Have homeless addicts ‘chosen’ their predicament?

After Mass today at Saint Patrick’s Church in Oak Bay, I went over to the parish hall for a cup of coffee.  I got into quite a heated discussion with some other Catholic men, most of whom seemed to think that homeless addicts have chosen their lot in life.I naturally resist this type of simplistic argument, as it strikes me that it is based on erroneous Calvinistic assumptions about virtue, work, righteousness and so on.  I also thought that I detected a moral condemnation of the disease of addiction, an argument with which I disagree, seeing it as unhelpful.I suggested that if the Liberal government wasn’t so busy wasting money on Olympic infrastructure for a 10 day party, we could properly attend to the needs of these people.  That brought the reply from one man who said he has been ‘working with the homeless for 12 years’ that the more handouts they are given, the more they seem to want…That did not strike me as a particularly Christian attitude, and I told him so.  We did agree that giving them needles and a so-called ’safe injection site’ was counterproductive, and that a new proposal, written up in today’s daily newspaper in Victoria, to provide an opportunity for them to work for a number of years at a large farm might prove to be of some benefit.  There is a famous recovery community in Italy upon which this new group hopes to model its proposed recovery farm.My wife Dawn came along at that point, so I had to drive her to get groceries, and the conversation had to end there.