While the participants at the Conservative Political Action Conference were chortling over having hitched a ride with the Catholic Bishops on birth control, they have had nothing to say about a little item from the Most Reverend Stephen E. Blaire, chairman of the Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development for the Bishops.
In a Thursday letter to the chairmen of the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, Blaire writes:
On behalf of the Catholic bishops, I urge you to extend emergency unemployment insurance in order that jobless workers and their families, who have suffered greatly in this economic downturn, can have a basic level of financial security as they seek stable, full-time employment. Furthermore, I wish to express deep concern with and strong opposition to proposals to alter the Child Tax Credit to now exclude children of hard working immigrant families. [...]
As Pope John Paul II said in his encyclical On Human Work:
The obligation to provide unemployment benefits, that is to say, the duty to make suitable grants indispensable for the subsistence of unemployed workers and their families, is a duty springing from the fundamental principle of the moral order in this sphere, namely the principle of the common use of goods or, to put it in another and still simpler way, the right to life and subsistence (No. 18).
We can be sure that before the weekend is half over, CPACkers and their pals will be sending emails and making phone calls advising congressional Republicans to back off from their stance in the interest of the "moral order in this sphere" the same way they pushed to get the Obama administration to back off over the birth control rule.
And then, on Monday, count on them to take up the pope's charge to end the death penalty.