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“Let’s face it ... the dirty little secret is that the Catholic Church in the U.S. has effectively become an arm of the state................These institutions” are nothing more than businesses that would close tomorrow if they could not avail themselves of government money. “

That’s not entirely true(only a little bit of it is true!).

Moat of the government money given to hospitals is for care of the indigent who cannot pay a penny for their health care. So, Catholic hospitals agree to give the free care - in an much less expensive manner than public hospitals do. I imagine this is the case with other religous hospitals too. As for local food shelves, most of the money is from donations from individuals and from businesses who are civic minded (another word for genuine charity).

The trouble with Obama and his leftist buddies is that they cannot comprehend the concept of freely given charity, and the benefits of private charity over the coerced excessive taxation of the citizens for public handouts.

Private donations are properly called CHARITY and this is not a dirly little word - but is a theological virtue. The Holy Spirit is involved in charity. Not so the liberal alternative which is the wasteful spending of tax dollars used more for consolidating a voting constituency than for genuine concern for the poor. Such a policy does not build up the spirits of the donors, nor the gratitude of the recipients, but rather resentments in the public and a feeling of entitlement in the recipients. Charity builds character in both the donor and the recipient, while the liberal alternative tears down these attributes. For that reason I believe the liberal viewpoint is a sin against the Holy Spirit.

The problem the Catholic bishops face is that they've spent the last 50 years turning their religious institution into little more than a political action group. There isn't much "religious" about the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops at all. That's why: (1) they're located in Washington D.C., and (2) they've got their own registered lobbying arm. This is taken directly from the USCCB website (emphasis is mine):

USCCB Government Relations (GR) represents the USCCB before the U.S. Congress on public policy issues of concern to the bishops. GR coordinates and directs the legislative activities of the USCCB staff and other church personnel to influence the actions of the Congress. A specific set of issues is assigned to each congressional liaison staff person, who in turn, works in collaboration with particular policy departments at the USCCB.

Unfortunately for conservative Catholics like me, most of what the USCCB lobbies for has no basis in Catholic doctrine and is nothing more than thinly-veiled Marxism.

And now they feel betrayed by the Marxist-in-Chief? Cry me a river, Archbishop Dolan.

On a related note, most prominent "Catholic" universities such as Notre Dame and Georgetown effectively ceased to exist as religious institutions after they became signatories to the Land O' Lakes Statement on the Nature of the Contemporary Catholic University in 1967. At that time, they explicitly acknowledged that their Catholic identify was subservient to their "academic freedom."

It's not just public vs. private funding that needs to be considered when discussing true "charity" as a theological virtue. There is an enormous difference between charity in a theological sense and philanthropy as a means of personal generosity for some tangible human benefit.

Mother Teresa was engaged in acts of charity, while wealthy people like Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg engage in philanthropy. There is an absolute and unequivocal religious element to the former, while the latter two might be accurately described as completely amoral radical secularists.

I highlighted those items in Post #14 to demonstrate that even the USCCB must admit that much of the Catholic Church's "charity" isn't really built on any religious foundation. If that's the case, then these organizations (Catholic Charities, for example) really shouldn't be covered by any kind of religious exemption because they are little more than the Kiwanis or Rotary International ... with the word "Catholic" in their name.