America`s Roman Catholic bishops, releasing Monday a revised draft of a proposed pastoral letter critical of U.S. economic policies, appear determined to serve as the voice of the politically and materially impoverished underclass.
The new version, issued by a committee of prelates headed by Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland of Milwaukee, carries a longer title–”Economic Justice for All: Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy.” It also puts greater emphasis on prayer and personal conversion as elements leading to a moral climate fostering a just economic order.
But the letter continues to condemn strongly the high rate of unemployment and poverty as a ”social and moral scandal” that cannot be tolerated ”in a nation as rich as ours.” It decries morally ”inequitable” income distribution in the U.S. and asserts that ”the poor have the single most urgent claim on the conscience of the nation.”
The third draft will be discussed and perhaps amended before a final vote on the document is taken at a November meeting of the full body of 300 U.S. bishops. If approved, it will serve as an official teaching document for the 52-million-member American denomination, and it will stand as one of the most sober and sweeping critiques of Reaganomics issued by any religious body.
President Reagan has declined to comment publicly on the proposed Catholic letter, which was released in its first draft the week after his 1984 re-election. But a number of his prominent allies have roundly condemned the church document as ill-informed and unnecessarily harsh in its analysis of the American free-enterprise system.
However, one of the key critics of the bishops, Catholic lay theologian and writer Michael Novak, may be modestly appeased by the third draft`s heightened emphasis on the role of the family in the U.S. economy. The letter now explicitly insists that all economic and social policies be evaluated ”in the light of their impact on the strength and stability of family life.”
The new version places greater emphasis on education for the poor, urging in particular a renewed commitment to maintaining Catholic schools in urban inner cities.
It also amplifies the impact of the United States on the world economy, examining the mounting debt of the Third World and lamenting ”the tendency to ignore the effect” such indebtedness has on ”the lives of people already disadvantaged.”
The 45,000-word, 100-page letter continues to urge the American Catholic community to live up to the same standards of economic justice the bishops are urging for the broader society, calling on church agencies and institutions to be ”exemplary” in their hiring and compensation practices.
