Within the Catholic Church, the Jesuits are to intellectual disputation what the Yankees are to Major League Baseball, what the Marines are to armed forces, what Goldman Sachs is to Wall Street. Esquire’s Charles Pierce speaks from personal experience:
This I learned from having Jebbies in my family. You do not muck around with the Society. If you try, bring your A-game, because otherwise very bad things will happen to your arguments.
House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan has made periodic attempts to justify his budget proposals in terms of his Catholic faith and the social teachings of the Catholic Church. So presumably Ryan was aware of the Jesuits’ reputation when he accepted Georgetown’s invitation to deliver the Whittington Lecture at the university’s Public Policy Institute this morning.
If he wasn’t, he surely is now. Earlier this week Ryan received this letter written by Fr. Thomas Reese, SJ and signed by over 80 Georgetown faculty and administrators. Reese knows a thing or two about wordsmithing, having edited the US Jesuits’ signature magazine, America, for seven years before running afoul of the enforcers at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly known as the Roman Inquisition). As Jesuits have done for hundreds of years, Reese doesn’t shy away from using words to shred the logic of Ryan’s previous arguments. Some highlights:
Welcome to Georgetown University….
(W)e would be remiss in our duty to you and our students if we did not challenge your 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….
In short, your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Her call to selfishness and her antagonism toward religion are antithetical to the Gospel values of compassion and love….
While you often appeal to Catholic teaching on “subsidiarity” as a rationale for gutting government programs, you are profoundly misreading Church teaching. Subsidiarity is not a free pass to dismantle government programs and abandon the poor to their own devices. This often misused Catholic principle cuts both ways. It calls for solutions to be enacted as close to the level of local communities as possible. But it also demands that higher levels of government provide help — “subsidium”*– when communities and local governments face problems beyond their means to address such as economic crises, high unemployment, endemic poverty and hunger….
And the “killing with cold kindness” closer:
Along with this letter, we have included a copy of the Vatican’s Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, commissioned by John Paul II, to help deepen your understanding of Catholic social teaching.
Respectfully,….
This is the kind of language Jesuits use in freshman writing classes when not pleased with a first draft. “If you’re going to use a word, Mr. Ryan, know what it means. If you don’t know what it means, look it up. If you’re going to make an argument, each piece must fit together logically, or your whole argument falls apart—as it does here. Now take this paper home and work on it until it makes an actual, supportable point. God gave you a mind for a reason, young man. Use it.”
The Whittington Lecture is scheduled to begin at 10 am. I guess we’ll find out soon if Paul Ryan has done his homework.
*subsidium – (Latin) reserve troops, auxiliary troops / support, help, assistance.
Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/
