The return of Archbishop Weakland to the Milwaukee See comes at a critical moment for the future of Wisconsin’s communities. His comments about the human needs of persons confronted with changed rules for welfare in our state remind us that such needed reform demands the deepest involvement of our spiritual leaders.
With all its powers and prerogatives, its armies and treasuries, its legions of experts and managers, the state cannot even acknowledge, much less tend to, the real needs of the human person. For the “entitlement” of which the archbishop speaks is nothing less than the recognition of the inherent dignity of the human person. To a believer, dignity may come from God, but to no one, faithful or faithless, can it come from the dispensation of a government agency.
Yes, W-2, Wisconsin’s welfare reform program, is incomplete. All government programs directed toward the improvement of the human condition are incomplete. Necessarily so. In our community, there are grassroots organizations, many of them faith-based, that on a shoestring consistently achieve results that expertly designed, professionally managed, and abundantly funded government programs cannot even come close to matching. They have more than food to give the hungry. They have a message. They speak to the needy by name and never deny to them the sort of advice each of us would give to a person we love, even if they must say “Get your act together” or “Take responsibility for your actions” or— alert the ACLU!—”Pray for salvation.”
By contrast, the one and only message the government can offer to those in need is this: Get a job. That is not enough. W-2 is not enough.
The state is neither evil nor useless. Government is wonderfully competent in delivering those things that its resources of money, science, and management allow. And for what it can successfully do, it rightly taxes citizens. Government can build roads, bridges, airports, and baseball stadiums. We can also hope that it may soon be able to budget funding for ends that it cannot competently provide, allowing instead that individual citizens choose various educational and social services from civil institutions through the use of vouchers.
But we must not look to government to do what it is intrinsically, necessarily incapable of doing. We all know that every human person has a con-science, yet the modern state increasingly shows itself institutionally ignorant of this. Within the welfare debate, appeals are regularly made to the conscience of all who are to give, with no respect at all for the conscience of those who are to receive. If people are poor, it is assumed they have no dignity—no pride for which a handout would be unpleasant. Yet the meanest result of viewing needy people as without the capacity for change is that it offers them no hope that they may, by their own acts, improve their circumstances.
Modern government can make no distinction among acts, except as legal or illegal. Indeed, its courts and administrators are so driven by secularity and relativism that virtues maintained throughout the whole of human history are one after the other now being revealed as unsustainable in law.
Despite its morally neutral pretense, modern government is not functionally secular or acultural. The aspirations of our nation’s founders to protect the right of the minority to values not shared by the majority have been transmogrified into a system in which only the minority has standing. The state, for example, will not only defend, but will actually fund with taxpayer dollars, the public display of a crucifix immersed in urine, claiming it is a work of art. But if a publicly supported institution were to remove that crucifix from urine, it would invite a lawsuit by someone whose First Amendment rights are ostensibly assaulted by the public presence of a cross.
We must ask if such an institution— blinded to distinctions that rely upon human tradition, culture, religious thought, even common sense—can or should instruct our children, advise the unfortunate, and guide the troubled. In this century of the state .as a secular redeemer, have we learned nothing from the tragic consequences of conforming humanity to the “scientific” principles of “progressive” theory?
In our families, our churches and synagogues, our neighborhoods and local organizations, as citizens in communities, we maintain the capacity to speak to one another of truth. The state cannot embrace the concept of truth, or know us, or love us. We are never its friends or family, only its clients. In the attempt to bestow human dignity, an infinite number of social scientists and experts cannot hope to accomplish what the den mothers and Little League coaches of America do every day.
There are no easy answers for citizens of goodwill as we contemplate the need for welfare policy reform. Perhaps the best that can be said for Wisconsin’s W-2 experiment is that it is a serious effort to probe for the point at which the state’s response to human need turns into a trap for the human spirit. That in itself is remarkable, for it suggests an awakening of leadership to the wisdom that could guide the path of the dawning twenty-first century: Government can build a jail, but only a morally strong and vigorous civil society can keep it empty.
For deep and meaningful life on earth, for human dignity, and for the joy that only good conscience can bring, we turn no more to the machinery of the state. We turn to all of our religious leaders and to our fathers and mothers, our neighbors and fellow citizens. In short, for one of the most critical components of welfare reform, we turn to those who know what we need because they know what we are.