USCCB Under Fire

Michael Voris is DEAD ON to the dereliction of duties by certain bishops at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The USCCB is corrupt and needs to be re-organized from top to bottom, ASAP!

Bishop Morin caught not-telling the truth, again.

Sad.

Millstones fit just as easily on the heads of the laity as on the heads of the clergy, friends.

It’s the CCHD thing all over again, along with a little bashing of the USCCB and the bishops.

Well, as I see it, the big problem with the sort of Catholicism that Mr. Voris seems to subscribe to is that its political formation is rooted in American Conservatism rather than Catholic Social Doctrine. To me, the CCHD is a beautiful implementation of the principles of subsidiarity and participation. Yes, it needs to have greater scrutiny of funding.

Yet American conservatism cannot stand CCHD, even a CCHD whose funding had better oversight.

Nate,

If you feel comfortable donating your time and treasure to an organization that funds the death of innocent human beings, then so be it.

You can view your faith through a political prism, we view our faith as Catholics first, everything else second.

Nate,

With all due respect, the political views of Mr. Vorhis are completely irrelevant. Facts are facts.

Perhaps Tito’s description is a bit hyperbolic, but it appears that the USCCB and CCHD are complicit in pro-abortion activities on some level.

I’m willing to chalk it up to ignorance and perhaps even lazyness rather than malice – I don’t see why the USCCB would intervene as it did in the health care debate if it secretly thought promoting abortion was a good thing.

Motives aside, it is a problem. And you really can’t invoke CST to apologize for this level of incompetence. A strict adherence to CST would have meant, as you say, greater scrutiny of funding, to ensure that anti-life messages which are directly contrary to its core principles were not connected in any way. It is a failure of CST that has taken place here.

Joe, I agree that it is ignorance if not laziness, and that it is certainly a problem. But we have to remember that each and every CCHD grant to a local organization must be approved by the local bishop. The national grants must be approved by the USCCB bishops. This isn’t a failure of CST, but of people.

But here’s my point – the criticisms leveled against CCHD and the bishops are not about fixing some funding problems, but about dismantling the USCCB itself. This depth of criticism is, I believe, is rooted in an American Conservatism that rejects much of the Bishops’ teachings when it comes to politics and society. Almost every USCCB document, for example, is routinely scorned by American Conservatism. The small mistakes made by the CCHD are being used to fuel long-standing criticisms of the Catholic Bishops, especially in respect to social issues.

I believe it is a great scandal to attack the CCHD and the USCCB. I do not believe one innocent child was aborted because a handful of organizations did some small campaigning for local democratic candidates. But I do believe many families will be hurt by those who wish to destroy the CCHD.

Tito, I’m not sure I understand what you are talking about. I had a good exchange with Stephan Phelan, who has been leading the boycott against CCHD, and he admitted that his opposition to the CCHD went further than bad funding:

“the CCHD’s paradigm no longer comports with the sort of development that JPII and B16 have increasingly called for.

The CCHD’s paradigm is based on a secular leftist worldview, seeing poverty itself as an evil to be eradicated, and seeking worldly ends which only bear a superficial resemblance to the ends of authentic Catholic Charity. There’s a reason Christ never sought wordly “empowerment” for those who loved and followed him.”

Anyhow, Stephen did make some good points about how we fund organizations when usually they are either liberal or conservative, yet Catholics are Catholic. Do we support pro-family yet pro-war groups? Do we support groups that work against poverty while also advocating abortion? I’d advocate supporting cooperative businesses that are apolitical, and CCHD does quite a bit of that already. Joe, I’d figure you’d be very supportive of such funding: http://www.usccb.org/cchd/grants/edgengrant.shtml

It’s beautiful!

Read some of these stories:
http://www.usccb.org/cchd/grants/featurearchive.shtml