On February 1, Jim Towey was named director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Deal W. Hudson recently spoke with him about the Bush administration’s plan to allow more federal funding for church-based charity organizations.
Deal W Hudson: Jim, you’ve had a fascinating journey in your life that involved a meeting with Mother Teresa.
Jim Towey: Yes. I was overseas on a trip for Senator Mark Hatfield, for whom I was working, and I thought it would be interesting if I could meet Mother Teresa on the way back, because she and Senator Hatfield were friends. I was a fairly disaffected Catholic. I wasn’t really very engaged in my faith, although I went to church every Sunday. But I was impressed that Mother Teresa seemed to be living her faith in a very real way. But I didn’t want to be around poor people, so I structured the trip so that I’d be in Calcutta for one day and then go to Hawaii on the way home for five days. That’s how I bolstered my courage. And so on August 20, 1985, I met Mother in the mother house in Calcutta. I visited with her very briefly, fell in love with her instantly. She was this tiny woman, big hands, huge heart, very focused. That week she turned 75, and she was just full of life, full of love, and full of energy. She asked me if I’d been to her home for the dying, and so I went there that afternoon. That’s where I got started in the world of the Missionaries of Charity and Mother Teresa.
You have said you met Christ there in a hospital bed. Tell us about that.
Well, when I got to the home for the dying, Sister Luke greeted me there, and she thought I came to volunteer. So she said, “Great, I’m glad you came. Here’s some cotton and solution and clean this fellow in bed 46 who has scabies.” One of the reasons I have no doubt whatsoever that this was a work of the grace and kindness of God—and the mercy of God—is that I knew at that moment there was not one particle of me that wanted to go back to that bed and touch that man, but I was too proud to admit that to the nun. I had come there for the tour. I thought she was going to show me the dying men and the dying women, and I was going to give her $20 and then leave in the embassy car, and that would have been that. But the Lord had other plans, and so waiting for me in that bed was, as Mother says, Jesus in His distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor. That’s not to say that bells went off and lights flashed, but in the act of touching that man, I recognized the mercy of God in my life and also that a barrier had come down. I had never done that kind of work before. I was afraid of it.
You ended up working with Mother Teresa then for a number of years. And you also volunteered at her AIDS hospice in Washington, D.C.
I did. I started doing legal work for Mother. I started volunteering in the soup kitchen over in Anacostia every Saturday for several years. And then when Mother opened the AIDS home in November 1986, I was in the first group of volunteers who would spend a night a week there to help the residents. Several years later, I lived in that home.
For a year?
Almost a year.
What was it like to give up an entire year to work with AIDS patients?
Well, I have a real debt to all the residents I came to know there. Back then, the disease of AIDS had a very marked and ugly decline. It was predictable, because there wasn’t this medley of medicines that they receive now. It was a real gift to be with these men and women as they went home to God. I learned a lot about life. I learned about what mattered. It was hard work. The people who came into the home were suffering a great deal. They were completely dependent upon those caring for them. So it was physically very demanding but spiritually as enriching as anything I’ve ever done in my life.
It seems to me that what Mother Teresa brought to the Church and to the world was this recognition of a need for relationship with the poor—not simply writing checks but getting to know them. She realized that the poor had in many ways a gift to give to others, that they would help us understand more about ourselves, more about life.
After you volunteered for that year, I understand that you started a nonprofit organization to help people who were dying.
It wasn’t immediately afterwards, but in May 1996, I started Aging with Dignity, because it was evident to me that there would be a systematic effort to legalize assisted suicide and euthanasia in this country and that this threat would spread like a wildfire if we weren’t careful. And so the best way to head that off, it seemed to me, was to promote better end-of-life care to help Americans recognize that they could maintain their human dignity at the end of life, that dying wasn’t simply a medical moment.
How exactly does the organization help people with dying?
We developed a document called “Five Wishes,” which helped them address their personal, spiritual, and emotional concerns, as well as their medical and legal issues. So it’s a legal document; it provides clear instructions to physicians on what kind of care [the patients] want or don’t want. It’s compatible with the Catholic faith. Hundreds of Catholic churches have passed them out, and other faiths have used it as well.
So you were actually protecting people from the threat of euthanasia.
First of all, it had a statement that they didn’t want anything done with the intention of taking their life. It was partly educational. We wanted to teach people that any act done with the intention of ending someone’s life is killing; it’s euthanasia. But that did not mean that they were required to accept each and every extraordinary treatment that medicine might throw at them, because medicine often doesn’t know when to stop. I watched this in Mother’s homes. We did not intubate every single person as they were dying. Instead, we held their hand and managed their pain and prayed with them if they wanted. I think America has developed this technology trap for some cases. But we have to be careful. There’s also very clearly a movement afoot to legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide because it’s always easier to kill someone than it is to care for them.
Do you think Americans lack a tragic sense of life?
I think Americans take life for granted. I think when you get into the Third World and you recognize how precarious life is, how fragile and beautiful it is, you come to discover, “Wow, this is incredible what God’s given me—the breath of life.” I think we all assume we’re going to live to be 80 or 90, and we never think for a second about our own mortality, and we certainly don’t discuss it as a culture.
Jim, you’ve come into the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives following Dr. John Dilulio. I think he got a lot done before he left. Do you agree?
Totally. I think John was a pioneer and a visionary.
What was his vision?
I think John saw that one of the best ways to help change the chronic conditions affecting the poor was to provide faith-based and other groups closest to the action an opportunity to serve, to remove federal barriers that prevented them from more active engagement with the poor. I think John understood that compassion—in order for it to be real and authentic—required relationship and that this was best expressed by local, grassroots, hands-on inner-city churches and synagogues.
You mean the principle of subsidiarity.
Right. That’s the Catholic word for it. It’s the human principle of contact. It was my experience in dealing with people in soup kitchens and in our AIDS shelter that they were thirsting for someone to know them by name, to care about their life story, to care if they woke up the next morning, simple things like that. And government can’t do that. President Bush says this all the time, “Government cannot love.” It’s very hard for government to be a neighbor.
I think that a lot of people misunderstand that. They look to the government as a kind of super-grandfather. And the faith-based initiative seems to be saying, “No, you do the loving.”
Right. There’s certainly a material dimension to the poverty that is afflicting so many lives in America, and we have to address it—the clothing and housing and sheltering issues. But at a deeper level, there’s a spiritual poverty. If you don’t address it, you’re not meeting the needs of the people you come in contact with.
That’s where the face-to-face contact comes in.
That’s right. That’s where a person who cares—a mentor, a neighbor—comes in and says, “I care about you. Not because I have to, not because it’s my paid job, but because you are my brother, you are my sister.”
What do you say to those who fear that more direct government subsidies for faith-based charities will diminish their religious character?
Well, I think each organization has to make a decision on whether in good conscience it wants to receive federal or state tax dollars. It’s a legitimate question to raise. I would point out to them that for decades faith-based groups have been receiving federal money and have not compromised their own religious identity. One of the things that I’m going to make sure is communicated—because I think it’s important to the president—is that these funds are not going to the promotion of religious beliefs. These are funds intended to serve the poor.
But isn’t it the case that if I as a Christian offer you a loaf of bread, that is in itself a witness? And it’s a witness you can’t eliminate from the dynamic of a faith-based organization?
Yes, but I don’t think the government’s going to be searching hearts. Only God does that. What I think is important is that the individual is receiving a service and is not being proselytized overtly.
We all know that this implicit witness, this embodied witness, is just, fortunately, a powerful fact of life. And we don’t want to eliminate it, do we?
No, I think the president wants to harness it.
“Harness” is the right word—and direct it to helping people.
He wants to see armies of compassion reaching out. Once you reach the point where you are telling people that they cannot have any religious motivation behind their work, that violates the First Amendment as much as funding religious [proselytization] does. So I think we have to find the balance. Mother Teresa always talked about preaching without preaching, not by words but by example—by the catching force and sympathetic influence of what we do. That’s how she lived her life.
How is the faith-based initiative addressing the issue of not just getting financial support to organizations but also addressing this larger question of personal involvement?
Well, I think the president, through the faith-based initiative and through the Freedom Corps, is making this a great priority. He’s calling for people to give. Mother used to talk about “giving until it hurt”—that people would give generously of their time or their money or their prayer, that this connection was important. I saw people very sick and handicapped who’d say that they prayed for someone else. That’s an important work. I think this president recognizes the importance of prayer in civic life. Prayer was in the hearts of the founders. What did our country do after September 11? It turned to prayer. This doesn’t mean that those who don’t pray—who aren’t religious—are outsiders. It simply means that this is part of American life, like other things.
What do you say to those who claim this violates the so-called separation of church and state?
I would say that they have not followed the Supreme Court case law, that they have not followed the fact that for decades faith-based groups have been receiving federal money to provide services. I met a man last week who told me that in 1930, Franklin Delano Roosevelt initiated a program in his parish church to help people recovering from the Great Depression. So this idea of turning to churches and mosques and synagogues as part of your delivery system to address the needs of society—this is long-standing. I don’t think anything’s new here.
Is it fair to characterize the initiative in this way: The government spends money on delivering social services, so why not take some of that money and direct it into faith-based organizations that are proven to be more effective than other kinds of organizations, specifically government organizations themselves?
Yes, provided that in characterizing it that way, it’s clear that you’re not providing preferential treatment. You’re simply giving religious organizations an equal opportunity to compete with other providers.
Now, if someone comes back and says, “Well, we’ve had religious organizations receiving federal and state money all along. Why do we need a program now to do the same thing that’s already being done?”
Because we have documented records of abuses that faith-based organizations have suffered. Bureaucrats have told them that if they don’t take the cross off the wall, they can’t receive federal money. That’s not only a misinterpretation of federal law and First Amendment law; it’s counterproductive, because that person in the shelter actually would like soup today.
Do you think that this is going to mean that more money gets to faith-based organizations or the same amount of money without the unnecessary conditions placed upon it?
Well, the president is promoting legislation that hopefully will increase the amount of money that’s going out to all organizations serving the poor, because he’s got numerous provisions to provide tax incentives for more charitable giving that would go not just to faith-based groups but to other groups involved in this kind of work. To answer your question on what will happen once there is equal treatment, our feeling is, let’s find the best providers of these services and let’s give the poor some choices in terms of where they go to get help. Let’s not allow monopolies on the ground—by government or by any organizations. If there are other groups that are proven and effective in these services, let’s work with them. Let’s fund them.
I understand that the legislation is being written so that organizations that have not previously received federal money can apply for funding. There used to be a qualifying provision that said unless you were already on their list for receiving money, you couldn’t get funding. You’ve removed that obstacle now.
Certainly we’re removing the barrier for first-time applicants. Before, they were in a hole they couldn’t get out of, because they could never prove they were experienced until they actually got a contract. Now, there should be some scrutiny up front [to make sure] that this group can deliver the services, that they have the fiscal integrity in their organization to account for the money, and that they’re proven in their community. But there shouldn’t be a prohibition against new groups wanting to get involved, because a lot of these new groups are actually start-up, not-for-profit organizations of very established churches and synagogues and mosques.
If someone reads this and is involved in an organization that would like to explore the possibility of receiving government support, how do they apply?
There are Web sites for faith-based programs at the department of HHS and HUDD—and, I believe, all the agencies that do contracting—that give advice and guidance on what funds are available. The HHS now has information that’s really tailored to answer those questions. There are several national organizations that provide similar guidance on their Web sites.
Should the established organizations that have been getting money for years be worried that they’ll get less?
I don’t think they should be worried; I think they should join in an effort to make sure the best programs are getting funded. If they’re providing good services and good outcomes, they’ll probably end up getting more funds. But I think the focus of this debate should be on the needs of the poor, not on the needs of organizations. Whoever can provide the service best, that’s who we should be going with. And I think that it’s healthy to have a range of services available in a community. It provides for competition—for lack of a better term—which I think improves organizations. Otherwise, you can get very laid-back and static in your approaches because you’re the only show in town, and I don’t think that’s good for the poor.