"Government is the fourth leg of the table, and if any of the four legs fail, the table falls," said Bishop George H. Neiderauer, leader of Utah's 200,000 Catholics. "All of us have responsibilities, but hunger, health care, a living wage . . . these are areas where we feel there has been a failure of that leg."

Neiderauer was joined by Bishop Carolyn Tanner Irish of Utah's Episcopal diocese and Bishop Warner H. Brown Jr. of the United Methodist Church's Denver-based Rocky Mountain Conference at the Crossroads Urban Center in Salt Lake City.

Their appeal comes a week before House and Senate conferees are expected to vote on a compromise resolution that would give final passage to President Bush's $2.6 trillion budget.

Both chambers last month passed resolutions that differed sharply in the size of cuts to Medicaid and key domestic programs. The House budget resolution calls for between $30 billion and $35 billion in cuts over the next five years to Medicaid, food stamps and low-income programs. Utah would lose an estimated $85 million to $113 million in Medicaid funding.

The Senate resolution leaves Medicaid untouched, but proposes to ax $2.8 billion from farm, conservation and nutrition programs. A portion of those cuts are expected to come from the food stamp program, which could hurt the nearly 350,000 Utah residents either hungry or at risk of hunger, the bishops said.

"This is not the kind of community any of us consciously want," Brown said. "This touches peoples' lives in profound ways. These are not just faceless people who don't want to work."

The bishops took aim at the Senate's decision to practically double the budget's tax cuts to $134 billion over the next five years, topping the amount requested by the president and the more conservative House.

"Sometimes we can be accused of being heavily ideological, but there is something very ideological about that," Neiderauer said. "It's not a 'soak the rich' issue, but it's not a 'forget the poor' issue either."