North of the Shire

The other day I heard a priest discussing the subject of health care in general terms and he said that he believes that it is a right.

I thought this was very interesting because, like many other folk, I believe that he has not thought through the subject carefully and is confusing legal obligation and moral obligation.

Clearly, we as Catholics believe that everyone should have food to eat, a place to live and yes, the best health care available. (Obviously the level and quality of health care has varied among nations and parts of the world and also has improved in exponential ways in several decades and continues to do so. Thus the “best available” cannot be a fixed point.) Not only that but we believe that it is our obligation to Jesus Christ to do all that we can to help those in need, either of food and shelter or health care.

St. Basil the Great (329-379) of Caesarea was renowned for his defense of orthodoxy of faith but he also helped the poor and the sick. Here’s an excerpt from the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia;

While assisting Eusebius in the care of his diocese, Basil had shown a marked interest in the poor and afflicted; that interest now displayed itself in the erection of a magnificent institution, the Ptochoptopheion, or Basileiad, a house for the care of friendless strangers, the medical treatment of the sick poor, and the industrial training of the unskilled. Built in the suburbs, it attained such importance as to become practically the centre of a new city with the name of he kaine polis or “Newtown”. It was the motherhouse of like institutions erected in other dioceses and stood as a constant reminder to the rich of their privilege of spending wealth in a truly Christian way. It may be mentioned here that the social obligations of the wealthy were so plainly and forcibly preached by St. Basil that modern sociologists have ventured to claim him as one of their own, though with no more foundation than would exist in the case of any other consistent teacher of the principles of Catholic ethics. The truth is that St. Basil was a practical lover of Christian poverty, and even in his exalted position preserved that simplicity in food and clothing and that austerity of life for which he had been remarked at his first renunciation of the world.

You might say that he was one of the first to build a Catholic hospital. The Catholic Church, throughout the ages has been occupied in fulfilling that mission wherever she has gone throughout the world, with or without the assistance of the secular government.

So from our perspective of obligation to Jesus Christ through the Church, we could say that health care is a “moral” right, because the converse is true; namely, we as Catholics have a moral obligation.

However, many Catholics, in present day America in the ongoing discussion of health care in the political arena, have confused the moral obligation with the concept of “rights” under the constitution of the United States. A reading of that document shows no such right.

Barack Obama, when he was a state senator did a radio interview on NPR in which he complained that the constitution was flawed because it gave “negative” rights to the people. By this he explained that the constitution talks about what the government cannot do to the people but not what it must do for the people. Actually, the constitution does contain the enumerated powers which give the description of the federal government’s limited obligations to the people.

For those of the political stripe of Barack Obama, the Democrats, the desire is that the government should have the obligation to provide health care, and conversely, any American should have the “right” to health care. There are many Catholics of similar political ideology who support this, at least in part because it parallels their moral obligation as Catholics.

However, as one political analyst is fond of pointing out, when you obligate the government, you are really obligating Americans, because the government doesn’t have any money other than what it collects in taxes. Thus, you are saying to the individual American taxpayer, since this other American has a right to health care, you have an obligation to provide it for him/her. Moreover, the doctor and others in the system are obligated to provide the service, so they have lost their own freedom.

There can be no “positive” right in a society, without a corresponding legal obligation. Once you have established such a right, it is by definition an “entitlement” simply by virtue of citizenship. Thus you enslave people when you establish positive rights. And that is precisely why the founders of the United States wrote the constitution the way they did. It was not an error or oversight; it was deliberate.

But now for the Catholic who supports this establishment of positive rights, in particular health care, what is the justification and motivation? Is it simply that the state then takes care of the Catholic’s moral obligation? Is that not really a personal evasion of obligation? Also, insofar as the moral obligation of the Catholic is proclaimed as such and enforced on the whole of society, is that not a very egregious violation of the separation of church and state, a principle otherwise religiously held by the Democrats and their fellow travelers on the left?

The Catholic Church did build hospitals and train nurses and doctors in the past expressly for the sake of those who other wise would have no health care. That is the same as Basil the Great, coming out of the moral obligation ever present to the Catholic. It was only recently that the state has interfered and intervened quite heavily into the affairs of Catholic hospitals, such that it has been difficult to impossible to uphold Catholic moral principles in the face of evil, such as abortion.

But we can see that a “right” that is the direct result of a moral obligation is not the same as a legal right. They might well overlap in some circumstances but they are not the same thing at all.