A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Catholic Relief Services receives 2/3 of funding from radical pro-abort government agency July 22, 2013

There are a number of interesting reactions to last week’s news (which I am unable to link, due to ongoing blog problems) that Catholic Relief Services (CRS) is funding a pro-abort group to the tune of $2.8 million a year.  But buried in these reactions below (see here: http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/heads-should-roll-pro-life-leaders-react-to-u.s.-bishops-agencys-funding-of) is a factoid that is stunning. Two-thirds of CRS’ funding comes from one federal agency (just as Catholic Charities receives well over 90% from the Feds, and the Feds do not give our money away cheaply) – the US Agency for International Development. Begun with good intentions, USAID fell victim to the sexular pagan agenda over 40 years ago, and began using the carrot of US aid in trying to force numerous countries to adopt the sexular pagan agenda of sexual libertinism, contraception, abortion, and over-arching “population control.” As Steve Mosher of the Population Research Institute (a great group!) notes, it is impossible for CRS to have been funded by USAID for decades, and not to share that agency’s misanthropic, amoral agenda:

Pro-life leaders are expressing outrage after LifeSiteNews.com revealed Thursday that the U.S. Bishops’ foreign relief agency is funding a leading abortion-marketing firm.

Catholic Relief Services is distributing a two-year $2.7 million grant to Population Services International (PSI), which networks and trains local providers throughout the developing world to offer “safe abortion.”

“Somebody has to get fired over this,” said Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM). “We fight groups like PSI all over the world and now we find our own church funds them. It’s disgusting and for one I am bone-weary of these types of revelations. Heads should roll.”

Fr. Shenan Boquet, president of Human Life International, said he finds it “incomprehensible” that an organization like PSI was deemed worthy of Catholic funds.

PSI’s “primary mission has always been to promote contraception, abortifacient drugs, condoms, and even surgical abortion,” he said. “Like many other population control groups in the mid-1990s, they started to rebrand their mission as being about ‘health’, using more positive language and adding malaria-prevention programs to their portfolio. But this should not confuse anyone as to their purpose.”

Judie Brown, president of American Life League, said the news was “not surprising.” “Catholic Relief Services has historically been advocates, although not publicly – behind the scenes – advocates of population control in the Third World,” she charged.

Brown’s point was echoed by Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, who said CRS implicates itself in population control by the very fact that it receives over two thirds of its funding from USAID.

“CRS knows very well what the principal purpose of USAID is. And it tries to, in various ways, to massage that purpose, and avoid being implicated in the purpose of population control,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, they know who’s paying their salaries, and that’s why the money goes to CARE, that’s why the money goes to PSI, that’s why the money goes back and forth to other population control agencies, because that’s what their masters in the federal government demand of them.”

“This is not an agency of the institutional Catholic Church. This is a separate aid agency, which, because it receives two thirds of its funding from the U.S. government, is Catholic in name only,” he added. “No man can serve two masters.”

There is always a price to pay for federal funding. With both CRS and Catholic Charities, that price is at least tacit – and I think it goes much further than that – acceptance of the socialist, sexularist pagan agenda. CCHD is just a more obvious example. But drilling down into how monies are doled out at all these charities reveal massive problems! 

What a tangled web!  The Feds fund CRS, which funds CARE and other groups, which back-feed money to CRS, and the wheel goes round and round with revolving staff positions filled by all the same kinds of people. Yesterday’s radical ACORN activist like Ralph McCloud is today’s head of CCHD and tomorrow’s head of International Planned Barrenhood. As long as the “little people” bible-humping in the pew don’t pay much attention, the sexular agenda continues to advance and these NGO activists get very, very well paid. And the Church becomes a little smaller, and increasingly just another NGO, something both the current and former Popes have warned against.

The question is, what are you going to do about it?  As Judie Brown notes later in the piece linked above, CRS, like CCHD, needs to be abolished and a new international relief agency – not dependent on government funding with all its attendant requirements to be utterly obiescent to the sexular pagan agenda – stood up in its place.

Will you give money to CRS, ever again?  Would you, very charitably and with great respect, send a note to your local ordinary stressing the numerous problems with CRS and your inability, in conscience, to support them ever again?