PAUL RYAN'S FELLOW ROMAN CATHOLICS ON RYAN'S BUDGET

Mitt Romney expects his running mate to help deliver the Catholic vote and smooth over any discomfort among Catholics about Mormonism. (This is the first major-party ticket to go Protestant-less.) Yet after Ryan claimed his budget was shaped by his faith, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops deemed it immoral.

“A just spending bill cannot rely on disproportionate cuts in essential services to poor and vulnerable persons,” the bishops wrote in a letter to Congress.

The Jesuits were even more tart, with one group writing to Ryan that “Your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” (My emphasis)

The nuns-on-the-bus also rapped the knuckles of the former altar boy who now takes his three kids to Mass. As Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of the Catholic social justice group Network, told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, it’s sad that a Catholic doesn’t understand that “we need to have each other’s backs. Only wealthy people can ever begin to pretend that they can live in a gated community all by themselves.”

Even Ryan’s former parish priest in Janesville weighed in. Father Stephen Umhoefer told the Center for Media and Democracy, “You can’t tell somebody that in 10 years your economic situation is going to be just wonderful because meanwhile your kids may starve to death.”

Ouch!  So much for Ryan's adherence to the social justice teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.  Thanks to Maureen Dowd for putting it all together.  And do read the entire column.  There's other good stuff there like Ryan's votes in favor of Bush's break-the-bank budgets, including two off-budget wars.

Paul Ryan then:

"The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand," Ryan said in a speech in 2005.

Paul Ryan now:

“I reject her philosophy,” Ryan says firmly. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview."

Has the leopard changed his spots?  I report; you decide.  It's the budget, stupid.  Focus, focus, focus on the budget.

GC12, RESTRUCTURING, BUDGET, AND RESTRUCTURING BY BUDGET

My head is spinning from reading posts about General Convention and what will take place in Indianapolis - about budgets, restructuring, and restructuring by budget.  Neither budgets nor restructuring institutions is my particular area of interest,  nor are they my areas of expertise.  From the viewpoint of a humble person in the pew, my overall impression is of a tug of war over diminishing resources between those in favor of further centralization and those who wish to retain ideals of a church that functions with a measure of democracy.  I freely admit that my overall picture may, indeed, be distorted, but I am trying to understand the present situation in the church as best I can.

By default, I lean in favor of democratic ideals and practices.  That's not to say that I wish to get rid of bishops, because I do not.  What I'd like from the bishops is that they view themselves as servants of all in their particular dioceses, and for the Presiding Bishop to view her/himself as the servant of the whole church.  "It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant..."

Since I have little expertise and knowledge in the areas I mention, I refer you to others who know much more than I.  I'll attempt to place the posts in the order I read them, not necessarily in the order they were written.  I urge you to read the posts to which I link in their entirety.   Judging them by my brief quotes will not do the authors justice.

First of all is the crie de coeur from Katie Sherrod, who serves on the Executive Committee of TEC.  Katie was a pillar of strength in the continuing Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth after the schism.

I left that meeting deeply troubled, not by the criticism the Council was getting – I’ve been a writer for newspapers and television much too long to get my feelings hurt by criticism. What troubled me was that leaders I admire and trusted seemed to me to be acting in confusing ways – saying things that were contradicted by their actions.  Again and again they urged Council to see that ministry is carried out as “close to the ground” as possible and by those people who can do it best, which is usually lay people in congregations across the church. Yet what they keep doing is to try to operate from a top-down model.

I began to pray for clarity and guidance.

Much of the rest of the commentary seemed to me to bounce off Katie's heartfelt post.

Tobias Haller weighs in with "Storms and Structure":

So my appeal, brothers and sisters, is that of Jesus, “Peace, be still.” Most importantly, can we focus on actual proposals and legislation free from any attributions of motive or power-play, and judge them on their merits? Could we take a breath , count to ten, and refocus our attention from the ad hominem to the substance of the tasks actually at hand, with less of a sense of urgency and panic and apocalyptic? Think for a moment about just how much the decisions on the budget, and the resolutions of General Convention will touch your parish, or your ministry, for good or ill. Stop trying to solve all the problems and save the world. Jesus did that already. He is asleep in the stern. We can do our part to assist in that ministry and mission, but our efficiency at that task is seriously encumbered by panic and busyness that accomplishes little work. Can we begin by trusting each other rather than assuming the worst? Can we approach our work as colleagues rather than as adversaries? 

Then Muthah+ at Stone of Witness:

Often times our bishops get in the habit of ‘doing for’ others rather than doing things ‘with others.’  And here lies the problem.  It is all too easy to for clergy to do something themselves that they think is a wonderful solution and present it to the rest of the church only to find that it isn’t accepted.  Then we are likely to think the people ungrateful when it is not received joyfully.  But it is the process that has been ignored.  It is the listening that has not been appealed to.  The process of becoming community in the production of that budget is what has been lost.  The process has not produced “Church” that sense of community that makes us all members in the same standing. 

Other posts caught my interest, but you have enough homework for now.  I will probably post again with more links to similar subject matter.