Catholic bishops on poverty: perhaps despite themselves, the US hierarchy has had it right.

THE TELEVISED IMAGES OF poor, black families--especially mothers holding their small children in an inadvertent and ironically grotesque replica of a Madonna and child--trudging through the rising flood waters of Hurricane Katrina as it engulfed Louisiana and Mississippi promised, at least momentarily, to re-open the debate on poverty and race in the US.

CNN'S Jack Cafferty calls it the "elephant in the room."

"One of the things that I hope we will do is look at [the Katrina disaster] as an opportunity ... to shine a bright light on poverty in America and do something about it nationally," John Edwards, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 2004, told CNN. Edwards had made poverty the centerpiece of his failed presidential bid.

Indeed, on August 30, even as the full wrath of Katrina was unfolding, the Census Bureau--to studied yawns from a vacationing Bush administration--released a report showing the fourth consecutive annual increase in poverty in the United States.

The poverty rate rose to 12.7 percent of the population in 2004--some 37 million people, up 1.1 million people from 2003. Among African-Americans, those whose pictures dominated the television screens, the poverty rate was about twice that of the general population at 24.7 percent.

And if any nongovernmental organization is prepared to make a major contribution--not only to the debate but to the actual alleviation of some of the problems of poverty--it is the nation's Roman Catholic bishops, and especially through their antipoverty and social services arms, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development and Catholic Charities.

It is the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) through which the bishops--or, more generally and more importantly, the laity who fund the campaign--have made a unique contribution to combating poverty in the United States.

As the televised images of Katrina's victims may prompt a new debate on poverty, it was another set of images--the 1968 riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Poor People's March on Washington with its despairing Resurrection City encampment, that prompted the bishops to establish what was originally called the National Catholic Crusade Against Poverty and, later, the Campaign for Human Development. In an effort to appease conservative critics in and out of the hierarchy, the word "Catholic" was later added to underscore its relationship to the church.

"The poor have not chosen poverty," says the bishops' resolution in 1969. "Poverty is the result of circumstances over which the poor have little or no control." Such pronouncements have been out of fashion in a political culture that has been dominated by a conservative ideology and theology of individualism that refuses to understand or recognize what in Catholic social teaching is called "social sin." But the dignity and empowerment of the poor are ideas deeply rooted in Catholic social teaching and in the 1960s were vibrantly alive in such groups as the Catholic Committee for Urban Ministry and other activist groups as well as the bishops' own Urban Task Force.

Urban activists of the 1960s were deeply influenced by the vision and style of Saul Alinsky, the pre-eminent community organizer of the time, and his Chicago-based Industrial Areas Foundation. Alinsky and other IAF-inspired organizations believed and organized around the principle that people--especially the poor but also working people and others shut out from power structures and institutions--should be empowered to develop and exercise economic and political power in their own communities.

It was a different country then, and a different church and hierarchy. To their credit, the bishops of the era were willing to initiate and institutionalize what was then--and still is--a radical vision. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that the current body of bishops, wounded as it has been by its floundering response to the sexual abuse scandal and obsessed as it has been and continues to be with the politics of abortion, have the vision and the courage to institutionally and financially commit themselves to such a radical vision in the way their predecessors did.

Still, for the most part, the bishops have stuck by CCHD. And since its inception, it has distributed more than $270 million to some 4,000 community- and neighborhood-based projects dealing with a host of issues from housing and tenants' rights to education and employment, with an emphasis on educating and empowering people to take control of the places where they live and work and go to school.

From its very beginning, CCHD has been attacked by conservatives from both within and outside the church. The attacks have ranged from the spurious--the Wanderer, an ultra-conservative newspaper, accused it of funding abortion clinics--to those more classically outraged that the church is involved in efforts to change power structures rather than provide traditional charity to the poor. In 1989, for example, William E. Simon, a noted Catholic layman and treasury secretary under Presidents Nixon and Ford, led an effort against the campaign including distribution of a report by the conservative think tank, the Capital Research Center. Simon and CRC accused CCHD of being a "funding mechanism for radical left wing political activism in the United States, rather than for traditional types of charities."

In particular, the CRC has been critical of c CHD for funding various branches of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which is generally known for pressuring banks to comply with fair lending practices, its effort to end housing mortgage redlining of poor neighborhoods, increasing low income housing availability and advocacy for a higher minimum wage. Conservatives, apparently, prefer what Simon calls "traditional types of charities" rather than having the poor work their way out of poverty through decent pay.

It objected, for example, to a $40,000 grant to the Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates in Los Angeles which helped organize garment and restaurant workers to press for higher wages and benefits. CRC perhaps has forgotten the church's longstanding commitment to the labor movement and the insistence of virtually every pope over the last 100 years on workers' rights to organize and to justly reap the rewards of their labor.

But the carping from the right has had some effects, much as CCHD officials would like to downplay it. As noted, the word "Catholic" was added to the organization's title and the funding guidelines, first drafted by the late Cardinal John Krol of Philadelphia when the organization was founded, were "updated" (critics on the left say "tightened") to forbid even any stray funding of groups that might work in coalition with groups at odds with the moral teachings--read abortion--of the church. As the 1990s ended, some groups complained that they had lost or had their funding withdrawn because of the new guidelines.

While the CCHD is the most provocative and potentially structure-challenging or structure-changing of the bishops' antipoverty efforts, it does not stand in isolation. Even better known--and much, much larger--is the church's traditional social service network, Catholic Charities USA, which helps some nine million people annually through adoption services, shelters and soup kitchens and refugee resettlement. It has a budget of about $2.5 billion, much of which comes from government grants and contracts. It is aimed primarily--but not exclusively--at alleviating the symptoms of poverty rather than attacking the structures that cause it, as CCHD does. But, more so than CCHD it is an active and sometimes vociferous participant on behalf of the poor in Washington's public policy debates.

Equally important, much of the public policy positions of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops are formulated through the theological prism of Catholic social teaching and its preferential option for the poor--whether it is the federal budget, climate change or immigration.

In February 2005, for example, in a letter to members of the House and Senate as Congress prepared to debate a budget resolution, Bishop William Skylstad, president of the USCCB, wrote that the bishops believe "a fundamental moral measure of our nation's budget policy is whether it enhances or undermines the lives and dignity of those most in need. Sadly, political pressure has left poor families missing in the national debate and without a place at the table."

Similarly, as Congress debated the energy bill, the bishops wrote--almost plaintively--urging support for "any amendment ... that will genuinely help mitigate the adverse effects of climate change, particularly as they affect the poor and other vulnerable populations."

"Given that the needs of the poor are so often neglected," the bishops added, "we urge you to place their concerns front and center during the debate about climate change."

Again, to their credit, as the church has undergone a demographic and sociological shift out of the city and to the suburbs and fewer and fewer bishops, their priests and their flocks retain the visceral, umbilical connection to the poor and working class which marked, at least in memory, the generation of priests and prelates 30 years ago, the bishops have maintained their rhetorical and programmatic commitment to the poor.

On poverty, the bishops have had it right.

Whether that commitment can be sustained or will be maintained into the future as anything more than a hollowed-out recitation of appropriate aphorisms remains to be seen. They have been gravely wounded politically by their handling of the sex abuse scandal. And the obsessive fury with which the conference has pursed political purity on the abortion issue--anathematizing and essentially casting out if not yet formally excommunicating--dissenting politicians who are their natural allies on poverty and social welfare issues can only harm the cause of the poor. Republican House Leader Tom DeLay may be an ally on the single issue of abortion, but he's not going to be there when it's time to make a place at the table for the poor and working people, or when the votes are counted on welfare reform, immigration reform and creating a budget that "enhances ... the lives and dignity of those most in need."

And that will be crucial if, as it is to be hoped, the nation once more puts poverty on its agenda.

DAVID E. ANDERSON is a former longtime religion writer, both for United Press International and as editor of Religion News Service.