This column is about broken precedents.
Presidents don’t do panels. This president doesn’t talk about “poverty.” Coverage of Catholic and evangelical public policy collaboration focuses on abortion and marriage. Columnists don’t write about events they help organize. And news is what happened an hour ago or a day ago, not a month ago.
Nevertheless, this column is about President Obama participating in a panel on poverty a month ago at a unique Catholic-Evangelical summit seeking to make overcoming poverty a clear moral imperative and urgent national priority. President Obama came to Georgetown not to give a speech, but to have a civil conversation with Robert Putnam of Harvard and Arthur Brooks, president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, moderated by E. J. Dionne of Georgetown and The Washington Post.
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There was broad agreement at the summit—from Opus Dei ministries to Nuns on the Bus, from Focus on the Family to Sojourners—that Pope Francis’ visit to the United States in September could be and should be a turning point. As Francis meets with the president, Congress, Catholic and interfaith leaders and poor people themselves, he will have his own papal poverty summit. The pope will challenge our leaders and the rest of us to confront the scandal of too much poverty and not enough opportunity in a nation pledged to “liberty and justice for all.”