Open Letter to Bishop Morin on the outrageous CCHD

An Open Letter to Bishop Roger P. Morin of Biloxi Mississippi

Dear Bishop Morin,

As one of the more visible critics of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), I would like to respond to your Report to Bishops on the Catholic Campaign for Human Development of November 17, 2009. I’m grateful for the opportunity your report, presented to fellow bishops in your capacity as Chair for the USCCB Subcommittee on the CCHD provides for a discussion about the very real and pervasive problems of CCHD.

You open with a reference to “allegations supporting activities contrary to church’s teaching. The claims are outrageous.” I assume these are the same allegations listed on the USCCB website “For the Record – The Truth about CCHD Funding.” I’ve written a point by point commentary to this document but here’s the bottom line: While understandably self-defensive, “For the Record…” doesn’t refute the allegations. If they are indeed “outrageous,” it seems to me there’d be a way of demonstrating that.

Allegation: “You shot Cock Robin!”

Response with refutation: “Outrageous! Mr. Robin was shot in NY. Here are the 10 witnesses to testify that I was in Chicago at the time of Mr. Robin’s shooting. So, unless I bilocated, there is NO way I shot that bird!”

And so forth. That’s a refutation. This is not:

Response sans refutation: “Outrageous! I’m a pacifist. I don’t even know how to shoot a gun. In my entire 50 years of bird watching – of putting kilos of seed out every winter for the chickadees and sparrows – I have always welcomed the robins in my yard. How could anyone think that I’d shoot one?”

Your report makes several additional remarks that I think need to be addressed, as well. You write: “The Catholic Campaign for Human Development was created by the United States Bishops to help carry out the mission of Jesus Christ to “bring good news to the poor, liberty to captives, new sight to the blind, and set the downtrodden free.” (Luke 4:18)

I’m sorry, Bishop, that may be why you think the CCHD was created but it’s not why the CCHD says it was created. According to a United States Catholic Conference publication in 1996, Empowerment and Hope, the (C)CHD mission “is to address the root causes of poverty in the US through promotion and support of community-controlled, self-help organizations and through transformative education.” (p 144)

To understand this mission statement, we need the answer to three questions.

1. What are the root causes of poverty?

2. Are today’s Alinskyian organizing networks (the Industrial Areas Foundation, Gamaliel, DART, PICO, Interfaith Worker Justice, etc.), which receive the majority of CCHD funds, “community-controlled?”

3. What is meant by “transformative education?”

As Catholics, informed by over a century of wonderful social teaching, our answers to questions one and three (question two is a different sort of problem) are rich and profound. However, CCHD grants aren’t given to Catholic organizations but to either secular or ecumenical groups with very different – often woefully un-catholic – perspectives.

Case in point: Bellarmine Veritas Ministry released a report earlier this year, exposing problems with the CCHD-funded Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN). The report says: “LA CAN provides the home organization and coordination of the Downtown Women’s Action Coalition (DWAC) and shares leadership in the Coalition with Downtown Women’s Center and SRO Housing. [It] has worked to support same-sex marriage and promotes access to emergency contraception and “family planning” through a monthly clinic offered by the Downtown Women’s Center.”

The report offers evidence for these statements, taken from LA CAN materials and posted at its website. In response, CCHD’s “For the Record…” writes: “The Archdiocese of Los Angeles has reviewed the activity of LA CAN and determined the organization does not engage in any activity contrary to Church teaching, and has recommended continued funding for the organization.”

So, here’s what we have: in the right corner, LA CAN supporting a clinic offering contraceptives and, in the opposite corner, we have the Archdiocese of Los Angeles claiming this isn’t activity contrary to Church teaching.

What you’re saying, then, Bishop Morin, is that contraceptive use is supported by Church teaching? We both know better than that.
So, when you write in your report that “all CCHD funds are used faithfully, effectively, and in accord with Catholic social and moral teaching…,” you’d have to do some very byzantine rationalizing to argue that LA CAN is a good choice for Catholic money. From where I sit, however, it seems offensively hypocritical to promote both Humanae Vitae (Church teaching that contraceptives are intrinsically evil) and, at the same time, contraceptive distribution.

Next we come to your ad hominem attacks. You write that some critics, motivated by “their own ideological or political agendas repeat and spread outrageous claims that the bishops are funding abortion, attacks on the family and other untruths. For these groups this seems to be just another way to attack the Church and its shepherds.” [emphasis in the original]

Since you don’t name names, perhaps there are some critics of CCHD who fit that description, but CCHD’s primary critics are those who have been writing about CCHD for decades and the pro-lifers who form the Reform CCHD Now coalition – including American Life League and Human Life International. Would you dare suggest publicly that these groups have any agenda other than defense of the Catholic teaching that all human life, from the moment of conception to natural death? Or, would you deny that they are among the staunchest defenders of the Church and Her shepherds? I didn’t think so.

Which means the statement is rhetorical and self-protective. It doesn’t answer the allegations against CCHD; it shifts the discussion to “poor me…” well, OK, not you, per se, but to the “poor, harried bishops.” The poor, harried bishops – and I agree, the bishops have supernatural burdens – are charged with protecting the flock against wolves. That includes keeping foreign bodies at bay that distribute abortifacient contraceptives. Killing the poor doesn’t solve the problem of poverty.

Lastly, we come to the crux of your report – which reads like a list of resolutions, though the term isn’t used. You begin this section: “We are ROOTING CCHD clearly in the mission of Jesus Christ. We are anchoring the ongoing work of CCHD in Catholic social teaching.” (emphasis in the original)

We’ve heard this before. Tell us, instead, what is going to change in CCHD funding patterns? Are the not-at-all-grassroots Alinskyian organizing networks going to continue receiving a major percentage of Catholic grants?

“We are REVIEWING CCHD and its major elements to insure they fully reflect our Catholic principles and our unique mission of helping poor people help themselves and empowering them to improve their own communities.” That would seem to knock out those not-at-all-grassroots Alinskyian organizing networks, wouldn’t it…but will have to see.

“We are RENEWING CCHD, not by abandoning or shifting its mission or principles, but by looking for new ways to carry them out in challenging times and in a more diverse community of faith. … Much of CCHD’s work now focuses on immigrants and their struggles to live in dignity.” Much of CCHD-grantees work, in the area of immigration reform, focuses on amnesty for illegal immigrants. Is this Church teaching? Just asking…

“We will RECOMMIT TO CCHD and its unique mission, history and central place in the Church’s broader efforts to overcome poverty.” Well, again, that brings us to those pesky two questions about what constitutes the “root causes” of poverty and the “transformative education” required to address them. Answer these questions wrong, and you can produce a monster that is the very opposite of Catholic teaching.

LA CAN, if you asked its spokes-crew, would emphatically insist it wants to tear out root causes of poverty. Poor people need health care, right? LA CAN is supporting a health clinic to serve the poor, right? Too many children at “inopportune” times are burdensome to the poor, right? Um…right?

For the CCHD to be “the Gospel at work” or to be “faith in action,” it has to be the leaven in society that helps people see that other human beings aren’t burdensome. ..that the health needs of some can’t be procured at the “expense” – through the death – of others. Instead, for nearly 40 years, CCHD has compromised Catholic values for “half” goods.

We can do better than that, Bishop Morin.

Yours in Christ,
Stephanie Block

Stephanie Block is the editor of the New Mexico-based Los Pequenos newspaper and a founder of the Catholic Media Coalition.

Links: http://www.speroforum.com/a/22977/Refuting-the-nonrefutation-of-the-CCHD