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This coming Sunday in the Archdiocese of Detroit tables will be set up in parishes to collect signatures for "increased revenues" to "end hunger" in America. My heart fell as I read it. The Church has learned nothing from Johnson's War on Poverty as, according to a recent report, FIFTEEN TRILLION DOLLARS have been spent and yet as I write nearly 50 million Americans use some sort of food stamps program. And millions are unemployed or underemployed. I had just such an exchange with a young Catholic woman but I don't think my point was well received. Obama's campaign succeeds in part because his tired old ideas appear new when spoken by a youngish president. We keep making the same mistakes. All rights, all charitable efforts, all anything is now "collective." We didn't only lose the culture war, apparently we lost the Cold War as well. A recent MSNBC host rants on about how education will only improve when the "community" takes responsibility for child's education away from the parents. I look just a few miles down the road to Detroit and see what happens when an amorphous, nameless, faceless "community" is responsible for anything. The Church doesn't seem to understand or doesn't care how things are done. No wonder most Catholics no longer see the point of an expensive Catholic education indistinguishable from what the state offers just down the street. It's as if the Church has given up. - Graham Combs