Inside the Capitol

Our society is failing to get to the bottom of the issues. We spend our energy trying to treat the symptoms of social crises, while either ignoring or remaining in denial about the deeper problems in today’s world, which exist first and foremost within the human heart.

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Racial disparities continue to persist in American life. As a response, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops recently instituted a new initiative to fight racism in all its forms.

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Our schools should be places where children are trained to pursue the true, the good and the beautiful — or, at the very least, equipped to honestly and rationally engage with objective reality. A school should be a place of education, not ideological instruction.

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There is a growing deficit of men in the workforce.

According to government data, more than seven million American men between the ages of 25 and 54, the traditional prime of working life, are not even looking for a job. The U.S. now ranks second-to-last among developed nations in the rate of adult men in the workforce, thanks to a steady 13 percent decline over the past fifty years.

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In my work as the Policy and Outreach Coordinator for the Minnesota Catholic Conference, I meet many Minnesota Catholics who have a deep aversion to politics. In their experience, politics are so steeped in special interests and dominated by power games that they don’t see why a Catholic should wade into such an imperfect arena.

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The well-being of Minnesota students took a hit during this year’s legislative session, as the Opportunity Scholarship Program was left by the wayside during final negotiations. Despite the fact that similar programs have been successful in several others states and could have played an important role in closing Minnesota’s unacceptable achievement gap, it was scrapped after an all-out revolt from the public school establishment.

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The Easter season is a time to confidently celebrate the victory of Christ over death, once and for all.  But the confidence of the Resurrection is too often missing from our lives as Christians—in our commission to proclaim the Good News, yes, but also in our call to faithful citizenship.

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The Catholic world lost one of its most illuminating thinkers when Michael Novak recently passed away at age 83. Novak can be credited with articulating a vision of the moral foundations necessary to maintain a system of democratic capitalism (political freedom and free enterprise).

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