April 12, 2011
John Gehring has a post up at Faith in Public Life that reminds the bishops of their own history in creating the New Deal and urges the bishops to take on Cong. Paul Ryan's proposals to dismantle the safety net an earlier generation of bishops endorsed. In his post, Gehring calls attention to one of my heroes, Msgr. John A. Ryan, a professor at Catholic University and staffer at what was then known as the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the forerunner of today's USCCB. Ryan was a lion, and his social activism earned him the sobriquet "Rt. Rev. New Dealer." We need voices like his today more than ever.
