Posted on 02/10/2025 9:40:29 AM PST by ebb tide
In the 1951 film “People Will Talk,” Dr. Noah Praetorius (an unconventional doctor, played by Cary Grant, who questions a medical industry that treats patients like machines) asks a colleague (Dr. Baker, played by Walter Slezak), “What is my business?” Dr. Baker responds with a rather conventional answer: “To diagnose the physical ailments of human beings and to cure them.” Dr. Praetorius immediately retorts that he is wrong, saying: “My business is to make sick people well. There’s a vast difference between curing an ailment and making a sick person well.”
This little dialogue (in what is truly a wonderful, pro-life movie) provides a philosophical question to the nature of the real purpose a doctor has in practicing medicine. The difference between “curing an ailment” and “making a sick person well” has less to do with methodology and everything to do with relationships. “Curing an ailment” places the focus on the ailment, whereas “making a sick person well” places the focus on the person, and, in this post-modern world, it is well and right to apply this difference to the question of charity.
Many organizations throughout the world claim to be “charities” or “charitable organizations,” and if you asked those who worked for them what their business is, they would respond with something akin to “ending poverty,” or “relieving poverty,” or “ending the root causes of poverty.” As with Dr. Baker, such answers place the focus on the ailment, rather than the person. However, if one were to ask a traditional member of a mendicant order what his or her business is, the response would be, “to serve the bodily needs of the poor while instructing them in the Faith in order to draw them to Christ.”
This little difference is subtle, and what it amounts to is a motive of love. When one is working to end an ailment, the motivation is the banner of a cause, whereas when one seeks to treat a person, the motivation is compassion and love. It’s easy to fight for a cause, while it is often difficult to love a person. Furthermore, when one fights for a cause, there are often expectations placed upon the outcome and remuneration for work done. On the other hand, when one is motivated by love to do some good, there are no expectations placed upon the outcome and remuneration is not only not expected but is rejected.
Simply put – love is characterized by the desire and pursuit of the good for someone else without any recourse to the self. Purchasing and handing out sandwiches to the hungry, giving away clothing to the naked, and providing shelter to the homeless without any sense of payment for these acts are all acts of love. Conversely, being paid to do these things is simply a job, and while there may be true compassion in the midst of the act, the material payment for the action merits little in Heaven. As our Lord said of those who perform righteous deeds so that others may see them, “they have received their reward.” And so, much the same is true of those who perform the works of charity for payment.
If those who perform works of charity for payment will have already received their rewards here on earth and have not stored them up in Heaven, what of those who are actually getting rich in the name of service to the poor? Much has been said lately of the massive amounts of government money going to Catholic Charities, and some are beginning to awaken to the grotesque salaries taken by their CEOs. Here, we will examine 10 Catholic Charities organizations, analyzing their reception of government grants, the salaries paid out, and the payments received by their CEOs.
The Catholic Charities of Baltimore (aka Associated Catholic Charities, INC)
The senior employee for Catholic Charities of Baltimore is William J. McCarthy, Jr, and his salary and benefits total $510,904. With a total revenue of $127.6 million (52 percent of which came from government grants), $92.9 million – 73 percent of the revenue – paid salaries and compensation.
Catholic Charities of New Hampshire
The senior employee for Catholic Charities of New Hampshire is Thomas E. Blonski, and his salary and benefits total $336,785. With a total revenue of $92.9 million, $40.1 million – 43 percent of the revenue – paid salaries and compensation.
Catholic Charities Neighborhood Services
The senior employee for Catholic Charities Neighborhood Services is Emmie Glynn Ryan, and her salary and benefits total $346,005. With a total revenue of $118.8 million (71 percent of which came from government grants), $61.7 million – 52 percent of the revenue – paid salaries and compensation.
Catholic Charities of Ft. Worth
The senior employee for Catholic Charities of Ft. Worth is Christopher Plumlee, and his salary and benefits total $297,082. With a total revenue of $140.2 million (92 percent of which came from government grants), $19.3 million – 14 percent of the revenue – paid salaries and compensation.
The senior employee for Catholic Charities of Chicago is Sally Blount, and her salary and benefits total $264,329. With a total revenue of $174.8 million (72 percent of which came from government grants), $70.2 million – 40 percent of the revenue – paid salaries and compensation.
Catholic Charities of St. Paul & Minneapolis
The senior employee for Catholic Charities of St. Paul and Minneapolis is Michael Goar, and his salary and benefits total $290,987. With a total revenue of $68.1 million, $36.5 million – 54% of the revenue – paid salaries and compensation.
Catholic Charities Community Services
The senior employee for Catholic Charities Community Services is Beatriz Diaz Taveras, and her salary and benefits total $294,282. With a total revenue of $87.4 million (69 percent of which came from government grants), $46.9 million – 54 percent of the revenue – paid salaries and compensation.
Catholic Charities of Galveston-Houston
The senior employee for Catholic Charities of Galveston-Houston is Cynthia Colbert, and her salary and benefits total $225,497. With a total revenue of $99.4 million (82 percent of which came from government grants), $32.5 million – 33 percent of the revenue – paid salaries and compensation.
The senior employee for Catholic Charities of Syracuse is Lori Accardi, and her salary and benefits total $233,353. With a total revenue of $79.9 million (57 percent of which came from government grants), $45.1 million – 57 percent of the revenue – paid salaries and compensation.
Catholic Charities of Rochester
The senior employee for Catholic Charities of Rochester is Karen Dehais, and her salary and benefits total $215,141. With a total revenue of $67.2 million (79 percent of which came from government grants), $49.4 million – 74 percent of the revenue – paid salaries and compensation.
The senior employee for Catholic Charities of Trenton is Marlene Lao-Collins, and her salary and benefits total $206,561. With a total revenue of $56.6 million 41 percent of which came from government grants), $40 million – 71 percent of the revenue – paid salaries and compensation.
A very wise priest – commenting on the exorbitant salaries of those “doing charity” – once said to me, “Very often people start off doing good, and end up doing well.”
The Great Commission, which is the primary act and purpose of the Catholic Church, has never changed. The conversion of peoples and nations to the teachings of Our Blessed Lord is the charge given to the Church, and everything done by the Church is done to this specific end. And anything done without this specific end is empty and without purpose.
Until the 20th century, the Catholic Church had worked through religious orders to provide aid to the poor, health care to the sick, and education to the ignorant. Catholic hospitals were filled with nuns and priests well educated in the healing arts, and the cost of health care was quite low. Catholic school classrooms were led by nuns and priests, and even the poorest kids in the neighborhood could afford a world-class education there. And the care of the world’s poorest was done by missionaries who sought first the salvation of the souls they served, while also working to provide food, housing, and clothing … and it didn’t cost billions of dollars to do it.
I will never forget a conversation I once had with Sean Callahan, the current CEO of Catholic Relief Services whose full compensation is $643,085. I expressed my concern that Catholic Relief Services does nothing to evangelize the souls it claims to serve to which Callahan responded, “Oh we evangelize, we just don’t proselytize.” When I asked what he meant by this, he said, “CRS works to convert people’s minds to how to treat people and how to do things, but not to the Catholic Faith.” I reminded him that Catholics are obliged to proclaim the Gospel and to bring souls to Christ, and he balked. He then equated feeding people and preaching the Gospel with “bribing the poor.”
Just a couple of years later, Bill O’Keefe, CRS’s vice-president for government relations and advocacy, said something similar during a CNN interview in 2014. He said:
“We assist people of all backgrounds and religions and we do not attempt to engage in discussions of faith. We’re proud of that. We like to say that we assist everybody because we’re Catholic, we don’t assist people to become Catholic.”
The industrialization of charity is robbing both the wealthy and the poor – those receiving healthy salaries to “do charity” are being robbed of a great and eternal reward in Heaven, while the poor are being used as political pawns for expanded use of federal funds. Meanwhile, those who pay taxes are being squeezed in the socialist scheme to redistribute wealth. But this shouldn’t be too surprising, since Pope Paul VI predicted this very thing in his 1975 encyclical Evangelii Nuntiandi. He wrote:
We must not ignore the fact that many, even generous Christians who are sensitive to the dramatic questions involved in the problem of liberation, in their wish to commit the Church to the liberation effort are frequently tempted to reduce her mission to the dimensions of a simply temporal project. They would reduce her aims to a man-centered goal; the salvation of which she is the messenger would be reduced to material well-being. Her activity, forgetful of all spiritual and religious preoccupation, would become initiatives of the political or social order. But if this were so, the Church would lose her fundamental meaning. Her message of liberation would no longer have any originality and would easily be open to monopolization and manipulation by ideological systems and political parties. She would have no more authority to proclaim freedom as in the name of God. This is why we have wished to emphasize, in the same address at the opening of the Synod, “the need to restate clearly the specifically religious finality of evangelization. This latter would lose its reason for existence if it were to diverge from the religious axis that guides it: the kingdom of God, before anything else, in its fully theological meaning….”
The meaning of the word “charity” is love. There is no love in mere philanthropy, and certainly not in an industry masquerading as a charity. In selling the Church to the highest bidder, Catholic Charities CEOs are making bank on the backs of the poor.
As the Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen would say, “If souls are not saved, nothing is saved.” If the hierarchy of the Catholic Church is truly interested in reducing poverty throughout the world, the poverty it must begin with is the poverty of the soul.
Republished with permission from the Lepanto Institute
Ping
That salary is about what a friend makes but he’s Chief of Staff at a major hospital.
This article is a waste of bandwidth. Despite its name, Catholic Charities is not a religious organization. THE END.
IIRC that is about what Franklin Graham makes for CEOing all the aspects of the Billy Graham organization, including evangelism and Samaritan’s Purse.
ELON and Mr. BESSENT.....PLEASE STOP THESE PAYMENTS!!
And by the way, I am a daily Mass goer, and I haven’t given to the LEFT WING of our religion for DECADES!
The Ft. Worth branch is WAY OUTTA LINE. They will be required to go back to NGO School.
They paid only 14% to salaries! Every other branch of Catholic Charities generally ranged 40-60% !!!!!
Same at my parish. Folks have stopped giving to Catholic Charities. I now give to Saint Jude and twice a year a donation to Boys Town.
St. Jude and St. Vincent DePaul...the LOCAL one.
St. Vincent DePaul is a very worthy organization. Very good with local needs.
"Until the 20th century, the Catholic Church had worked through religious orders to provide aid to the poor, health care to the sick, and education to the ignorant. Catholic hospitals were filled with nuns and priests well educated in the healing arts, and the cost of health care was quite low. Catholic school classrooms were led by nuns and priests, and even the poorest kids in the neighborhood could afford a world-class education there. And the care of the world’s poorest was done by missionaries who sought first the salvation of the souls they served, while also working to provide food, housing, and clothing … and it didn’t cost billions of dollars to do it."
"As the Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen would say, “If souls are not saved, nothing is saved.”
Trafficking illegal aliens? Is that against the law? If it is, then why have these “charity” CEOs not been charged? It takes time an money, risks ICE lives, etc., to remove them.
Once more Freud took hold of my mind and I read Catholic CIRCUS.
Catholic Charities USA has released its 2024 annual report, which offers an overview of the organization’s work but offers no summary of its finances.
Previous annual reports offered an overview of Catholic Charities USA’s finances: the 2022 annual report discussed national office financials on p. 20, as did the 2021 annual report on p. 21.
What are they hiding?
RCC is not in the business of gathering flocks of Christians either. It exists to rake in the cash.
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