USCCB Pulpit Announcement - help! Not sure I can read it

[Ender]

They are. But that’s a different conference of bishops. We don’t hear what they are saying. The same is being promoted by CELAM in Latin America, which is their conference.

Two things: if the current health care bill (with only the changes the bishops have requested) constitutes Church teaching, then it shouldn’t matter if there are different conferences of bishops involved, they should all teach the same thing. Second, while I would expect to see all conferences of bishops speak about the need for access to health care I seriously doubt that any of the others are proposing the same prudential solution being supported by ours. When you say “the same is being promoted by CELAM” you surely must mean they are promoting access to health care as a general right; you cannot mean they are promoting the same solution.

This is really my point. If the particular law being pushed by our congress is required by Church teaching then every country in the world would be morally required to pass the same law for their citizens. On the other hand, if it not Church teaching but is only a prudential preference, then we have no obligation to support the law and the bishops mislead us by using their moral authority to achieve a political end. Something for which they deserve to be severely chastised.

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[Ender]

Regarding the discussion of United Way and selecting where your donations go, Br. JREducation has it exactly right. You can specify who gets your dollars and how much.

Money is fungible: “being of such a nature that one part or quantity may be replaced by another equal part or quantity in the satisfaction of an obligation”.

Whatever money the UW receives will be distributed according to some percentage ratios they have set up for each organization. If you specify that you want your $100 contribution to go to the Girl Scouts they can satisfy that request in one of two ways: set your money aside, divvy up the rest, and then add yours to the Girl Scout pile. Or they could give your money to the GS and simply reduce by $100 the money they get from the general fund so that the GS amount stays within the ratios they established.

I have a low opinion of the UW ever since they removed the Boy Scouts from their list of recipient organizations when the Boy Scouts refused to accept homosexuals as scout leaders. This is why the UW will support the Girl Scouts but not the Boy Scouts.

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[DOShea]

Well you should realize that UW is national in organization but not in scope of donations. They are set up to operate locally. Money donated in one locality does not all go into some huge pool of national money like, say, money donated to the Red Cross does. Each region has it’s own list of designated recipients, and just a few months ago when I participated in the drive at my work, I designated part of my donation to the Boy Scouts. Another region in the US might not have them as a recipient, but my locality does.

Money donated is not “swapped around” as you suggest. All the money donated specifically to a charity goes to that charity (minus a small percent for operating costs). After all that money is allocated, the rest goes into a pool that is divided up into several different branches or groups of similar charities. Examples would be food kitchens servicing the homeless in one group, services for the deaf in another group, etc. Each of those groups then has it’s share of the remaining funds allocated by vote of committees made up of people who volunteer to help them decide who gets how much.

To give you an example of how that might work, you might have the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts competing for funds out of that same slice of money allocated for their group. Each of the two groups has the opportunity to come and present their case - what are they doing with the money, how does the money help them do what they do, and how does it impact our community. If one group shows more impact on the community than the other, they stand a better chance of receiving more funding than the other, that is, a higher percentage of the funds designated for that type of charity. That percentage isn’t influenced by how much they may have received by donors designating their donation to that specific charity, because that information isn’t given to the people in the committee making the decision.