Flynn takes on Pawlenty

05/20/2005

Patricia Lopez, Star Tribune
May 20, 2005

After more than a decade of quietly leading the Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Archbishop Harry Flynn has stepped into the spotlight on the most secular of issues, openly advocating higher taxes and taking the governor to task for his insistence on holding to a no-new-taxes pledge. Flynn has also spoken out against Catholic gay activists who have taken their protest to the very heart of Catholic ritual, holy communion. He discussed both issues during an interview with the Star Tribune’s Patricia Lopez this week. Excerpts:

On his decision to speak out for higher taxes:

“It’s so easy to make decisions on a budget without really knowing how that decision is going to affect a single mother, someone who needs assistance in health care, someone who needs child care. When I heard them [legislators] talking about cutbacks and no increase in taxes at all, I was compelled to do something. I pay taxes, you know, and my salary is about $2,200 a month plus room and board, so I’m not starving. I wouldn’t mind a tax increase. I would be happy to pay it if I knew a single mother was going to be assisted, to put her child in a day care center so that she could go out and do her work and not worry about that child. I’m not going to let this go. I’m hosting a meeting of religious leaders at my residence within the next month, simply to keep revisiting this, so we don’t let it get lost, this idea that the state budget is a moral statement.”

On meeting privately with Gov. Tim Pawlenty:

“I met with him earlier in the legislative session. I think the governor has a real good heart. I think he’s obviously made a promise of no increase in taxes. And we all like to stand with our promises. But I’ve made promises too in my life. Then when I hear the other side of the story ... I’ve changed my mind. It’s my hope and prayer that the governor, listening to the stories of the many, will modify his position. I asked him to listen to the stories. Otherwise, the poor are out there, a nebulous cast of people who we don’t even know. How can he change? Do exactly ... what I did. Walk to the day care centers, watch the mothers coming to pick up their children, ask a little child, ‘Did you enjoy your meal today, your hot meal, and what are you going to do when you go home for dinner? Are you going to help your mother get dinner?’ And listen to the answer, ‘Oh, we don’t have any food in our house.’ That’s the way to change hearts. And any heart should be able to be changed by that.”

On helping the poor:

“We live in a society where if someone has a broken marriage, if someone is on welfare, if someone loses a job, we have a tendency to say you didn’t try hard enough. You were lazy and that’s why you’re unemployed. It’s your fault, whatever it might be. So added now to the misery of not having a job is the guilt that I didn’t try hard enough. And that’s not it at all. Generally speaking, if someone is unemployed, that person wants to make a living, to live a respectful life. We as a society should always ask that question, how is this going to affect the most vulnerable among us? I’ve been a priest for 45 years. My experience has taught me that the inner core of every person is good. Every human being. That’s something taught to us by God. We try to encourage that person along the right pathway, so people will not get so discouraged they feel like they cannot make it another day.”

On who takes care of the poor:

“I had one man who wrote to me and said, ‘How dare you speak before the committee on taxes. It is up to the church and the church alone to care for the poor. The state has no obligation and this is from the Bible.’ I wrote back to him and I said, would you please tell me where I could find that in the Bible? I never heard of that before. It’s every person’s obligation to care for the other. I don’t need the Qur’an for that. I don’t need scriptures for that, or the New Testament, nor do I need the Old Testament for that. All I need is the sense of the human and a sense of the dignity of every person. Born out of that should be the realization that I have an obligation to this person.”

On social justice versus moral issues:

“It’s an easy thing to fall into one category or another, to take just one tenet of one’s faith and run with that and forget all the others. For instance, my faith teaches me that every child in the womb is a child. It would be easy to get on that and forget the caring for that child after it’s born and forget the mother who cares for that child, and forget the tension that any poor mother might experience when she finds that she’s pregnant. We need to be holistic in our approach to the caring of the other. From the child in the womb to the man or woman on death row, we need to remember that is a human being. Taking care of the poor costs us something. I can sit here all day and talk about other issues that are good moral issues, but if I talk about caring for the poor, it’s going to cost me something and cost society something. That’s why we don’t see more of that.”

On changing attitudes:

“In our society we have developed an attitude of ‘I’ll take care of myself, I’ll make it myself and you make it yourself and if you don’t make it, that’s your fault. And if I make it, well, then, I’m very good and I deserve a lot of credit.’ We don’t have enough sympathy for those who don’t make it. Part of the reason, I’m convinced, is that we’ve learned not to see the poor. When the American people saw, with vivid pictures, the destruction that resulted from the tsunami, they responded. They saw the devastation. They don’t see that child who’s going home tonight to no food in the house.”

On denying communion to Catholic gay activists who wear rainbow sashes to mass:

“In the beginning, when I heard from the Rainbow Sash people, they indicated to me that they were not challenging church teaching. They were only doing this to let other people know that there were gays and lesbians who coexisted with them. They were not challenging the teaching of the church on human sexuality. Last year it began to change. The cry became, ‘We’re doing this to defy church teachings so that the church will change its teaching on homosexual relationships,’ which it won’t. In the meantime, I had discussions with the Vatican. I would not be able to let someone who is openly defying church teaching at the same time receive the eucharist and use that reception of the eucharist as a point of protest.

On whether there will be any repercussions for St. Joan of Arc, where sash-wearers continue to receive communion:

“I’d rather not get into that today.”