By (name removed by moderator)
“i am heart-broken that what is so wrong continues to be defended by well-meaning catholics. Painful though it is to us, we should all be demanding a thorough house-cleaning
i am brokenhearted that well meaning catholic continue to attack the successors of peter, who have admitted error and are in good faith attempting to do their best to correct those mistakes. What i believe you are demanding is not a “housecleaning” but your own particular version of “perfection”. The problem with that is that the church is not a museum for saints but a hospital for sinners, human beings subject to error, neglect, and temptation, clergy included. We as the body of christ need to grow up and stop expecting our clergy to be perfect. They aren’t, never have been, and never will be…”
But is this really what’s going on? Is this an “attack” on the successors of Peter, or is it an awareness that a bureaucracy has gone astray? I think it’s the latter.
What continues to baffle me in all this is the fact that the CCHD gives money to secular organizations AT ALL. It isn’t as if there aren’t perfectly good and quite needy Catholic organizations to whom money could be given, both here and abroad. And, truth be told, most Catholics think that’s what they’re doing when they give to CCHD.
Now, I could believe, if I wanted to, that gifts to the truly offensive organizations was a mistake. But was it really? How are we to know? This is not a matter of my bishop saying “oh, organization ‘X’ supports abortion, but I’m going to give your donations to it anyway”. It’s a matter of non-bishops; people whose JOB IT IS to investigate and to know to whom they are donating, giving money Catholic parishioners thought was going to Catholic organizations. It’s not so hard to find out what an organization is if you’re thinking of giving it thousands of dollars, or even millions, as in the case of ACORN. SOMETHING had to make the organizations appeal to them.
People can disagree over whether ACORN has some charitable programs, but I have personally known for years that it’s fundamentally political. You don’t have to know much about ACORN to know that. So why is the CCHD giving them millions? It can only be because the people in CCHD knew full well that it’s political and intend to effect political changes. Political changes are a resort to governmental coercion. Did anyone ever see any CCHD material say “Well, among other things, we give your money to organizations that want the state to force you to do this or that.”? Never have I seen anything evern remotely suggesting that. Yet, that’s what they have been doing. To me, that’s a subcategory of Liberation Theology: “Never mind charity. Let’s force people to do what WE think is charitable.”
Over the years, a lot of bad things have crept into the Church in the U.S., and to me, the whole approach of the CCHD is one of them.
If Liberation Theology, American Style, is what the CCHD is all about; if that, and not direct charitable action is what it’s all about, then maybe it’s time it was shut down altogether.
