthcare readily mixed moral issues with arguments from American liberalism in ways that were often indistinguishable. The implicit argument was that the government has no right to force people to subsidize the healthcare of others, either directly through taxpayer funds, or indirectly through the individual mandate. Did any of these people support the House version of the reform, the version that had the ironclad abortion protections that pleased the bishops? No, they continued to oppose – and salivated over the election of a pro-abortion pro-torture senator who nonetheless opposed healthcare reform.
And here, Peters reveals his hand. If he thinks this legislation violates subsidiarity then he has no understanding of subsidiarity. [As a side note, I wish all those American free markets zealots who oppose government intervention in economic affairs on grounds of “subsidiarity” would actually go and read Quadragesimo Anno, the key source document behind this principle, and sign up to Pope Pius’s cogent analysis of the free market]. Peters surely knows that the “right to health care” is indeed a tenet of Catholic social teaching. He makes the weird argument that there is no obligation for “government to provide the right”. What does that mean? Which entity if not government can ensure the provision of universal healthcare by law? Perhaps what he means to say, but doesn’t, is that there is no right for the government to provide healthcare? That, of course, would be a strawman argument, as the current reform is centered around a huge expansion of the private insurance market.
If there is a problem with subsidiarity in healthcare, it is already there – in the form of large dominant insurers making healthcare decisions based on the profit motive. And anyway, this will be helped by the setting up of exchanges – just as the Church supports unions to put them on more equal terms with employers, so we can support regulated exchanges to reduce the unequal power relationship. But I have a funny feeling that this is not what Peters is talking about.
Of course, the bishops never made this argument in the healthcare debate. They were very clear that they judged the legislation on three moral principles – affordable universal healthcare, no funding for abortion, no discrimination against immigrants (including so-called “illegal” immigrants). And these were indeed the correct moral principles to deploy. I mention this because Peters has been quite vicious in his attacks on those Catholics and Catholic organizations that made a prudential judgment to support this legislation. And yet, in his mini-magisterium, we find some very different principles! Peters is basically using the bishops when he needs them, discarding them when he doesn’t – all in the service of his own liberal ends.
One final point on this. Peters makes his prudential judgment that “this bill will result in worse care for more people” and then insists he is “entitled” to make this judgment. Well, not so fast. In these situations, the proper task of the bishops is to lay out the moral principles, and Catholics then apply these principles to the given facts and circumstances at hand. I’ve pointed out that the bishops were insufficiently clear on this. But Catholics must never abandon reason. You cannot just throw facts and logic out the window, and replace them with talking points. Forming a prudential judgment is a serious exercise in moral decision-making.
In this case, there is absolutely no evidence that Master Peters’ analysis is correct. Not a shard. ‘Worse care for more people”. Most people are on employer-based insurance, and will see little change (perhaps a small decrease in premiums). But those on the individual market, and especially those rationed by cost today, will see major improvements. The individual market is today dysfunctional; it will no longer be. There are many criticisms that one can make about this reform but “worse care for more people” is not a serious argument. I would suggest that Master Peters did not take his moral responsibility seriously enough here. For someone so invested in this debate, he failed to educate himself on the basics.
The bottom line is that not all prudential judgments are equal. Consider the war analogy. It’s quite similar – the Church lays out the moral principles (in this case, the just war criteria) and Catholics do their best to figure out how these principles apply to specific circumstances. That does not mean that one is free to say that since war is not intrinsically evil, then any war can be legitimately supported. Would a German in the Hitler era been right to form this judgment? The example of St. Franz Jägerstätter tells us otherwise. No, forming a prudential judgment is a very serious moral undertaking. Master Peters seems to regard it as a personal “entitlement” – echoing again the secular feel-good entitlement mentality that so pervades our culture. That, of course, is rather telling.
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