Year: 2017

By Sr.  Kathleen Holland

As I listen to all the talk about a new tax plan, I can’t help but wonder who will reap the benefits of this plan and who will end up paying for it. It is apparent that wealthy corporations and the wealthiest members (1 percent) of our country will get a massive tax cut.
When these tax cuts go into effect, the deficit will no doubt skyrocket and lawmakers will begin to find places to reduce spending. Some will demand cuts in funding for federal programs that assist so many helpless folks put food on their tables, obtain affordable health care and basically just make ends meet.

We know this because throughout the years, but especially in 2017, we have witnessed health care and anti-poverty programs jeopardized by direct funding cuts, structural changes or, as in this case, giving tax breaks to the wealthy and threatening future funding for anti-poverty programs.

Repeatedly, Capitol Hill has considered hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid, SNAP (previously called Food Stamps), and other programs that allow low-income Americans to get by. Fortunately, because of public outcry, many of those threats have been stopped. But if Congress enacts these tax breaks for the wealthy that result in increasing the deficit, many of those programs will be at risk once again.
Here’s a fact that gets lost in all the rhetoric: federal anti-poverty programs actually work! SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) alone lifted 3.6 million people above the poverty line in 2016, while Medicaid currently provides health care for one in five Americans, including low-income children, pregnant women, adults, seniors and people with disabilities.

Programs like SNAP play a key role in our economy because recipients use their benefits at local businesses. Children in households that receive SNAP do better in school and earn more as adults. Medicaid makes people healthier in the long-term, and ensures families don’t have to fear that one trip to the emergency room will result in a lifetime of devastating debt.

Make no mistake: if made law, this tax plan will ask struggling families to subsidize tax cuts for the wealthy. On a practical level, this means that instead of being able to buy groceries and get affordable medical care for their kids, low-income families could face a situation where they simply don’t have enough food and can’t see a doctor. This is an unacceptable trade-off.

I hope we can count on Senators Charles Grassley and Joni Ernst to reject this plan. Tax policy can be a powerful mechanism for creating economic opportunity and security for all. Sadly, this plan doesn’t do that; instead, it prioritizes the super-rich and leaves working families and kids behind.

(Sister Kathleen Holland, OSF, is a member of the Leadership Team of the Sisters of St. Francis, Clinton.)

By Corinne Winter

My husband and I recently watched a Christmas movie in which popular artist Thomas Kincaid told of a mentor who advised him to “Paint the light.” Kincaid interpreted the advice to mean that he should find and point out through his work the light of God’s glory as it is manifest in the world around us. Whatever one’s feelings about Kincaid’s work, it seems to me that the call to see and point out the light of Christ present within our world challenges all of us during the Christmas season as we contemplate the doctrine of the Incarnation. We see and hear so much about the darkness, the evil that is found in our world, that we may be tempted to cynicism. But the story of Christmas is the story of the Divine Son taking on humanity, coming into the world, claiming the world as God’s creation and God’s possession not finally to be swallowed up by evil.

As I read and listen to the messages of the prophets during Advent, I find in them a marvelous balance. On some days we seem to hear mostly condemnations of what Israel is doing wrong. On other days, we are admonished not to give up, to remember the faithfulness of God and to persevere in hope no matter how bad things may look. There is light beyond the darkness and the darkness will not prevail.

Ultimately, the message of the Incarnation is that the world created by God belongs to God and is destined for God’s Reign. Thus the world and all its peoples by nature not only can but yearn to welcome God, to be filled with divine life, the light that can and will crowd out the darkness. That doesn’t make us blind or immune to the real existence and power of evil. The Gospel of John says that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness will not overcome it. But it does not say that the darkness goes away entirely. Christ in his preaching did condemn sin where he saw it, but he also called even the worst of sinners to repentance and new life.

The message of the Incarnation challenges us not only to be hopeful ourselves, but to bring hope to others. As Christians, we are called to be light to the world and not to hide our light. How can we be light? In at least two ways: shed the light of truth against falsehood, against injustice against ambitions that are unsuited for the dignity of the human person created by and for God. And point out the light that we see in others. Sometimes my mother calls me after seeing a whole program of horrible news and talks about feeling really discouraged. I tell her that at those times, I look at and think about the people closest to me, about family, friends and church. It is there that I see the goodness remaining in this world, that I see light shining against the darkness.

Lights abound in our celebration of Christ’s birth. We light the tree. We may string lights on the outside of our homes as well as inside. Christmas candles come in green, white, gold, and silver. All this light is appropriate to our belief in Christ as the Light of the World and to the stories of shepherds seeing a great light and of wise men following a star. Let it also speak to us of our Christian vocation to holiness of life.

We may be tempted to think of the shepherds’ and wise men’s experiences as unique and unrepeatable privileges, especially as we have a strong tendency to romanticize our images of the Christmas scene. I would like instead to think of them as people going faithfully and attentively about their usual work and therefore being open to the messages they received.

I wish everyone a Blessed, Light-filled Christmas season.

(Corinne Winter is a professor-emeritus of St. Ambrose University, Davenport.)

(Editor’s note: Bishop Thomas Zinkula wrote the following editorial in response to a front-page article in the Dec. 14 issue of The Quad-City Times.)

I would like to respond to Barb Ickes’ Dec. 14, 2017, column on end-of-life options.

As a religious and spiritual leader, I suppose it is predictable that I would take the position that we should allow the God who gives us life also to be the one who determines when our life has reached its natural end. This view is in keeping with the pro-life position of the Catholic Church.

Likewise, the church teaches that we should not try to “play God” by always taking active measures to keep someone alive as long as possible. Patients may forgo life-sustaining medical treatments which offer no reasonable hope of benefit or are excessively burdensome, and in this way allow death to occur naturally.

In light of Ms. Ickes’ emotion-based column, I would suggest that there are better emotion-based reasons to resist the proposed legalization of physician assisted suicide for terminally ill persons under the name of “death with dignity” legislation.
In “To Live Each Day with Dignity,” the U.S. bishops affirm that “our society should embrace what Pope John Paul II called ‘the way of love and true mercy’ — a readiness to surround patients with love, support and companionship, providing the assistance needed to ease their physical, emotional, and spiritual suffering.”

Advocates of physician assisted suicide claim they want to help end the suffering of dying people who are in terrible pain. However, reports from the states of Oregon and Washington, where physician-assisted suicide is legal, do not indicate that uncontrolled pain is a major motivation for patients wanting to end their lives. In fact, medical and hospice care is such today that much pain and suffering can be relieved.

Psychological distress can be a motive for patients seeking assisted suicide: depression, hopelessness, fear of loss of autonomy and control. Should we not offer these patients counseling rather than death? Is it right to eliminate suffering by eliminating the one who suffers?
In my own experience as a minister and a family member, I have found that when a loved one is terminally ill we have the opportunity to be compassionate by gently washing, dressing and caressing them, thereby loving them to the end.

Meanwhile, as Father Ron Rolheiser, a popular spiritual writer, suggests in a recent column, the loved one actively emits love until the end as well. “From that person’s helplessness and pain emanates the power to draw us together as a family, a power to intuit and understand deeper things, a deeper appreciation of life, and especially a deeper recognition of that person’s life and spirit.”

Fr. Rolheiser concludes his column with these words: “In our dying bodies we can give our loved ones something we cannot fully give them when we are healthy and active. Euthanasia [and physician-assisted suicide are] partially blind to the mystery of how love is given.”

Bishop Thomas Zinkula, Bishop of the Diocese of Davenport