Former Lake Geneva resident subject of Masterpiece TV series

4 — The Beacon also at www.readthebeacon.com March 22, 2013
From New World pope, a mix
of old teaching and new spirit
By David Horsey
For the first time in history, the Roman
Catholic Church has a pope from the New
World, but liberal American Catholics
should not expect Pope Francis to stray far
from the old theology. Some things are
excitingly different about this new pontiff.
On matters of birth control, abortion,
homosexuality, celibate priests and the
role of women in the church, however, he
is no revolutionary.
When Argentina’s Cardinal Jorge
Mario Bergoglio stepped out on the
Vatican balcony as the new pope on
Wednesday evening, all he was required to
do was wave and give a blessing. Instead,
he began with a witty reference to the fact
his fellow cardinals had picked someone
from the far side of the planet to become
bishop of Rome. Then, before giving his
own blessing to the city and the world —
“urbi et orbi” — he asked the multitude in
St. Peter’s Square to bless him. His humor,
humility and kindly smile immediately
endeared him to the faithful and marked a
contrast will his chillier German predecessor,
Benedict XVI.
In Latin America, the conclave’s
choice was met with wild enthusiasm
because he is one of their own. Picking the
first non-European pope in more than
1,200 years was a timely decision given
that the majority of Catholics are no longer
European. Almost half live in Latin
America, and Africa is where the church is
experiencing dramatic growth.
There is great hope among those who
admire the social teachings of the church
that Pope Francis will put the struggles and
needs of the poor in the developing world
at the top of his public agenda. In
Argentina, he is known as a man of the
people who shunned the limousines and
palaces enjoyed by past cardinals and
instead rode public transit and lived in a
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modest apartment where he cooked his
own meals. He has been a critic of the corrupt
politics and greedy economic policies
of the powerful and rich. If he puts the
authority of the Roman Catholic Church
on the side of exploited workers and the
destitute in the barrios, Francis could have
a significant humanizing influence on the
world economic order.
Much has already been made of the fact
he chose Francis as his pontifical name,
another first in the long line of popes. The
assumption is he wanted to take on the
name of St. Francis of Assisi, the favorite
saint of the poor and marginalized. This,
too, would be a good sign, a very clear
assertion of where his priorities will lie.
It is entirely possible that, as the first
Jesuit to be elected pope, he also had in
mind another Francis — St. Francis
Xavier, who, with St. Ignatius Loyola,
founded the Jesuit order in the 16th century.
Xavier began the bold missionary tradition
of the Jesuits, traveling to India,
Southeast Asia and Japan, before he died
at the age of 46 while waiting for permission
to enter China.
The evangelizing work of Xavier
could be a model for Pope Francis. During
Benedict’s years as pope, selling the message
of the church became a priority to
counteract the rise of secularism in the
West and the sharp drop in the number of
parishioners, priests and nuns in Europe
and the United States. Francis will almost
certainly carry on this work and, because
of his humility and social concern, will
probably be a better salesman than his
predecessor.
Still, Francis will not be selling a new
product. On theological issues, the new
pope’s pronouncements during his years
leading the church in Buenos Aires were
entirely traditional.
(Continued on page 5)
Correspondents
Marjie Reed
Geneva West
Parker Cross
By Lee H. Hamilton
Over the past few weeks, as the
deadline for the congressionally mandated
budget cuts known as the “sequester”
came and went, we got a taste of how
difficult cutting
federal spending
actually
turns out to be.
The news is
disconcerting:
thousands
fewer food
safety inspections,
some
70,000 fewer
kids in early
education pro-
grams, people
with mental ill-
ness losing access to treatment, civilian
employees of the military furloughed,
ships and aircraft going without maintenance...
It’s a long and dispiriting list.
Yet as painful as the sequester might
be, most policy-makers know that it is
not the main event when it comes to our
fiscal challenges. Discretionary spending,
the kind getting cut in the sequester,
amounts to less than a third of federal
spending.
That’s not what many people
believe, of course. Whenever I give talks
about the federal budget I’m taken aback
by where my listeners think most of our
money gets spent. At two meetings
recently, members of the audience stood
up to complain that if we just cut what
we give away to other countries in foreign
aid, we could resolve our budget
issues. This isn’t even close to the truth:
altogether, we spend well less than 1
percent of the federal budget on foreign
aid.
If you think of federal spending as a
pie, by far the biggest slices go to Social
Security and unemployment support,
Medicare, Medicaid, and other health
programs, which altogether make up
well over half. Military spending
accounts for about another quarter,
while the next biggest slice, about 7 percent,
is for interest on the federal debt –
a figure that will explode in upcoming
years. Everything else we think of as the
federal government – spending on highways
and the aviation system, money for
student loans and other education programs,
housing, food stamps, medical
research and, yes, foreign aid – comes in
at less than one-fifth of the total.
The biggest driver of growth in federal
spending, as Nate Silver of The New
Where our money goes
Lee Hamilton
All telephone numbers
published in The Beacon
are in area code 262
unless otherwise indicated.
York Times pointed out in a thoughtful
analysis in January, is entitlements:
Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and
other social insurance programs. This is
especially true of health-care, which
accounted for about half of the increase
in federal spending relative to the economy
over the past 40 years. We cannot
get control of federal spending without
reining in health-care spending – and
though its rate of increase has slackened
over the past few years, no one knows
whether it’s a permanent or temporary
change.
So if Congress and the White House
are serious about tackling federal spending,
then the piece they left out of the
sequester – entitlement reform – must be
on the table. But it’s been hard to tell
from their actions that they’re really
serious. Members of Congress have
been taking to the airwaves for weeks to
decry the sequester’s meat-cleaver
approach to budget-cutting, yet most of
them voted for it. That’s because it’s
simpler to impose across-the-board cuts
than to make discriminating judgments
about individual programs. Members
find it easy to demand cuts in federal
spending in the abstract, but painfully
difficult to cut specific programs.
Americans as a whole do, too: a
recent Pew Center poll found they
approve cutting government spending in
general, but when asked about specific
programs, they want to boost funding or
keep it the same. Americans are
demanding that government cut spending
without cutting actual programs.
This is why it takes extraordinary
leadership to address our fiscal issues.
Americans may bear some responsibility,
but our leaders have not leveled with
us about what it takes to get a sensible
budget and put the economy on a path to
recovery. I am hard-pressed to think of
an example of government failure to
match our political leaders’ inability to
lead us to a solution.
Their prolonged fighting is causing
businesses to hesitate, workers to remain
in limbo, and an economy that needs a
boost to continue to stutter. They are
denying us the ability to invest in our
future, promote economic growth, and
deal with the many other challenges our
nation faces. Let’s stop the blame game
and get to work.
Lee Hamilton is Director of the
Center on Congress at Indiana
University. He was a member of the U.S.
House of Representatives for 34 years.