How dishonest is Ross Douthat? A charitable view

Fernando Botero, Nuncio (1970). WikiArt. 

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, leaps as is his wont to the defense of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops against an affront by the sociologist Robert Putnam:

“Over the last 30 years,” Harvard’s Robert Putnam told The Washington Post, “most organized religion has focused on issues regarding sexual morality, such as abortion, gay marriage, all of those. I’m not saying if that’s good or bad, but that’s what they’ve been using all their resources for ... It’s been entirely focused on issues of homosexuality and contraception and not at all focused on issues of poverty.”

Worse, President Obama, speaking alongside Putnam at the Catholic-Evangelical Leadership Summit on Overcoming Poverty at Georgetown University, seemed to agree with him:

“Despite great caring and concern,” the president remarked, when churches pick “the defining issue” that’s “really going to capture the essence of who we are as Christians,” fighting poverty is often seen as merely “nice to have” compared to “an issue like abortion.” 

To Douthat, this is virtually slander:

It would be too kind to call these comments wrong; they were ridiculous. Not only because (as Putnam acknowledged) believers personally give abundantly to charity, but because institutionally the churches of America use “all their resources” in ways that completely belie the idea that they’re obsessed with culture war.

This is partly because he assumes, or pretends to assume, that what Putnam means by "resources" is money, and Catholic Charities, for example, spends thousands of times more money, some of it certainly on the poor, than an abortion-focused organization like Focus on the Family. Though if you look at Obama's remarks with Douthat's edits removed, you can see that this isn't what he's saying at all; he's talking about the church's moral influence on the people in the pews:

“Despite great caring and concern,” he said, “when it comes to what are you really going to the mat for, what's the defining issue, when you're talking in your congregations, what's the thing that is really going to capture the essence of who we are as Christians, or as Catholics, or what have you, that this”—fighting poverty—“is oftentimes viewed as a 'nice to have' relative to an issue like abortion.”

Which puts him pretty much on the same page as the complaint made by Papa Francesco and the message of Evangelii Gaudium,

"More than by fear of going astray, my hope is that we will be moved by the fear of remaining shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security, within rules which make us harsh judges, within habits which make us feel safe, while at our door people are starving and Jesus does not tire of saying to us, 'Give them something to eat.'"... He said their greatest concern must be the poor and marginalized, since they are victims of an unjust, global economic system that prizes profit over people.

Or as Putnam put it in the interview that offended the Monsignor so much,

As I’ve said repeatedly, religious people are nicer [than non-religious]. They are more likely to give to charity, and to volunteer compared with the public in general. But what has not happened is the move from, “I, Joe Blow, want to help this poor person,” to “My church is involved in the national conversation about poverty and what to do about it.” 

Douthat's also lying about Putnam ignoring the existence of all the non-conservative Christians with his reference to "most organized religion":

this critique essentially erases black and Latino churches (who reliably support social programs), ignores decades worth of pro-welfare-state talk from Catholic bishops, and treats the liberal Protestant mainline as dead already.

Putnam shouldn't have put it that way, but he had just said a minute or so earlier who he had in mind:

Poverty has not been at the top of the public agenda of either the Catholic Church or evangelicals.

Oops, Ross, he's talking to you! And to those same bishops, who said very explicitly that poverty is a less important issue to Catholics than abortion and such in their "Faithful Citizenship" statement of October 2011:

Over the last two years at the USCCB semi-annual meetings, [Fr. Thomas] Reese pointed out incredulously, “The issue of unemployment, the issue of poverty, the fact that we are in a recession, for God’s sake, did not come up.” A review of press releases from the USCCB from this period confirms Reese’s charge: economic justice issues were not a material part of the agenda of the meetings.

Faithful Citizenship, meanwhile, frames the forming of political judgments as a tension between two kinds of issues: those, like poverty, that require “affirmative efforts to seek the common good,” and those, like abortion and euthanasia, that represent “intrinsic evils that can never be supported.” This conceptual division appeared in Faithful Citizenship for the first time in 2007.

Since poverty, though an explicit concern, is not treated as an “intrinsic evil,” and since Faithful Citizenship cautions Catholics against treating “all issues as equal,” the two-tier system of assessing moral challenges has had, as a practical matter, a pernicious effect, according to David Hollenbach, a Jesuit theologian at Boston College. “The status of abortion and homosexuality and stem cell research issues and so forth [have been elevated] to a level of discussion,” says Hollenbach, “in a way that I think is inappropriately stressing those issues above the broad range of issues that really need to be dealt with,” including poverty.

Perhaps with the advent of Pope Francis and his call for a reprioritizing of the Church's mission to focus on poverty, this is starting to change for the better—this week's Georgetown conference is a sign that it could really be happening, and that's why Obama and Putnam showed up—but it's clear that neither Obama nor Putnam, not to mention the Pope, said anything out of line.

Fernando Botero, Newborn Nun (1975). WikiArt. 

One of the sources Douthat cites for how generous conservative American churches are in fighting poverty is an article by Rob Schwarzwalder and Dr. Fat Pagan (no, I'm just being childish) of the Family Research Council, originally syndicated by Religion News Service and picked up by the Washington Post (like Fred Hiatt is running a pundit-laundering operation over there, you could call it Wapo-washing), with a claim on the particular eleemosynary greatness of the US Catholic Church that contains a truly classic bit of economics derp:

In total, The Economist magazine’s assessment of the Catholic Church’s estimated $170 billion total U.S. income finds that about 57 percent (roughly $97 billion) goes to “health-care networks, followed by 28 percent on colleges, with parish and diocesan day-to-day operations accounting for just 6 percent, with the remaining $4.6 billion going to ‘national charitable activities.’”

Of course what the Economist totals (August 2012) isn't their "total income" but their operations' total expenditures; it doesn't say anything about the income, and that's kind of important.

Because the Church does not collect $97 billion per year from its parishioners or anywhere close to that amount to provide health care. Rather, it does $97 billion worth of nonprofit business, in which the bills are paid mostly by insurance companies (including the government Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs) and patients, with lots of assistance from government subsidies, research funding, and even non-Catholic private charities—not that the Church doesn't subsidize it as well. Though on the other hand Catholic hospitals are not exactly falling over themselves to help the poor, giving about half as much charity care as public hospitals do:

Via Mother Jones.

Nor are the $48.8 billion of the 244 Catholic colleges and universities taken from offertory collections; the money comes as much as possible from tuition payments, and the schools too are notably ungenerous with poor students nowadays, preferring to reserve scholarship assistance to the high-fliers who make them more desirable to those who can pay full fare. (Catholic elementary and secondary education is charging more and more as well, as the supply of monks and nuns able to teach more or less for free diminishes, and they are becoming institutions for the elite and of course for the transmission of anti-abortion, anti-contraception, and anti-homosexual views, to which they clearly devote more effort than they do to caring for the poor).

So the suggestion that these numbers somehow indicate the Church's generosity is off the wall. How deceptive it is can be seen by just examining the Catholic Charities line a little more carefully, for 2010, as supplied by the New York Times:

Catholic Charities affiliates received a total of nearly $2.9 billion a year from the government in 2010, about 62 percent of its annual revenue of $4.67 billion. Only 3 percent came from churches in the diocese (the rest came from in-kind contributions, investments, program fees and community donations).

Apparently the Church or at any rate its Mystical Body, the Roman Catholic parishes of the United States, contributed about $140 million to Catholic Charities USA in 2010, or a little less than one twentieth of what the organization got from local, state, and federal government. Compare that to $180 million from the parishes for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2011, the closest year I can find. Yes, more money was squeezed out of the congregations by their parish priests for the 446 abortion-maddened bishops, active and retired, and their club than for the countless programs, mostly devoted to poverty relief, of the nation's largest charitable agency (this may be rather unfair; some of the contributions in kind and community donations must be in some sense "from" the church, and the only other accounting I can find, from Bloomberg for 1999, makes the total church contribution to be 12%—but that's still less than a fifth of what government puts in).

Moreover, though Catholic Charities affiliates don't devote a lot of time to denouncing abortion, they do refuse to perform any charitable activity in which an abortion might be involved, or contraception, condoms for the prevention of HIV transmission, stem cell research, or what have you, as do all the Church's medical establishments and most of its educational ones, so that they all are, in effect, agencies in which the rejection of "intrinsic evil" has priority over the alleviation of human suffering, and that's just a fact. (What the conservative evangelicals do in Africa may be rather worse, contributing to actual crimes against humanity.)

The Jewish charity industry is just as bad as the Catholics in its way, giving some fraction of 20% to social services and well over a third to the richest non–oil economy in the Middle East. From the Forward.

And by the way, Americans may be famous for their charitable generosity, but most of the money is given to churches, and only about a third of it goes to the poor:

According to the Giving USA report, which tracks charitable giving patterns, the biggest category of recipient is religious organizations. Note that that just includes donations to churches, synagogues, mosques, etc, and not donations to religiously inspired service groups like the Salvation Army or Episcopal Relief and Development.

From a 2005 study, via the Wapo story cited above.