Both parties have made stand:
Now comes hard part

		Eye on the  Capitol  John Huebscher

When he ran for president in 1968 as a third party candidate, the late Governor George Wallace often said, "there isn't a dime's worth of difference between the Democrats and Republicans."

Were he alive today, Wallace wouldn't say that about the Democrats and Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature. As far as the state budget is concerned, there is a $10 billion difference.

Resolving that difference is the task before the legislature this summer.

Compromise

The Democrats control the Senate and the Republicans hold sway in the Assembly. Both parties use their power to craft budgets that reflect respective visions of what Wisconsin should look like and what part government should have in making it that way. In the process, both parties have lived up to the themes and messages they ran on in the last elections. In this sense, both have kept the promises they made to the voters.

Now both parties must keep another promise, that of resolving their differences for the sake of the larger public interest. Initially, that task falls to the eight-member Conference Committee of four senators and four representatives. This committee will negotiate a budget compromise to submit to all 132 legislators.

This could happen by mid-August. Or, it may take much of the autumn, for the differences are numerous and real. By any measure, 10 billion dollars is a lot of ground to cover.

Good will

As the conferees begin their work, they may wish to consider that most of the voters who elected them, be they liberal or conservative, Democrats, Republicans, or independents, are practical people. They care about the issues and they have values that mean a lot to them. But they also live every day with the knowledge that they can't have everything they want. They know that compromise and give and take are necessary parts of life.

The conferees are people of good will. They know what they have to do. They know some voices telling them what to do will be louder than others. Some of these voices may run ad campaigns intended more to inflame opinion than to enlighten it. It won't be easy, but in the end they will produce a budget.

We citizens can help.

First, we should identify those programs or proposals in the budget that are important to us. The Catholic Conference has done that, identifying priorities in areas of children and families, education, corrections, and health care.

Common Good

But we can't let it go at that.

We can also remind legislators that compromise is not a dirty word when it comes to setting spending priorities. We can tell them we know that our wishes aren't the only ones that matter, that other towns and other people may have needs equal to, or in some cases greater than, our own.

We can assure them that we will judge their work by the state as a whole, not the funding for one program or one community or one special policy issue that may not even have a fiscal effect.

This may sound overly hopeful. But such a pragmatic commitment to the common good has been the rule not the exception in our state since 1848. Let's hope the conferees, their colleagues, and we citizens, remember that.

John Huebscher is executive director of the Wisconsin Catholic Conference in Madison.

Raising saints:
Without regard to the monetary cost

		A Culture  of Life  Fr. Eric Nielsen

While there has been a slight trend toward larger families, the fact remains that most people limit their family size to two or three children.

And I find it ironic that the reason often cited for this is economic. "We can't afford any more than two children." The irony comes from the fact that at no other time in recorded history has a country had as much wealth as ours.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that for a just reason a couple may space the birth of their children, but that they are to make certain that this desire is not "motivated by selfishness."

Material wealth

We must be careful and realize that our society measures the good in terms of material wealth, and thus it is easy to think that our children need certain things in order to be happy. While a person's material wealth is not a bad thing, and in America may indicate a certain amount of personal industriousness and responsibility, it is not an indicator of anything that God considers important.

God desires us to be faithful, forgiving, trusting, generous, loving, and pure; in a word "holy." He never says anything about being rich, except to warn us of its dangers. When we plan our family around a desire of wealth for our children, we have thus stepped into a type of selfishness.

Desire holiness

Jesus told us "to be holy as your heavenly Father is holy." Do we have this desire? In our over 200 years as a nation we have produced a lot of billionaires, and many more millionaires, but only one officially declared native born saint. It seems we could improve a bit in our desire for holiness.

The desire for holiness is incompatible with a strong desire for financial security and an easy life. If these goods are our primary concerns, they become traps that cloud the mind and cause us to recoil from the generous heart necessary for holiness. A heart that is willing to open itself up to the will of God and take a risk for Christ cannot be overly concerned with material advantages.

Paying for college

It is true that God does not will all parents to have a large family, and some of the best people I know grew up without siblings. And there are prudent reasons to limit one's family size. It is just that in the United States I can't see why lack of income is one of the more common reasons given for doing so.

But, you ask, "what about saving up for college?" That you are required to save enough money to send every one of your children to college is a myth.

"Son/daughter," you will say, "when your mother and I decided to have you, we knew we wouldn't have enough money to pay for your college, but we had you anyway!"

Not only will he or she not hold it against you, but his or her odds of becoming a saint would have increased.

Fr. Eric Nielsen is pastor of St. Paul Parish on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. This column is syndicated by www.OneMoreSoul.com