Catholic Charities USA is the largest religious charity in America, with a $2.3 million budget and local affiliates in 1,400 dioceses across the United States. Those local offices in turn support a myriad of good works for the poor—soup kitchens, homeless shelters, help for women facing crisis pregnancies, AIDS treatment, services for the elderly—with the aid of an army of some 280,000 volunteers. I used to be one of those volunteers myself, manning the front desk once a month at Mt. Carmel House, a facility for homeless women operated by the Catholic Charities affiliate in my own diocese of Washington, D.C. And every year for the past decade or so, I’ve also mailed a donation to the D.C. office of Catholic Charities.
This year, however, I’ll be thinking twice before I get out my checkbook. The other day, I visited the Web site of Catholic Charities USA’s headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, an $11.5 million operation indirectly supported by my donations. There (at www.catholicharities-usa.org), I discovered that Catholic Charities had made a conscious decision to align itself with the most radically “progressive” (read, dissenting) wing of the Catholic Church in America, and also with at least one secular organization whose agenda is at alarming variance with Catholic teaching.
Catholic Charities has come under fire in conservative circles for its heavy reliance on government funding (some 62 percent of its total budget) to operate its network of services. Last year, Brian C. Anderson, former book review editor of Crisis and current senior editor of City Journal, a quarterly affiliated with the Manhattan Institute, published an article in his magazine contending that government dependency had effectively secularized Catholic Charities, turning it into an arm of the welfare state.
The debate over whether accepting government aid dilutes a religious organization’s religious mission is a complex one. On page 19 of this issue of Crisis, contributing editor Stacy Mattingly explores its ramifications with respect to President George W. Bush’s new “faith-based initiative” that would move churches and the federal government into closer partnership (Mattingly interviewed Catholic Charities USA’s policy director, Sharon Daly, among others, for her article). I don’t want to take sides here on this complicated issue. What outrages me is Catholic Charities USA’s web—so to speak—of ideological alliances.
Click the “links” hypertext line on Catholic Charities’ “advocacy” page on the Internet, and you’ll get a taste of the thought world in which the organization operates. Of the hundreds of Catholic periodicals in the United States, for example, the site provides a link to only one: the radical National Catholic Reporter, whose editorials regularly take potshots at Church teachings on divorce and birth control, blast Pope John Paul II as a troglodyte, and criticize the U.S. bishops for condemning pro-choice Catholic politicians.
Or how about Network, the self- described “Catholic social justice lobby” to which Catholic Charities also provides a link? Once you’ve clicked onto Network, you’re in dissenting-Catholic lala-land: You can click straight from there to Call to Action, headquarters of the graying-ponytail Catholic set, which has minimal interest in social justice but maximal interest in “Church reform,” meaning allowing women to be priests and letting just about anyone who wants to receive Communion. The Call to Action site is a hypertext free-for-all: You can pray to the goddess Sophia at WATER (Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual); you can join the Women’s Ordination Conference, Dignity, or the married priests’ group CORPUS; or you can visit Future-Church and find out how to agitate for an “inclusive-language” liturgy.
You can even support abortion with a boost from Catholic Charities USA—at the site of Catholics for a Free Choice, only three degrees of Web separation (via Network and Call to Action) from the Catholic Charities links page. Catholic Charities can also link you directly from its own site to the Center for Law and Social Policy, whose projects include producing a report on the use of federal welfare- reform funding to provide the abortifacient Depo-Provera to teenage girls.
Yes, Catholic Charities says that it’s “not responsible for the content on other organizations’ web sites.” So what? Why doesn’t it at least offer links to pro-life groups such as Birthright International, the Nurturing Network, or the Gabriel Project, which give impoverished pregnant women the financial and moral support they need to choose against abortion?
So I’m torn right now about whether to continue supporting my local Catholic Charities. On the one hand, I saw firsthand the lives turned around at Mt. Carmel House when I volunteered there. On the other, Catholic Charities USA’s links page (about which its communications director, John Keightley, declined to comment when I called) suggests that its vision of Catholicism is seriously at odds with that of the Catholic Church.
There is one sign of hope: Rev. Fred Kammer, S.J., Catholic Charities’s politically liberal national president, will shortly be stepping down. Who-ever succeeds him will have a chance to clean house and, it is to be hoped, restore this 91-year-old organization to its original mission of helping the poor without ideological distraction.