RYAN AS ATLAS SHRUGGING
Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), Chairman of the Budget Committee, apparently was never required to read the New Testament at whatever Roman Catholic Grammar School he attended.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote Congress on April 16, 2012, urging Congress to choose as a “central moral measure of any budget proposal” exactly “how it affects ‘the least of these,’” quoting the gospel of Matthew 25.
The Conference of Bishops made it crystal clear, “the needs of those who are hungry and homeless, without work or in poverty should come first.” The Catholic Bishops insisted, “every budget decision should be assessed by whether it protects or threatens human life and dignity.” The Catholic Bishops protested, “for moral and human reasons,” the “unacceptable cuts to hunger and nutrition programs” because they “hurt hungry children, poor families, vulnerable seniors and workers who cannot find employment.”
Ryan nevertheless insists his budget is consistent with Catholic teachings even though it amounts to $5 trillion in cuts. Ryan told the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) without any remorse that the government was simply not responsible for lifting its citizens out of poverty.
The Catholic Bishops told Congress that they feared reducing the deficit in this dramatic manner would wipe out Pell grants, workforce training and development, nutrition assistance, low income tax credits and safe and affordable housing for the less fortunate.
Ryan didn’t answer the charge; instead, he attacked the legitimacy of the Catholic Bishops to criticize him, saying, “These are not all the Catholic bishops.” The Catholic Bishops explained that they did speak for “all” as they were “elected by their fellow bishops to represent all of the U.S. bishops…”
Ryan might have learned something as a child from the Dominican nuns that taught us kids the Sermon on the Mount. Sister Augustine, God rest her immortal soul, would have cracked her long thin wooden stick across the palms of Ryan’s chalky crooked hands for his trash talk, advocating indifference to the poor and suffering.
Ryan believes Catholic “teaching” is what you say it is and took that message recently, on April 26, 2012, to Gaston Hall at Georgetown University to “teach” the Jesuits and their student body what it means to be “Christian.”
88 Jesuits, faculty and staff welcomed Ryan in a short letter, “challeng[ing]” his “continuing misuse of Catholic teaching to defend a budget plan that decimates food programs for struggling families, radically weakens protections for the elderly and sick, and gives more tax breaks to the wealthiest few.”
They noted that Ryan claimed to be inspired by the late Ayn Rand. Ryan reportedly said, “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” Ryan reportedly instructed his Hill staffers to study Rand’s elitist philosophy with its felicific calculus favoring the wealthy, and declaiming the parasitic middle class and the poor.
The Jesuits and faculty wrote Ryan that his budget appeared to “reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” They explained that Rand’s “call to selfishness and her antagonism toward religion are antithetical to the Gospel values of compassion and love.”
Unbowed, once at the University, Ryan invoked Pope Benedict XVI but blithely disregarded what Benedict wrote in his very first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (“God is Love”), that taught that three things made the Church the Holy Roman Catholic Church and one was caring for the poor, because “love of God and love of neighbor have become one: In the least of the brethren we find Jesus himself, and in Jesus we find God.”
Ryan, however, is as indifferent to the poor as his inspiration Rand was, and that puts him in opposition to the teachings of Jesus and Christ and Pope Benedict as well.
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