In May, five of the USCCB’s leading Bishops sent a letter to every Senator and Representative, denouncing President Trump’s proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2018 as “profoundly troubling.”
Invoking “moral criteria” and the “common good,” the Bishops insist that Congress abandon Trump’s cuts in federal welfare programs. In a cynical bow to fiscal responsibility, however, they endorse cuts in defense spending instead.
The Bishops are calling on Congress to preserve the spending priorities that prevailed during the Obama administration.
So, what is really going on here.
The truth is that Bishops have relied increasingly on federal dollars to fund their various welfare agencies.
The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) reports that 30 million Catholics have left the Church, a figure confirmed by Timothy Cardinal Dolan when he was President of the USCCB.
As a result, voluntary donations from the Catholic faithful who remain have plummeted.
This perhaps explains why the USCCB’s call to preserve the Obama spending priorities do not mention or express any difficulty with Congress fully funding Planned Parenthood. The letter makes no reference to President Trump’s unprecedented move to protect unborn life by expanding the Mexico City Policy, which will reduce to zero the billions of taxpayer dollars that Obama has sent every year to fund abortion worldwide.
No, for the USCCB the letter is all about money.
By now, Catholics have become are resigned to hearing the Bishops proclaim personal political agendas as the Gospel. Yet, their silence about the moral implications and consequences of the budget priorities they are advocating is stunning. So much so that it warrants closer investigation.
The Bishops’ financial dependence upon public funding of their social agendas was fully revealed under the Obama administration.
The Obama administration attacked the Catholic Church in countless ways, from the HHS Mandate to mandatory LGBT hiring policies enforced on schools and “other institutions” receiving federal funding.
In the mix of those “other institutions" one finds CATHOLIC CHARITIES USA (CCUSA) and CATHOLIC RELIEF SERVICES (CRS), both of which receive the majority of their funding -- not from voluntary donations -- but from tax payer dollars.
Both the CCUSA and CRS are essentially subsidiaries of the government with a Catholic label. They must act — and hire — accordingly. After all, they have to observe federal regulations in order to be eligible for the federal funding.
The USCCB letter does not mention this salient fact.
One must bear this in mind in reading the USCCB’s letter to Congress. It clearly expresses the Bishops sudden fear that President Trump’s budget will slash CCUSA and CRS programs drastically, if not completely
The President’s proposed budget folds the Agency for International Development (AID) into the State Department. Consequently, it will “slash aid to developing countries by over one-third, re-channeling funding from development assistance into a program that is tied closely to national security objectives.”
And that means “slashing aid” to CRS, which relies on AID for the majority of its funding (about half a billion taxpayer dollars a year).
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