A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Catholic Charities gives award to Obamacare supporting Catholic Health Association UPDATED: Tie in to Seton parish in Plano August 30, 2010

Long ago, I wrote some posts on why I could not give money to the bishop’s annual appeal, nor to Catholic Charities or Catholic Releif Services.  This was due largely to all the aforementioned groups’ involvement in left-wing causes, and the fact that the latter two have relatively poor margins of giving compared to many other charities.  Recently, Catholic Charities helped re-inforce this view by awarding the Catholic Health Association(CHA), which was so instrumental in passing Obamacare, for their “valuable contributions of individuals and organizations to the reduction of poverty in the United States.”

Now, this is not a specific embrace of CHA”s role in passing Obamacare, but, reading the entire text of the award, indicates that the key role played by CHA in passing Obamacare is most likely the source of the award.  And so we have another ‘Catholic’ organization, tightly wrapped up with the USCCB, rebuking the bishops conference and the vast majority of individual bishops on the issue of the supremacy of a “right” to health care over the right to life championed, publically, at least, by the bishops.  A second disquieting aspect of this is the further evidence of the extremely cozy relationships which exist between all the alphabet soup Catholic organizations – staff from CCHD work for CRS and CHA and give awards to Catholic Charities (CC), then get a job at USCCB and funnel money to CCHD which gives an award to CRS!  In researching social justice activities, I was amazed to see how many directors at CCHD also had worked at Catholic Charities, or CRS, or USCCB, and vice versa all the way around.  These agencies are the locus points of left-wing influence in the Church – within these massive, quite well funded bureaucracies spring forth initiatives that cause many Catholics, including many bishops, grave concerns, such as the 25% of CCHD grant recipients from 2009 taking at least one stance on a moral issue opposite to that of the Church.  I believe that all of these organizations deserve closer scrutiny – including the fact that Catholic Charities spends several percentage points of its annual budget lobbying the government for more donations to – yes, you guessed it – Catholic Charities.  Two-thirds – 2/3, 67%, of Catholic Charities budget comes from good ‘ol Uncle Sugar. 

To get a feel for the pervasive world-view at Catholic Charities, I’ll quote the City Journal article:

Swept up in the decade’s tumult and encouraged by the modernizing spirit of the second Vatican Council, Catholic Charities rejected its long-standing emphasis on personal responsibility and self-reliance and began to blame capitalist society rather than individual behavior for poverty and crime. It now looked to the welfare state to solve all social problems. Today, through a continual whirlwind of policy statements and lobbying, and by fostering countless activist community organizations, Catholic Charities has become, as Richard John Neuhaus, a priest and editor of the esteemed religious journal First Things, puts it, “a chief apologist for a catastrophically destructive welfare system, and it stands in the way of developing alternatives to help people break out of dependency and take charge of their lives.”Catholic Charities first announced its politicization in a wild-eyed manifesto that invokes such radical sixties icons as Malcolm X, Gloria Steinem, Herbert Marcuse, and—above all—the Marxist-inspired Liberation Theology movement that (to put it crudely) equates Jesus with Che Guevara. Ratified at Catholic Charities’ annual meeting in 1972, the so-called Cadre Study totally abandoned any stress on personal responsibility in relation to poverty and other social ills. Instead, it painted America as an unjust, “numb” country, whose oppressive society and closed economy cause people to turn to crime or drugs or prostitution. Moreover, the study asserts, individual acts of charity are useless. We must instead unearth “the root causes of poverty and oppression” and radically reconstruct—”humanize and transform”—the social order to avert social upheaval.

This radical shift in thinking had two practical consequences. First, Catholic Charities moved away from “just” charity toward a stress on government solutions to every social problem, making political advocacy a key mission. “We undertook to get more involved in making a contribution to the formation of public policy,” says former Catholic Charities president Monsignor Lawrence Corcoran, one of the authors of the Cadre Study.

Heavens to Betsy, sound familiar?  Root Causes?  It’s nothing of the sort.  Catholic Charities simply became co-opted by a “cadre,” a cadre of Marxists.  It happened alot back in the 60s, but in the Church, like academia, the leftists have maintained their control.

Not for much longer.

UPDATE: Do yourself a favor and read the whole City Journal article.  CCHD is not the only Catholic charity totally permeated by “social justice” (read: Marxist) thinking.  Catholic Charities and CRS are just as well.  Remember how Tom Ulrich was one of the speakers at the Seton social justice training seminar a couple of months ago?  Here’s a money quote from him:

Explains Tom Ulrich, the Catholic Charities’ national director of “Training and Convening,” which instructs local personnel in parish social ministry, “To bring people together to create a power base so that they can influence their local communities—that’s important in parish social ministry, and very much influenced by Alinsky and the IAF.”

Bingo.