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The debate about the debt ceiling crisis which plagued Congress, the administration and the American public for much of the summer is in the rearview mirror.

The bill passed by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama calls for $1 trillion in cuts over the next 10 years and establishes a 12-member, bi-partisan "super committee" (the Joint Selective Committee On Deficit Reduction) whose members are supposed to tackle debt reduction broadly, by finding an additional $1.5 trillion in cuts over the next decade.

Under the terms of the debt ceiling pact, if the 12-member legislative committee cannot reach a deal by Nov. 23 that Congress will approve, then $1.5 trillion would be cut automatically: half from the defense budget and half from domestic programs such as education, housing, scientific research and transportation.

In a letter to the members of Congress immediately prior to the vote, Bishop Stephen Blair, chair of the U.S. bishops' Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, and I, in my role as chair of the bishops' Committee on International Peace and Justice, wrote to Congress on behalf of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

We acknowledged the difficult choices the members of Congress face about how to balance needs and resources and to allocate burdens and sacrifices. While committed to fiscal responsibility and shared sacrifice, we offered several moral criteria to help guide difficult budgetary decisions:

1 Every budget decision should be assessed by whether it protects or threatens human life and dignity.

2 A central moral measure of any budget proposal is how it affects "the least of these" (Matthew 25). The needs of those who are hungry and homeless, without work or in poverty should come first.

3 Government and other institutions have a shared responsibility to promote the common good of all, especially ordinary workers and families who struggle to live in dignity in difficult economic times.

We underscored that "a just framework for future budgets cannot rely on disproportionate cuts in essential services to poor persons. It requires shared sacrifice by all, including raising adequate revenues, eliminating unnecessary military and other spending and addressing the long-term costs of health insurance and retirement programs fairly."

Our letter did not offer a detailed critique of the entire measure before Congress, but asked our senators and representatives in the House to consider the human and moral dimensions of several key choices facing Congress.

We expressed fear about the human and social costs of substantial cuts to programs that serve families working to escape poverty - especially food and nutrition, child development, education and affordable housing.

We also communicated our concern about proposed cuts to international assistance, which is an essential tool to promote human life and dignity, advance solidarity with poorer nations and enhance global security.

Finally, we noted that the moral measure of this budget debate is not which party wins or which powerful interests prevail, but how those who are jobless, hungry, homeless or poor are treated. Their voices are too often missing in these debates, but they have the most compelling moral claim on our consciences and common resources.

As the "super committee" does its work over the next several months, we believe these same principles should guide their efforts.

On this Labor Day weekend, we are particularly concerned about how the action already taken last month and under consideration between now and Nov. 23 will affect America's workforce.

With the economy faltering and 25 million people in need of full-time work, almost everyone wants Washington and other governmental entities focused on how to create jobs and to get the economy going, not on slashing spending for the rising number of poor children and homeless, while sheltering tax havens for millionaires and billionaires.

More than four million Americans have been out of work for more than a year, the largest number of long-term unemployed since World War II; yet Congress has gone on a summer recess without extending unemployment benefits to their out-of-work constituents.

What is particularly distressing is the growing disparity of wealth in our country. In their new book, "How Washington made the Rich Richer - And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class," John Hacker, a political scientist at Yale University, and Paul Pierson, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, posit that we have experienced a "30-year war" in which the long, slow struggle through the 20th century for greater equality of income and wealth has been reversed.

They note that, from 1979 until the eve of our current great recession, the top one percent have held 35 percent of our nation's wealth. Between 2001 and 2006, the top one percent amassed more than half the gains, while the median income of non-elderly households actually fell.

In fact, the top one-tenth of that one percent "received over 20 percent of all after-tax income gains between 1970 and 2005, compared with the 13.5 percent enjoyed by the bottom 60 percent of households."

In other words, the total of new income going to roughly 300,000 people was one and a half percent the size of the total going to roughly 180 million people.

In the last four decades, these authors conclude that our democracy has become the most economically unequal nation in the advanced world. Meanwhile, the working and middle classes have either fallen behind or kept up by going into debt and having more family members work longer hours.

Making this same point, Charles Morris, the author of "The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown," describes the two-tier economy which has developed in our nation by pointing out that "for a quarter-century after World War II, the reported taxable income of the top one percent of taxpayers, including capital gains, toddled along at approximately eight to 10 percent of all taxable income.

"That share started to rise steadily in the late 1970s and continued to rise right through the '90s and 2000s. By 2007, the top one percent of taxpayers were reporting 24 percent of taxable income, the highest ever."

This income disparity and these harsh economic realities reinforce the significant guidance the principles of Catholic social teaching have to offer our society.

Every Pope from Leo XIII to Benedict XVI has underscored that economic justice, not economic growth, is the cornerstone of our Church's teaching. The Church condemns the social and personal damage done when employees and their families are treated as voiceless underlings or disposable parts.

Just last month, during his travels to World Youth Day in Madrid, Spain, Pope Benedict denounced "the profit-at-all-costs mentality" that has contributed to our current economic crisis. He noted that "people must be at the center of the economy, and the economy cannot be measured only by the maximization of profit, but rather according to the common good."

That is why Catholic social teaching has upheld the rights of workers to organize and to bargain with employers for a living wage and decent medical, disability and retirement benefits. Therefore, with workers under so much pressure and unions facing open attack - most recently in the state of Wisconsin - it is helpful, this Labor Day, to recall three fundamental themes of Catholic social teaching on labor:

1 Human dignity is achieved through work.

2 In a world of powerful corporations and weak borrowing power on the part of workers, unions are necessary for achieving a fair and decent livelihood for workers and their families.

3 The principal role of the government is to protect the common good by safeguarding and implementing the rights of working men and women.

It is true that unions have sometimes abused their powers, and when this happens they must be held accountable. "But without them," as Commonweal magazine editorializes, "who holds employers accountable?"

That's a very sage question. In 1950, a third of all American workers were union members. Today, that number is less than 12 percent. Public employees now account for 50 percent of all unionized workers. As union membership has declined, so have all working- and middle-class incomes.

At the same time, as noted in the book by Hacker and Pierson, the concentration of wealth among the top one percent of earners has reached levels not seen since the 1920s.

Thus, the continuing fragility of organized labor is likely to doom the nation to further economic and social disasters.

In the face of the ongoing debate in our nation about taxes, government spending and entitlements, it is imperative that the government, businesses, unions, churches, editorial boards and grassroots civic groups come together to promote what Rev. James Massa, a professor of ethics at the Boston School of Theology, cites as the central purpose of our economy: "to meet the basic material needs of all members of society.

"Needs should take preference over wants, necessities over luxuries," he states. "Insisting on a fair sharing of social burdens and benefits may not always be popular, but it remains the right thing to do."

Indeed, it is. God bless you and happy Labor Day.[[In-content Ad]]

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