Conservatives are ignoring the Catholic Church’s history of social justice

Last March, the Republican Study Committee proposed changing the provisions of the Social Security program by raising the full retirement age from 67 to 69. The committee, which represents 80 percent of the GOP House members and all the House Republican leadership, has found support for its plan from various outside groups.  

Chief among them is the Heritage Foundation. Stephen Moore, one of the coauthors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, has labeled Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” and has encouraged college students to burn their Social Security cards.  

Social Security is the crown jewel of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. However, few people know how deeply involved the Catholic Church was in creating the program. 

Catholic Charities, led by Catholic University of America professor Monsignor John O’Grady, founder of the university’s National School of Social Service, worked tirelessly to secure congressional support. Marshaling support from around the country, O’Grady mobilized his vast network to lobby members of Congress to support the program. 

Arthur Altmyer, author of the 1935 Social Security Act, called O’Grady “one of the most valuable supporters of the bill,” and credited him with influencing “a great many members of Congress to support the bill who otherwise would have opposed it.”  

O’Grady had another ally: his Catholic University colleague, Monsignor John A. Ryan. Ryan, known as “The Right Reverend New Dealer,” hailed the Social Security law as achieving “an elementary measure of social justice.” 

Thanking him for his assistance, Franklin D. Roosevelt later paid tribute to Ryan: “With voice and pen, you have pleaded the cause of social justice.” 

Together, O’Grady and Ryan adhered to the precepts of the Catechism of the Catholic Church which held that government institutions and programs must be designed “always with a view to the common good.”

Upon signing the 1935 Social Security Act into law, Franklin Roosevelt said it “represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but by no means complete.”  

Roosevelt was right. Over time, both Democratic and Republican administrations have worked to protect and enhance the program. In 1972, Richard Nixon tied Social Security benefits to cost-of-living increases. Eleven years later Ronald Reagan worked with Democrats to ensure the long-term solvency of the program. 

However, opposition was strong when the Social Security Act was signed into law. In 1936, Republican presidential nominee Alf Landon assailed it as “unjust, unworkable, stupidly drafted and wastefully financed.” Others were even more vociferous, calling the law “communistic,” a charge Monsignor Ryan said was “hurled by the beneficiaries of social injustice.”  

Ryan was so incensed at the allegations that Roosevelt was a communist that he gave a nationwide radio address titled “Roosevelt Safeguards America.” In his October 1936 speech, he said anyone making that accusation against Roosevelt was guilty of violating the Eighth Commandment: “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” 

Monsignor Ryan might not be surprised at the reprise of false charges being flung by Donald Trump, who routinely accuses Kamala Harris of being “a communist” who will “destroy America,” conferring upon her the derogatory nickname, “Comrade Kamala.” If Ryan were alive, I suspect he, too, would accuse Trump of violating the Eighth Commandment. 

In that long-ago radio address, Ryan lamented “the amount of false assertions that have been accepted as true in this campaign” — so many that one is tempted “to lose faith in American intelligence.”

The pro-Trump group, Catholics for Catholics is ignoring the vital role that the church played in ensuring some measure of social justice. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us: “Excessive economic and social disparity between individuals and peoples of the one human race is a source of scandal and militates against social justice, equity, human dignity, as well as social and international peace.”  

Pope Francis recently reemphasized this point saying, “Sadly, it is often precisely the wealthiest who oppose the realization of social justice or integral ecology out of sheer greed.” 

Leonard Leo, a member of Catholic University’s Board of Trustees, promises to devote a portion of the $1 billion Marble Trust Fund that he controls not to alleviate any economic or social disparities but to operationalize and weaponize “those ideas and policies to crush liberal dominance at the choke points of influence and power in our society.” 

Among his stated enemies are a “progressive Ku Klux Klan” and “vile and immoral current-day barbarians, secularists and bigots” who demonize people of faith and move society further from its “natural order.”  

Leo’s culture warrior partner is the Heritage Foundation. In addition to railing against Social Security, Heritage has taken to listing which universities subscribe to its conservative views when it comes to opposing “diversity, equity and inclusion” and teaching critical race theory. Today, Heritage lists The Catholic University of America as a “great choice” for prospective students. 

Catholic cultural warriors often don’t remember the Catholic Church’s history in promoting vital social justice programs like Social Security. Worse still, there are those Catholics who want to rewrite that history altogether. 

Together these culture warriors, along with the authors of Project 2025, are not only undermining the work of the Catholic Church but Catholicism itself.  

John Kenneth White (johnkennethwhite.com) is a professor emeritus at The Catholic University of America. His latest book is “Grand Old Unraveling: The Republican Party, Donald Trump, and the Rise of Authoritarianism.”