Thought the thread could use some color...
Posted on 10/28/2007 3:58:12 PM PDT by NYer
The Catholic Campaign for Human Development is the Plymouth Duster of the U.S. Bishops Conference, a relic of early-1970s social activism that -- except for its value as a fashion statement -- was a disappointment when it was launched and hasn't improved with age. Yesterday we were given our official annual spadeful of the 40-year-old rhetoric:
The Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) distributed more than $9.5 million in grants to local organizations working to overcome poverty in the United States.
The 2007, grants, totaling $9,578,000, will be used by 314 projects in 46 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. The average award is $30,500 and will go to local organizations that address the specific concerns of their poor and low-income members. These groups work toward economic justice, fair housing, health care access, living wages, and immigrant and worker rights, among other concerns.
Note the phrase "working to overcome poverty" -- this is the key element in the CCHD mission and what we're told makes it different from a conventional charity: i.e., poverty relief through almsgiving. Helping the poor overcome their poverty is a noble endeavor, but the CCHD's idea of overcoming poverty seems in every case to be a statist solution: cash disbursements to Left-leaning action groups aimed at redirecting government funds towards their own purposes. Think of this way: you'd be pleased to learn your pastor gave your 12-year-old a part-time job; less pleased to discover that what the job consists in is pestering you for a larger allowance.
The grantees the CCHD chose to tell us about are the Mississippi Poultry Workers Center, Natural Home Cleaning Professionals (Oakland), Albany Park Neighborhood Council (Chicago), Women's Community Revitalization (Philadelphia), Families United for Racial and Economic Equality (Brooklyn), and the Disabled Rights Action Committee (Salt Lake City). One notes that organizations aimed at empowering home-schoolers and pregnancy help centers are not much in evidence.
A visit to the website of Families United for Racial and Economic Equality (FUREE, get it?) provides a list of "victories" chalked up to the organization -- victories at overcoming poverty, I presume. For example:
A take-over of the Heritage Foundation? That'll feed a lot of hungry children. Try a mirror-image reversal of the party politics and ask yourself much cash the CCHD would toss at a group that shut down the ACLU or the National Lawyers Guild.
Three points. One: the partisan politics of the CCHD is overwhelmingly lopsided, yet its Leftist bias is never candidly admitted come special collection time. Two: the funded programs don't teach unskilled workers to become welders or encourage men to marry and stay married to the mothers of their children, but rather take social breakdown for granted and seek government monies to make the breakdown less irksome; it can be argued that this approach doesn't overcome poverty but perpetuates it. Three: even where the funds fought for and won serve a good cause, other good causes will thereby go unfunded; who's to say the net change is for the better?
Almost every social ill in the U.S. has its roots in the breakdown of the family, and, conversely, a healthy family situation gives its members advantages that almost no external misfortune can offset. And the Catholic Church is uniquely well-placed to use her teaching to remedy the ills of family life. The irony of the CCHD is that it seems consciously to exclude the Catholic view of the human person from its understanding of poverty and its programs for overcoming it. True, $9 million isn't a huge sum by the standards of contemporary diocesan pay-outs (barely five creation spirituality convictions, at current rates), but it still seems Catholics could untrouser the cash they have left for purposes closer to their hearts.
Surprise!
I don’t give anything to second collections except for Holy Land.
Not the least bit.
Thought the thread could use some color...
I am on the inside of one particular unnamed diocese and have had occasion to see grant submission requests for CCHD funding. If you too would see the BS that groups expect to be funded (and are) you’d be appalled and would never send a dime to any agency operated by the USCCB. I have said many times: “If you thing the sex abuse scandal in the Church was bad, the corruption surrounding the misuse of money would be 10 times worse if people knew how money is being spent.”
Please abide the remarks of Veritas and you need not just take his/her word, but examine the USCCB links and “programs” and also take a look at the fatuous “Faithful Citizenship” voters’ “guide”. It as with many other USCCB publications reads like a lefty professor’s lecture notes. You frequently will find the language of post modernism such as “global solidarity” and other meaningless drivel. You will not find solid teachings on subidiarity but rather throughout all of the USSB domestic stuff a preference for open borders, globalism and social programs and of course the man behind this social curtain-—taxes (though not directly mentioned). You will not find demands of government to allow for the full protection of the family and for the means by which the private sector might be encouraged to produce more “good paying” jobs, through such tried and true ideas such as tax cuts. In other words you will find nothing of a differing viewpoint which allows us to pursue our salvific mission by choice to obey Him instead of subjugation to state compulsion, about individual responsibility of those in need and those of us who need to give, or about our responsibility beyond the political and more importantly to the scriptural. Despite the Church’s 2000 years of dealing with every form of government imaginable, the USCCB sees a political system it really wants but that is wrong in every way. Indeed, you will not find the salvific language, just the same tasteless gruel of social[ist] justice, global solidarity, immigration reform through unregulated borders, etc.
Please give to our missionaries and our evangelists such as the Sisters of Charity and the Missionaries of the Poor, and of course give of yourself with charity to those in our communities and who through our communities need us, as we need them for our salvation-—but avoid the bureacracy of the USCCB.
our pastor in Minnesota made it clear that he did not approve of any collections for CHD, but obeyed his bishop and put the envelopes in the pews for those people who wished to participate. After mass, a few of us would go around and collect the envelopes and put them where they belonged—in the trash. I never saw more than one or two in any collection basket. Considering the political leanings of most of those old FDR Democrats, I was really surprised.
“Considering the political leanings of most of those old FDR Democrats, I was really surprised.” I’m not...they’re for taking your money, not giving their own which sort of makes the point in an ironic way. :)
I always get them confused with the Human Rights Campaign — the GLBT extravaganza! So just to be sure, I don’t give to either! ;-)
At this point, I consider any charity of which I've never before heard to be guilty until proven innocent. I suppose that attitude makes life hard for start-up charities ... but like you, I've been 'had' once too often.
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