Amy Welborn

Amy Welborn has a couple of posts on the problems at Catholic charities this morning. Here is an interesting article on the same subject.

How Catholic Charities Lost Its Soul, by Brian C. Anderson

But the understanding of poverty as often inseparable from moral and cultural considerations disintegrated in the late 1960s. Swept up in the decade's tumult and encouraged by the modernizing spirit of the second Vatican Council, Catholic Charities rejected its long-standing emphasis on personal responsibility and self-reliance and began to blame capitalist society rather than individual behavior for poverty and crime. It now looked to the welfare state to solve all social problems. Today, through a continual whirlwind of policy statements and lobbying, and by fostering countless activist community organizations, Catholic Charities has become, as Richard John Neuhaus, a priest and editor of the esteemed religious journal First Things, puts it, "a chief apologist for a catastrophically destructive welfare system, and it stands in the way of developing alternatives to help people break out of dependency and take charge of their lives."