Day: March 14, 2006

Catholic unionism

This from National Catholic Reporter on Chi area’s Resurrection Health Care, which took over Oak Park’s West Suburban Hospital a few years ago and has lots of other venues:
From the pope on down to local clergy and parishioners, the Catholic church has defended the rights of workers for decades, and in a 1999 document the U.S. bishops specified that hospital workers in Catholic facilities “have the right to organize themselves for collective bargaining and to be recognized by management for such purposes.” Citing these teachings, many in the Catholic community of Chicago have sided with the workers trying to unionize Resurrection Health Care.
It’s a story on attempts to get Cardinal George to pressure Resurrection H.C.  But as hospitals fall and users complain — consider black West Siders protesting Advocate Health Care’s partial closing of Bethany — is C. George going to guarantee health care to users of West Sub, which turned in desperation to a buyer, and to other hospitals squeezed by costs?  (His man says he’s staying out of it.)  And is there a connection between being non-unionized and surviving?  Ask U.S. automakers, whose market share has eroded while they pay exorbitant amounts to the select few who belong to the UAW.
 
As for Catholic teaching, it was hijacked by the Jesuit ghost writer Nell-Breuning 80 years ago, with popes going along sans any more authority in the matter than a tenured radical on a U.S. or Euro campus.  This is true Catholic leftism, and there’s no better sample of it than NCR, which gives 1,479 words to this story, done by a writer from Toledo.  From Toledo?
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Posted by Blithe Spirit to Oak Park, Home of Edgar Rice Burroughs at 3/14/2006 11:13:15 AM

Boo-hoo the boo-boo

Chi Trib’s Colleen Mastony has a page one Metro Near West story about Elmwood Park, its Italian immigrants of two generations past vs. Latin Americans of today, with dollop about Poles also of today — Poles are second only to Italians now, reports Trib, which would not surprise someone who shops at Caputo’s on Harlem near Diversey.  The story jumps off from recent put-down of Elmwood Park (EP) schools for not taking an Ecuadorean kid on immigrant-status grounds.  It was the last straw, apparently, for tightly knit, stranger-shy EP, but higher-ups put them down and they had to take the kid.
 
Point is, older immigrants resent new ones. 
Second-generation immigrant families, mindful of how their parents and grandparents once struggled to gain a foothold in the U.S., now find themselves arguing about the rights of new immigrants,
OK, but the next sentence stops the careful reader, who hasn’t got all the time in the world to read what Trib has to say, even if he lives near EP and wrote about it recently and used to eat bagels there:
Among recent arrivals, some wonder if it is right to extend social services to those who subverted laws to come to this country. Others think basics such as education should be available to all, especially to children, who are not responsible for their immigration status.
Which thanks to dangling phrase means that some recent arrivals question social services for recent arrivals.  The reader trying to take Trib seriously — Mastony and her apparently MIA copy editors — wonders what’s going on here?  A wrinkle he hadn’t realized?  Nope.  Another irritating boo-boo by the once world’s greatest newspaper.