A group of Catholic nuns from across the country stopped in Columbia Tuesday — en route to Mar-a-Lago.
Nuns on the Bus, a cross-country expedition under the auspices of Network Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, took its Tax Justice Truth Tour to the South Carolina State House, joined by representatives from the Women’s Rights and Empowerment Network (WREN), local community organizer and policy analyst John Ruoff, and S.C. Congressman Jim Clyburn.
Although there was no tour last year, Nuns on the Bus has been an otherwise annual event since 2012, said Sister Mary Ellen Lacy, Network’s grassroots mobilization specialist. The impetus for the first tour was to protest the budget proposed by then-House Speaker Paul Ryan.
This year’s tour, which began on Oct. 8 in Los Angeles, is taking nuns from a variety of Catholic orders on a 21-state, 27-day expedition that will arrive at President Trump’s palatial Palm Beach resort on Nov. 2. The group on the bus changes weekly.
The goal: a get-out-the-vote campaign with a special focus on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which passed last December, highlighting in particular the disparity between the rich and the middle class in shouldering the tax burden.
“It’s community and collaboration that make the difference that create the hope,” said Network Executive Director Sister Simone Campbell.
“We’re on the road to call for justice and to hold our elected congress persons accountable for their votes,” said Sister Clare Lawlor from the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Agnes in Wisconsin.
“The new tax bill that was recently passed benefits the wealthiest one percent of this country,” Lawlor said, adding that the tax bill is “not progressive, which means in some senses that as the benefits occur to the 1 percent; that means the rest of us are losing the tax income that could have been gotten from that 1 percent.”
She reasoned that making up for the loss would mean cuts to Medicaid, health care and “all the programs that the other 99 percent absolutely need to have in order to survive and live well enough in this, the richest country in the world.”
In a time when values are threatened, said WREN CEO Ann Warner, “we have a responsibility to stand up, to speak out and be heard more than ever.”
“A budget is a moral document,” said Ruoff, who drew upon the Book of Matthew for further explication: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
Ruoff, who has worked with nonprofits for much of his career, said that in South Carolina, “We don’t have the money” is a common refrain when it comes to social programs.
“Well, that’s not true,” he said. “We have chosen not to have the money.”
Congressman Clyburn likewise hit the same spiritual theme, noting his own work with faith groups, and also that he had been reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, where he came across the quote, “America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great” — a common misattribution in political speeches; Tocqueville never said it, and it isn’t in his book.
“The greatness of the country,” Clyburn said, “is on the ballot.”
