Catholic Nuns Gun for Paul Ryan

Sister Simone Campbell, leader of the ‘Nuns on the Bus’ tour, is stepping up her campaign against Mitt Romney's running mate, saying the Ryan budget would hit the poor hard. Abigail Pesta reports.



by Abigail Pesta Aug 16, 2012 4:45 AM EDT

Sister Simone Campbell says she is on a mission to protect the poor—from Rep. Paul Ryan.

This summer, the outspoken Catholic nun led a bus tour across the country called “Nuns on the Bus,” protesting the Wisconsin congressman’s proposed budget plan, which she says would slash federal funds for social programs for low-income people. Now she is recruiting teams of sisters to lobby their state legislators to insist on protections for the poor, such as an expansion of Medicaid. She says she has invited Ryan and Mitt Romney to join her in spending a day with poor people. She even took on conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly on Fox News this week to make her point.

“That was kind of wild,” she says of the O’Reilly show, which resulted in an on-air fight. “You have to think of it as missionary activity,” she laughs. On the show, O’Reilly argued that the poverty rate had gone up under President Obama, so the current system isn’t working. “Tell me what you want, Sister,” he demanded. Her reply: “What I want is money in the pockets of hardworking people who are living below the poverty level…The Ryan budget gives money to the top, not the bottom.”

Sister Simone is the executive director of a Catholic advocacy group in Washington, D.C., called Network, which lobbies Congress for policies that help the poor. She and her fellow sisters have zeroed in on the newly chosen vice-presidential candidate because he proposes reducing the federal budget deficit through substantial cuts in spending, which Sister Simone believes would hit low-income people hard. “In order to do what he says he is going to do, it takes drastic cuts,” she says, adding that Ryan does not generally go into detail about the specific programs for the poor that would be affected. “He’s trying to avoid enumerating them,” she says. “The truth is, there’s a shift of money to the top—tax cuts for the wealthy.” Representatives for Ryan didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/16/catholic-nuns-gun-for-paul-ryan.html