MORE THAN 75 Catholic professors have written to Speaker John Boehner on the occasion of his pending commencement address at Catholic University of America. The academics, in an outrageous distortion of theological principles, have charged the speaker with violating Catholic moral teachings for cutting government programs to the poor. They wrote to Boehner, who will be speaking at the university Saturday:

The 2012 budget you shepherded to passage in the House of Representatives guts long-established protections for the most vulnerable members of society. It is particularly cruel to pregnant women and children, gutting Maternal and Child Health grants and slashing $500 million from the highly successful Women Infants and Children nutrition program. When they graduate from WIC at age 5, these children will face a 20% cut in food stamps. The House budget radically cuts Medicaid and effectively ends Medicare. It invokes the deficit to justify visiting such hardship upon the vulnerable, while it carves out $3 trillion in new tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.

Catholicism is synonymous with socialism in the minds of these professors. Charity is not exercised freely, but forced – and overseen by social engineers. This elitism, and Marxist control by experts, is contrary to traditional Catholic morality and its respect for private property and individual rights. As Pope Leo XIII stated in Rerum Novarum: “Rights must be religiously respected wherever they exist, and it is the duty of the public authority to prevent and to punish injury, and to protect every one in the possession of his own.” [emphasis added.]

The professors wrote:

Mr. Speaker, your voting record is at variance from one of the church’s most ancient moral teachings. From the apostles to the present, the magisterium of the church has insisted that those in power are morally obliged to preference the needs of the poor. Your record in support of legislation to address the desperate needs of the poor is among the worst in Congress. This fundamental concern should have great urgency for Catholic policy makers. Yet, even now, you work in opposition to it.

By this logic, the vast majority of Catholic rulers throughout history were in violation of fundamental principle. For they did not interpret the obligation of the individual to give to the poor as the obligation of those in power to give the money or property of others to the poor.

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