A Year End Prayer and Reflection for Policymakers

By Patrick Carolan and Alexei Laushkin

The end of the year gives you a chance to reflect on what’s been and what might be in the year ahead.

It’s in this spirit that we offer some prayers and reflections for policy makers.

We pray that they might prioritize the poor and grant them tools for success.

In the New Year, we hope that policymakers might be awakened to the reality of those struggling to live paycheck-to-paycheck and might be especially aware of the lives of single moms and dads who balance work and being a parent.

Policymakers should look for additional tools for families and individuals in need. Whether it means making it easier for people to access the support they need or whether it means expanding support at the state level to cover more of what’s required for the lives of people to thrive. We pray that policymakers would look to how the lives of those in need are lived out and look to improve and strengthen the type of support needed.

From zoning laws to ensuring safe and healthy neighborhoods to limiting payday loan abuses, to ensuring that state policies cover the medically fragile, complex, children who need additional support, adult opioid abuse, and those suffering from mental illness. Policies should make it easier for families and individuals to receive the help and support they need in the home when a loving caregiver is present and capable of providing support.

We pray that policymakers would find the courage to act on behalf of children in need and distress.

We pray that especially Congressional policymakers would set aside partisanship and work towards a long-term extension of CHIP health insurance for children. Instead of arguing over how things should be paid for and what other nonrelated reforms should be included, we pray that policy makers would extend CHIP and end the insecurity for states.

We also pray that families would not be torn from one another. We see too many stories of parents being forced to leave for entering the country illegally while leaving their children here. More should be done to keep families together. Any immigration policy shouldn’t mean forcibly removing parents from their children.

We pray that policymakers would prioritize our fellow Americans in Puerto Rico.

We have both been shocked to see the relatively slow recovery in Puerto Rico. Residents have had to wait months for electricity and access to water and some have been forced to stay in long-term shelters for months on end.

We pray in particular that Puerto Rico’s Medicaid funds might get the additional help it needs, especially in this time of crisis. Neither of the recent funding measures to pass Congress is addressing a growing fiscal shortfall.

We pray that policy makers would make the total well being of Puerto Rico a priority in 2018.

We pray that policymakers would be prudent with fiscal debt without harming those in need.

A national deficit does need tending to, but the social safety net shouldn’t be needlessly reduced or costs shifted to simply pay down debt. Prudent fiscal policies at all levels of government can help policy makers reduce the debt, but the poor should not bear the brunt of these efforts.

Policymakers should avoid the trends of this past year. From block grants to entitlement cuts, there were a whole host of proposals that would have simply shifted the cost of social programs to states. In many cases this would have led to reductions on those eligible to receive services.

Whether its SNAP which provides critical food support for children, who are often cared for by an elderly grandparent, or the Medicaid Expansion which has provided more coverage for working adults who would otherwise be unable to access healthcare, these policies should be strengthened not cut and reduced in a haphazard fashion.

We pray that policymakers might head the words of Pope Francis.

As Pope Francis said in his World Day of the Poor Message in November, “We are called, then, to draw near to the poor, to encounter them, to meet their gaze, to embrace them and to let them feel the warmth of love that breaks through their solitude.  Their outstretched hand is also an invitation to step out of our certainties and comforts, and to acknowledge the value of poverty in itself.” (3)

All of these issues that face our country are a starting point for stability not the end point. We do need a renewal of service, but that renewal won’t make up for a significant weakening of critical support in the lives of a whole range of people. We are called by His holiness to “respond with a new vision of life and society.” (5)

Pope Francis offers this definition of ‘Poverty’: “Poverty means having a humble heart that…enables us to overcome the temptation to feel omnipotent and immortal.  Poverty is an interior attitude that avoids looking upon money, career and luxury as our goal in life and the condition for our happiness.” (4)

Our nation needs the stability of programs that empower and a renewal of national service. We don’t doubt that programs can be streamlined and improved with the stability and dignity of the poor in mind, but we will not be doing well by our neighbor, if our hearts don’t begin to soften towards that scriptural call to be among the poor and the least of these. That should begin with individual action and more private and church/parish based action, but it has to be supported with sound and stable policy.

So our year end prayer is that we all might be inspired, especially those who are given responsibility, to renew our sense of service to those in need and that our hearts might be more a tune to the needs of the vulnerable.

Patrick Carolan is a Catholic activist, the executive director of the Franciscan Action Network, and author of the Franciscan Activist.

Alexei Laushkin is the Executive Director of the Kingdom Mission Society based in Herndon, VA