Editorials: Mother Teresa, R.I.P
omy whose rewards are increasingly skewed toward those who already enjoy great wealth and privilege, there is something petty and suspiciously self-serving in those at the top loudly demanding so...
...We cannot even see our brothers in need without first stripping ourselves...
...Thankfully, fears that abandoning a federal entitlement to welfare would result in abandonment of the poor at the state level have not been realized...
...Wisconsin, for example, is spending $6,000 more this year than last on each recipient...
...How will states respond to a recession and a welfare emergency...
...True, the reform bill strictly capped federal spending for welfare at $16.5 billion, regardless of the growth of welfare rolls...
...The mystery of poverty is that by sharing in it, making ourselves poor in giving to others, we increase our knowledge of and belief in love...
...Insofar as the old system treated its clients more like undeserving children than morally responsible adults, it dehumanized recipients and alienated taxpayers...
...Moreover, Mother Teresa's seeming indifference to the very this-worldly task of alleviating poverty could sometimes rankle even those who recognized the great value of her vocation...
...It is hard to argue that no good has come from last year's reform...
...But will they have enough resources and will they do it...
...MOTHER TERESA, R.I.P...
...Yet Wisconsin's experience under a Republican governor indicates that getting people off welfare permanently will require greater, not minimal, public investment...
...To the extent that welfare is understood to be a two-way street, it promises to strengthen the average citizen's regard for what government stands for and consequently for what government is called upon to do...
...If faced with an increase in welfare rolls they will be free to spend more or to artfully rearrange how they spend federal dollars...
...In founding and building up the Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa gave comfort and spiritual consolation to the dying and destitute through the work of more than 500 missions in an astonishing 120 countries...
...States now pick up roughly 40 percent of the welfare bill...
...We are not social workers, not teachers, not nurses or doctors...
...Devising a more reasonable or realistic welfare reform than the one enacted by the Republican Congress is not hard...
...Finally, one of the 1996 law's most noxious stipulations, the denial of Supplemental Social Security aid to elderly and disabled legal immigrants, was eliminated at Clinton's insistence in the recent budget deal...
...The poorest of the poor are for us a means of expressing our love for God...
...Indeed, Mother Teresa's harshest critics accused her of using the poor as "occasions of piety...
...Worldly renown brought her into contact with nefarious political figures, like Haiti's dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier and the Nicaraguan contras, eager to acquire a kind of vicarious moral legitimacy in her shadow...
...Republicans are promising to fight that ruling...
...Only 20 percent of welfare clients will remain exempt from being cut off come 2002...
...Too often seeing "Jesus" in the poor has allowed the better-off, and the church, to avoid really seeing the poor at all...
...The imposition of time limits on benefits holds the prospect of great hardship for many of the neediest...
...For Christianity has long taught, Day continued, that "the mystery of the poor is this: That they are Jesus, and what you do for them you do for him...
...We serve Jesus in the poor," she told those who questioned the limited scope of the services provided by her order...
...Through voluntary poverty," Dorothy Day wrote, "we will have the means to help our brothers...
...That is a truth that needs constant rediscovering...
...She allowed herself to be held up as a model of a very gender-specific kind of piety by those eager to end the discussion about the current role and the historical treatment of women in the church...
...omy whose rewards are increasingly skewed toward those who already enjoy great wealth and privilege, there is something petty and suspiciously self-serving in those at the top loudly demanding so much from those who have so little...
...Funding was also restored to help provide work for unemployed food stamp recipients...
...But since the rolls have declined so dramatically, many states now have more money to spend on making workfare work...
...This is wildly off the mark, but such skepticism is understandable, especially in a world where so much can now be done to help lift people out of destitution...
...Commonweal 6 September 26,1997...
...In requiring recipients to do their fair share, the larger community, both public and private, in turn binds itself more firmly to doing its part...
...But here, too, the real answers lie in the future...
...Mother Teresa's death earlier this month at the age of eightyseven marked the passing of a woman whose heart seemed large enough to embrace all humanity...
...Will those exemptions cover all truly in need of public assistance...
...Requiring able-bodied welfare recipients to work need not be seen as a narrow or merely meanspirited victory for "conservatives...
...The current law has the potential (largely unintended, to be sure) to reinvigorate a sense of social and moral reciprocity between this nation's haves and have-nots...
...Brought to the wider world's attention by Malcom Muggeridge in the 1960s, she went from relative obscurity tending to and sharing the life of the "poorest of the poor" in India's teeming slums to international acclaim, including the Nobel Peace prize in 1979...
...Yet as Mother Teresa's life attested to, the gospel's declaration that the poor and the meek are blessed discloses an undeniable truth...
...So as the welfare system begins to deal with its hardest cases, the renewed confidence in government generated by the early success of reform can, in the right hands, be a great asset in summoning the political will to provide for the neediest of all...
...Yet she also had her critics, especially among those who bristled at her uncompromising opposition to abortion and her all-but-uncomprehending dismissal of contraception...
...Seeing God as somehow present-indeed, paramount-in the midst of unrelieved human suffering is not easy to do...
...Indeed, states that have already been experimenting with workfare, such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Tennessee, have pioneered the use of job training and placement, day care, community-service, and subsidized jobs...
...In addition, the Labor Department has ruled that workfare recipients are entitled to the minimum wage and subject to federal labor regulations...
Vol. 124 • September 1997 • No. 16
