Thread: Catholic Church collects $1.6 billion in U.S. contracts, grants since 2012

Catholic Church collects $1.6 billion in U.S. contracts, grants since 2012

Amid Pope Francis’ first-ever visit to the U.S. this week, some analysts are digging into the books to note the amount of money the American government doles out to Catholic charities every year. (Associated Press) more >


By Kelly Riddell - The Washington Times - Thursday, September 24, 2015

Not to be lost in the pomp and circumstance of Pope Francis’ first visit toWashington is the reality that the Catholic Church he oversees has become one of the largest recipients of federal largesse in America.

The Church and related Catholic charities and schools have collected more than $1.6 billion since 2012 in U.S. contracts and grants in a far-reaching relationship that spans from school lunches for grammar school students to contracts across the globe to care for the poor and needy at the expense of Uncle Sam, a Washington Times review of federal spending records shows.

Former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York once famously noted in 1980 that the government funded 50 percent of Catholic Charities‘ budget, commenting “private institutions really aren’t private anymore.” Today, those estimates remain about the same, according to Leslie Lenkowsky, who served as the chief executive officer of the Corporation for National and Community Service under George W. Bush.

Catholic Charities USA, the largest charitable organization run by the church, receives about 65 percent of its annual budget from state and federal governments, making it an arm of the federal welfare state, said Brian Anderson, a researcher with the Manhattan Institute.

The federal government came to increasingly rely on the church to help it with Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” and the charities “imbued with their new faith in the government’s potential to solve social problems, eagerly accepted government money,” Mr. Anderson wrote in an essay for the Manhattan Institute.

Catholic Charities received nearly a quarter of its funding from government by the end of the 1960s, more than half by the late 1970s and more than 60 percent by the mid-1980s, the level where it has remained ever since, Mr. Anderson said.

Today, Catholic charity work is a large part of this nation’s social safety net, according to Mr. Lenkowsky, now a professor of practice in public affairs and philanthropy at Indiana University.

“A lot of the charity is distributing food, running homeless shelters, most things considered charitable,” said Mr. Lenkowsky. “So what we’re not talking about is federal money being paid for priests and religious activities.”

Fifty-seven government agencies are now contracting with the Catholic Church. If the church were a state, its $1.6 billion in funding would rank it about 43rd out of the 50 states in total federal funding, according to analysis by Adam Andrzejewski, founder of OpenTheBooks.com. The majority of those funds are dedicated to refugee services and rehabilitation.

“Churches have generally looked to find common cause with secular goals, adapting their activities to the secular philanthropic model, if only to benefit from grants from the U.S. government,” Olivier Zunz, a social historian, wrote in his book “Philanthropy in America.” “Catholic Relief Services and federated Protestant charities have acted not as missions but as humanitarian institutions combining taxpayer money with their own for carrying out modernizing projects in many theaters around the world.”

However, Mr. Anderson argues, because the Catholic Church and its charities are so ingrained in the U.S. government’s welfare system, it’s hard to reform and better it. For example, in 1996 Catholic Charities lobbied heavily against welfare-reform law and met with then-President Clinton to help derail it. At the time, a Jesuit priest, the Rev. Fred Kammer, who is now the director of the Jesuit Social Research Institute at Loyola University, said the welfare-reform law would be “a national social catastrophe. No one will be spared the consequences.”

There’s also friction between state and church, with Catholic charities taking on such a prominent role in the government’s welfare system.

Conservative Christians, unlike Catholics and some other religious charities such as those run by Lutherans, have resisted taking federal money to do charitable work, insisting proselytism and good works go hand in hand and can’t be separated from one another — which most federal and state grants require.

“If a religious institution is required to do something that is in conflict of its religious views, it may opt out from receiving federal funding or make the pragmatic decision to stay in to get the funding,” said Mr. Lenkowsky.

For example, most of the Catholic charities in Illinois have decided to close down their adoption programs rather than comply with a state requirement that says they can no longer receive state funding if they turn away same-sex couples for adoptive services or foster care.

“On one hand the government can’t make any laws infringing on someone’s civil liberties, but it also has to protect free expression of religion, and those are in tension in the age of the welfare state, where you are contracting with a religious organization to deliver secular social services,” Mr. Lenkowsky said. In many of these cases, it will be up to the courts to decide, he added.
Georgetown University, the nation’s oldest Catholic and Jesuit University, broke with church doctrine in order to accommodate for civil rights.
When faced with the decision to officially recognize a student homosexual group on its campus, it decided to formally recognize it for fear it would be in violation of Washington, D.C.’s civil rights law and anti-discrimination protections. The school wanted to build a new dormitory at the time and needed municipal bonds to secure it.
For Catholic Charities USA, the priority of helping those in need trumps all, and they can’t fulfill that mission without financial assistance from the government.
“While Catholic Charities agencies, and many other faith-based non-profits, will continue to work with families and individuals on the brink, we know that in order for our nation to truly make a significant change in the numbers of those in poverty, we need support and commitment from the for-profit sector and from government. We cannot do this alone,” the group said in a statement to The Times.
The nation is better off having Catholic charities participate in the federal welfare system than the alternative of having only secular organization and the government do it, Mr. Lenkowsky said.
“Not only would Catholic charities be hurt, but our society would be much worse off because these services would be provided by government employees and secular service agencies run by social workers,” Mr. Lenkowsky said. “There’s certain things Catholic charities can do that social workers can’t do, like pastoral counseling — a minister trained to give counseling to people facing critical issues like substance abuse.”
If Catholic charities were cut out of the federal system, secular social workers may determine that pastors may not be qualified to give counseling, eliminating a helpful avenue for some in need, he said.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...ntract/?page=2

Sorry, friends, that's disgusting. There should be no taxpayer money funneled into any religious organization.

The Religious Origins of the Sanctuary Movement

Cliff Kincaid — July 24, 2015
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Thanks to Donald Trump, the major media are being forced to cover the illegal immigration movement, such as the proliferation of “sanctuary cities” across the U.S. that attract criminal aliens, give them legal protection, and let them back out on the streets to commit more crimes. But the really taboo topic is how these sanctuary cities grew out of a movement started by the Catholic Church and other churches.

Over 200 cities, counties and states provide safe-haven to illegal aliens as sanctuary cities, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) reports. What has not yet been reported is that the Catholic Church, which gave President Obama his start in “community organizing” in Chicago, has been promoting the sanctuary movement for more than two decades.

What’s more, in April, a delegation of U.S. Catholic bishops staged a church service along the U.S.-Mexico border and distributed Communion through the border fence. At the same time, Pope Francis said a “racist and xenophobic” attitude was keeping immigrants out of the United States.

No wonder the pope’s approval ratings have been falling in the United States. Overall, Gallup reports that it’s now at 59 percent, down from 76 percent in early 2014. Among conservatives, it’s fallen from 72 percent approval to 45 percent (a drop of 27 points).

“Few people are aware that this extreme left branch of the Catholic Church played a large part in birthing the sanctuary movement,” says James Simpson, author of the new book, The Red-Green Axis: Refugees, Immigration and the Agenda to Erase America.

Simpson says Catholic Charities, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and its grant-making arm, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, are prominent elements of the open borders movement.

The sanctuary movement has its roots in the attempted communist takeover of Latin America.

With the support of elements of the Roman Catholic Church, the Communist Sandinistas had taken power in Nicaragua in 1979. At the time, communist terrorists known as the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) were threatening a violent takeover of neighboring El Salvador. President Ronald Reagan’s policies of overt and covert aid for the Nicaraguan freedom fighters, known as the Contras, forced the defeat of the Sandinistas, leaving the FMLN in disarray. In 1983, Reagan ordered the liberation of Grenada, an island in the Caribbean, from communist thugs.

Groups like the Marxist-oriented Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) were promoting the sanctuary movement for the purpose of facilitating the entry into the U.S. of illegal aliens who were supposedly being repressed by pro-American governments and movements in the region. The U.S. Catholic Bishops openly supported the sanctuary movement, even issuing a statement in 1985 denouncing the criminal indictments of those caught smuggling illegal aliens and violating the law. Section 274 of the Immigration and Nationality Act prohibits the transportation or harboring of illegal aliens.

Two Roman Catholic priests and three nuns were among those under indictmentin one case on 71 counts of conspiracy to smuggle illegal aliens into the United States. One of the Catholic priests indicted in the scheme was Father Ramon Dagoberto Quinones, a Mexican citizen. He was among those convicted of conspiracy in the case.

Through the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, an arm of the Bishops, the church has funded Casa de Maryland, an illegal alien support group which was behind the May 1, 2010, “May Day” rally in Washington, D.C. in favor of “immigrant rights.” Photographs taken by this writer showed Mexican immigrants wearing Che Guevara T-shirts, and Spanish-language communist books and literature being provided to rally participants.

An academic paper, “The Acme of the Catholic Left: Catholic Activists in the US Sanctuary Movement, 1982-1992,” states that lay Catholics and Catholic religious figures were “active participants” in the network protecting illegals. The paper said, “Near the peak of national participation in August 1988, of an estimated 464 sanctuaries around the country, 78 were Catholic communities—the largest number provided by any single denomination.”

A “New Sanctuary Movement” emerged in 2007, with goals similar to the old group. In May, the far-left Nation magazine ran a glowing profile of this new movement, saying it was “revived” by many of the same “communities of faith” and churches behind it in the 1980s.

One group that worked to find churches that would provide sanctuary to immigrants in fear of deportation is called Interfaith Worker Justice, led by Kim Bobo, who was quoted by PBS in 2007 as saying, “We believe what we are doing is really calling forth a higher law, which is really God’s law, of caring for the immigrant.”

But conservative Catholic Michael Hichborn of the Lepanto Institute says Interfaith Worker Justice is run by “committed Marxist socialists,” and that Bobo is “highly active and involved with the Democratic Socialists of America,” a group which backed Obama’s political career.

http://www.aim.org/aim-column/the-re...uary-movement/

It's disgusting to realize that systems established to protect the civil religious rights of our citizens are being used to destroy the our nation.

STOP IT NOW! Pass the FairTax, HR 25 in the US House of Representatives and S 155 in the US Senate

In addition to deporting aliens, in order to same this nation and restoring it to what it was intended to be we have to butt religion out of government, including interfering with government. I am not anti-Christian, but pro-American. by allowing Christians to participate as an integral part of government, our Constitution would also allow Islam to participate. To protect us from
adversaries we cannot advocate for religion, one or another. To do so emboldens and empowers others arguments!

Originally Posted by kevinssdad

In addition to deporting aliens, in order to same this nation and restoring it to what it was intended to be we have to butt religion out of government, including interfering with government. I am not anti-Christian, but pro-American. by allowing Christians to participate as an integral part of government, our Constitution would also allow Islam to participate. To protect us from
adversaries we cannot advocate for religion, one or another. To do so emboldens and empowers others arguments!

THANK YOU!!!

Absolutely. This effort to weave religion into our politics is taking US down a very dangerous misdirected road with devastating consequences.