Abolish the Catholic Campaign for Human Development

Well, the title expresses my position on what should be done, exactly.  It's time to abolish this miscarriage of Charity, and establish a new program, with absolutely no overlap in personnel.  Especially in lay personnel.  I know that's a broad brush, and I am convinced that there are a few good people involved, but the entrenched bureaucrats of the CCHD--mostly lay-- are part of the problem.

Another part of the problem, and the larger one, I think, is the very conceptual foundation of the CCHD,  It is an obvious outgrowth of the 19th century and first half of the 20th century Catholic Action movement and campaigns.  That movement had some notable failures, to be sure, but it also had some notable successes.  The idea was to empower people to help themselves, and the idea is a good one, at it's root.  But the CCHD is a little bit different.  It's charter says it is not to give money for relief, but to hep empower people to end poverty.  Well,the only real way to get people out of the depths of cyclic poverty is to enable them to pull themselves out.  But the CCHD was founded with a great deal of input from Saul Alinsky,  not just from Alinsky's followers, but from the man himself.  And he did a great job confusing the Bishops as to the actual ends the Campaign would pursue.  When people are asked to give money to the CCHD, they are asked to give money to help the poor--and many of them reasonably conclude that they are giving money to pursue the Corporal Works of Mercy.  They are not, and the CCHD is banned by it's own charter from doing so.  It's founded, in a way, upon a fraud perpetrated on the Faithful.

The CCHD is an example of something that Pope Paul VI (A Pontiff who will never be my favorite, but for whom I am developing a much greater respect as I learn about the things he had to deal with.) warned us about:  The Church should never be reduced to a Social Services and Social Justice Group--it must always proclaim the gospel, and maintain sacramental ministry.  The CCHD is firmly in the camp that declares that social justice concerns are the only real proclamation of the Gospel, and the only real Christian ministry.

Catholic Action reached it's apogee in the US in the person of Dorothy Day, a woman who was the driving force behind it through much of the first half of the Twentieth Century.  There are those in the Social Justice community who feel she should be canonized.  I have no opinion in the matter, personally, but it's notable that they wish her to be canonized not because of a life of heroic virtue, but for political reasons.   Which is interesting, because Miss Day was appalled at the directions the Social Justice community and the Church took in the late 60s.  She had very little in common with the Modernizers who dropped their masks and revealed themselves to be Modernists. She especially had problems with their approach to the Eucharist.  (She once attended a Mass held in a homeless shelter where the priest used one of the shelters coffee cups for the Precious Blood, she gave him what for, explained that his attempt to show "solidarity' was pathetic, and personally buried the cup to prevent it's ever being used for a lesser purpose!) Catholic Action, in the iteration that Ms. Day represented, was strongly Catholic in identity, rooted in prayer and sacrament, and was a hands on affair--yes, some Catholics wrote checks, but others got their hands dirty and did the work.  it wasn't outsourced to applicant groups.  And it was intended not only to provide relief, but to provide a way up, an improvement to communities and a method for communities to raise themselves up by their boot straps, maintaining that while there were a great many victims of injustice, in the end, the victims themselves, through personal responsibility and effort, held the key to their own improvement.

This spirit of Catholic Action, and the example of people like Dorothy Day informed the founding of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.  unfortunately, it was contaminated-yes, I used the term 'contaminated"--from the very beginning with and by the input from Saul Alinsky.  Among the distortions was the idea that there would be no direct relief included in the projects funded by the CCHD, a departure from 2000 years of tradition in performing the Corporal Works of Mercy, and the idea that the Campaign was to soft sell or even conceal the Catholic identity of the projects--it was intended to be separated from the Evangelization of Peoples.  How Mr. Alinsky became involved is something of a mystery to me--he had a long history by this point of being opposed to the Church, in fact of being blatantly Anti-Catholic.  None the less, his input distorted the effort from it's founding.  In effect, in accordance with his Rules for Radicals, he put a huge con job over on the Bishops in the US, and through them, on the faithful who would be footing the bill.

Let's fast forward from the 1960s to the present decade.  At this point, there is a groundswell of dissatisfaction among the Catholic Faithful--and I will open myself up to all sorts of vile remonstrance and accusation by saying that the Modernists are notCCHD, which culminated in the publication of the kinds of groups that were being funded, and the Bishops feeling the heat.  This year, the CCHD published new guidelines on how it was going to conduct itself, and some of us saw a ray of hope.

Too bad it turned out to be a death ray.

My take on the process is that the Bishops are actually trying.  Seriously.  But that early on they resigned their control over the CCHD to a pro forma status, and gave it's operation over to lay bureaucrats, who are for the most part Modernists, uncommitted to the gospel, but very committed to progressive politics.  The reform is already falling though.

After the publication of the types of groups that CCHD was funding, several groups lost their funding.  Others were told that their contracts wouldn't be renewed.  And those new guidelines were published.  But we find that the people who are working in the CCHD are trying very hard not to comply.  like in the Archdiocese of Chicago.

In the Archdiocese of Chicago, the CCHD was the subject of some excellent reforms.  The Director for the Archdiocese, Rey Flores made great progress in establishing guidelines, and maintaining Catholic Identity within the program--the very reforms the National leadership had said were needed.  He's been fired, and a group of Modernist priests led by a Father Larry Dowling, have been writing letters to Cardinal George saying it's insulting to applicants to ask them if they support Abortion and Same Sex Marriage.  Priests who think it's insulting to ask groups that provide no social services with the money given, if they support murdering people before they're born and enabling sodomy.  There is something very wrong there.

Mr. Flores said that for a very brief time, they were doing something wonderful in Chicago--they had the Pro-life people considering that the dignity of the worker and immigrant was an important part of being a pro-life activist, and they had the Social Justice community considering the justice implications of the sanctity of life and how the destruction of the societal institutions that nurture life were a huge contributor to poverty and injustice in the world.  But that vital linkage, that is clear to anyone who actually takes a few hours to study the Catechism of the Catholic Church didn't last long.  The old guard of the Social Justice community of Chicago has very thoroughly sunk it.  No Father Dowling and his ilk--yeah, I used the  work 'ilk' in a pejorative sense, and I mean it just the way it sounds--are targeting Flores' old boss, the Director of the Office of Peace and Justice Director Nicholas Lund-Molfese.

They don't want the Gospel cluttering up their view of justice--it's too hard to proclaim the whole gospel, and it hurts the feeling of their little buddies in the secular realm.  Priests of divided heart are always destructive of the Mystical Body, and always ineffective in proclaiming the Gospel.

This is happening in a climate that has the bishops on the defensive about a program they have pushed for forty years.  Ten diocese in the US have simply said they will no longer participate in the CCHD.  But the USCCB is still trying to defend the program.  One journalist described it as a "siege mentality" when it became apparent that the Faithful were not happy with this initiative.  The defense of CCHD resulted in the new guidelines for activities--which are apparently still born.  (This is illustrated by the inclusion of groups that support other groups, and participate in their activities, that link such things as a living wage, and enforcement of labor laws with Same Sex Marriage and the availability of federally funded abortions.)  One of the things they have done,which may well be constructive, is the appointment of a Theologian to advise the CCHD on the moral fitness of various grant applications.  They were at least sensitive enough to the concerns of those who pay the bill to appoint Father Daniel Mindling, Rectory of Mount Saint Mary's Seminary to the job.  (Mt St. Mary's is regarded as the most orthodox seminary in the US--in itself sad--they should all be orthodox!)
Father Mindlings job description include ensuring that the grants distributed support and enhance Catholic Identity.  I imagine that the Bureaucrats already hate him.

The Bishops, by and large, like this program.  I am not sure how many of them like the way it's being run.  if they were entirely satisfied, it's doubtful new guidelines would have been issued, or theologian appointed to oversee the work.  On the other hand, if there weren't a sizable portion of the prelates who weren't pleased, it would be gone by now.  So the Bishops are trying to get enough reform in the program for it to be at least morally acceptable, and to persuade the faithful that it's a legitimate and valuable way for the Church to spread the gospel.  One way they are doing that is to release a cartoon.  A cartoon!  This is something that once again is divisive.  To be blunt, we are the best educated group of the Faithful in church history.  We do not need cartoons, we need teaching that explains some things to us.  This just makes us think that we are held in contempt by our Bishops, and by the Modernist lay Bureaucracy that has so infested out Bishops Conference.  It's hard for us to take the call to the laity to action and leadership in the Church when we get the feeling that unless the laity are modernists, we're considered too stupid to have input.

The Church is not in the business of re-creating society through Bureaucracy and direct political action.  The Church is in the Business of Saving Souls--of enabling people to become saints.  Saints living among us as always, leaven the Mystical Body which is Christs hands and feet on earth, and enable it to manifest the works of the Holy Spirit.  if we want justice, we must remember that God Alone is Just.  Not us. The battle over the CCHD isn't about a program, it's about the nature of the Church, and our role in proclaiming the Kingdom of God.

Michael Hichborn, who is spokesman for the group Reform CCHD Now says that the program is "...philosophically flawed right from the outset."  Against this statement, it's illuminating to set the remarks of Robert Gorman, who is the Executive Director of Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Houma-Thibidaux in Louisiana.  He says that the battle "It's a red herring. It's a national agenda that's not of importance to people at the local level who are just trying to work their way out of poverty and keep their kids safe".  This is very illuminating, indeed..  Especially as Gorman went onto link justice to swimming pool safety and pollution.   It points up a critical difference:  To the social Justice crowd, the Gospel is only relevant to agenda.  And the end justifies the means.  CCHD hasn't given any money to relief--that's not it's job.  Rather it has been, for a generation, distributing money to Organizers and Activists, who uniformly represent one end of the political spectrum, and whose efforts in the last generation have led to no improvement in the lot of the poor.  In fact, their guiding light, Saul Alinsky, said that the goal wasn't to make things better, it was to leave people demanding more services from the Government.  And a generation of this activity has led to a net increase in poverty, and a culture of dependence that will perpetuate poverty.

Moreover the groups that CCHD has supported and does support are problematical for Catholic Teaching not only in the realm of morality--abortion and same sex marriage, but in social teaching itself, ignoring such principles as private responsibility, subsidiarity, private property and the duty of government to promote the social order.  Although the Peace and Justice crowd often trot out Cardinal Bernardin's famous "whole cloth" statement, they are not willing to apply that to what they do, only to use it to justify doing something they shouldn't, on our dime.

This battle points out something else: the infighting between the pro-life people and the social justice people.  As Mr. Flores of Chicago said, for a brief time, they had everybody talking on the same page,and that got sabotaged.  I've noticed this in our Archdiocese--the pro-life/evangelization people and the peace and justice people not only don't talk, they don't like each other.  This division also runs parallel to the division between Catholic Teaching and Modernism.

It's time to abolish the CCHD, and replace it with another program--no one who looks at the whole of the situation can say there is no need--that takes a holistic approach, maintains the Catholic Identity of the program, and most especially doesn't let it become the entrenched bastion of a heretical faction.  it should be closely overseen by the Bishops themselves, not delegated to the laity, where it can and would become an item in a tug of war between Modernists and Catholics.

In the Spiritual Struggle that Our Lady of Akita warned us about, the CCHD has become not only a battle ground, but a weapon being used by the Enemy.  We need to end it now!