President Bush's plan to provide religious groups with greater access to federal funds to help the needy has concentrated public attention on how Americans care for the less fortunate.

Many liberals believe the government should take care of the poor. Bush's conservative plan would let religious groups do more to help government by channeling more public funds their way.

Meanwhile, many programs are already operating, without any government affiliation, to improve life for those without sufficient resources of their own.

Take the Masonic Children's Home program in Elizabethtown for example. As a New Era story pointed out last Wednesday, that program operates without government funds and without cost to the families involved.

The home currently serves 40 children whose families cannot care for them. That service includes everything: from providing shelter to driving them to school and extracurricular activities. Staff members counsel them when necessary and encourage them to go on to college.

Established early in this last century, the home is financed entirely by Masonic lodges throughout Pennsylvania. The Masons have never turned down an appropriate case and take pride in providing needy children with a real future.

"Coming here was the gateway for being able to put my life together in a totally different direction," says the Rev. A. Preston Van Deursen. The homes' director of pastoral care, Deursen entered the program at age 8 and returned to work as an adult.

This is the type of program on which other plans to help the needy should be patterned. The government could learn something about children's services by examining the Elizabethtown program. Faith-based initiatives also could take a lesson.

And congratulations to Pennsylvania's Masonic lodges for operating a first-class child-helping institution for nearly a century.

To read another Lancaster New Era article reprint
about the Masonic Children's Home click here.