Social services have a worthy role to play
Pope John Paul II saw the value of work as the essential key to the whole social question. This viewpoint maintains that the value of work should be realistically integrated into the social service system and that God endows each individual with dignity. Instead of sustaining a person in poverty, the social service system should be structured into raising a person out of poverty. When a poor person needs transportation to work, now the government provides $750 so that the person can purchase a car. Anybody who has bought a car knows that $750 does not buy reliable transportation. Add to that even minor car repairs, and a person making minimum wage soon finds him/herself without employment. The system is again sustaining a person in poverty. Raising a person out of poverty would be to provide a reliable car.
Hundreds of years before the social service industry, there was the church. It had God in the center. Every church member had the responsibility to help raise a person out of poverty. It integrated work into charity and charity into work. Caring people surrounded the person in need doing whatever was necessary to help the person out of his/her situation.
In recent times, charity became professionalized, bureaucratized and secularized. Church members became complacent, allowing social service agencies to assist people in need. Eliminating social services, and putting the emphasis on the person in need to get out of his/her situation, further eliminates the responsibility of every human to love his/her neighbor.
This is not the time for the community to distance itself from its responsibilities to each other; thus further distancing itself from God. Work is the answer, but work that is surrounded by love of God and people. It is work that raises up; not sustains people in poverty. It is work which values the individual as a creation of God, permitted to reach his/her full human potential and dignity; not the employer’s perceived value of productivity and profitability.
It is time for all church members to return to their century- old roots and get actively involved in aiding the poor, whom God loves, or risk losing their call to family and community.
Some of the poor are individuals with challenges, which do not take away their dignity, or their ability or desire to work. Because of physical, mental, or emotional challenges, some individuals are unable to work to the fullest employer-expectations.
Would any purely profit-motivated employer, worried about insurance issues, hire 10 people with physical/mental challenges or 10 people without those challenges? It is the employer, more often than the poor, who does not value their work.
Others of the poor make terrible choices by abusing drugs or alcohol, or by living in successive transitional relationships. When is a human life no longer redeemable? If that person wishes to turn his/her life around, what support is there from the community?
In most cases, individuals who have spent any time living in wrong choices have destroyed their family/friends connections. If these people are blocked from social services and forced to work to survive, how many private employers will set aside concerns about insurance, safety and profits to hire a person who was on drugs or has a criminal record?
Perhaps a few. What happens if that person returns into bad choices and again wants to change? Zero. To survive the individual has no option but to continue bad choices.
If a person has the potential for wrong choices, would it be in the individual’s best interests to block usage of the social service system, while saving taxpayers money, before that person graduates to greater wrong choices and learns to manipulate the system?
Should the “undeserving poor,” unable to work, be imprisoned or left to die? The ancient Romans nailed these people to trees along the road and atop hills as examples.
If the private sector does not want to hire, should the government? Where is the compassion, if they are regulated into forced work for the common good? When the government decides, often it starts with the criminals, the poor and the undesirables, and escalates to other perceived undesirables such as those of the independent press that criticize government policies.
Not long ago, a government used the motto “work makes you free” over the gates of camps where they forced “undesirables” to work. This was Nazi Germany. Compassionless work became the Holocaust. Where and who draws that line?
Roy Sarver, is executive director St. Vincent de Paul Society in Uniontown.