GOD AND THE WELFARE STATE

Bush II's "faith-based initiative," by which religious charities get federal funding without having to compromise their principles, has raised a lot of sand, and whether religious are more effective than public welfare agencies remains unproven (thematter is under study). Meanwhile, the trend of jurisprudence is definitely against First Amendment challenges to the initiative. In light of all this, Daly counsels hope for resolute antipoverty warriors. The ideas informing the initiative are, he says, those of European Christian democracy, which in the early twentieth century transformed the Netherlands, and after World War II, West Germany, into the most equitable societies on earth when Christian Democrat governments put them in practice. Both Catholic, stated in the social encyclicals of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI, and Prote-stant, advanced by Dutch theologian--politician Abraham Kuyper, Christian democratic thinking deplores concentrated wealth and, applied, could greatly alleviate American poverty. Daly doesn't address such complicating factors as the effects of massive immigration on all welfare provision, but he does, indeed, revive the prospect of effective welfare.