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Published: November 18, 2009
Reforming the Catholic Campaign for Human Development
What You Can Do
Editor: The following announcement comes from the website www.reformcchdnow.com.
Every year on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, many Catholic parishes take up a second collection for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.
Recognize that organization? If you don’t, you should. Here’s why:
Until 2008, the campaign had been funding ACORN for several years, giving over $7 million to the corrupt organization. The same organization that is being investigated for voter fraud, embezzlement, and other wrongdoing was recently caught in undercover videos in recent months helping a pimp and prostitute set up a business and traffic underage girls for prostitution.
It doesn’t end there. The Catholic Campaign for Human Development has funded groups that openly oppose the Church’s teachings, including:
- Young Workers United – supports abortion rights, legalized prostitution and gay marriage.
- The Chinese Progressive Association (San Francisco) – supports abortion rights and gay marriage, actively urging its members to vote against Prop 8 in California, which would define marriage as between a man and a woman.
- People Improving Communities through Organizing – currently campaigning for the a version of healthcare reform, which has government-funding of abortion and does not protect the conscience rights of medical professionals who decline to perform or refer for abortions.
Learn more from the Bellarmine Veritas Ministry's exposition of the funded groups. For more information and for the Catholic Campaign's response to these charges, click here.
The Catholic Campaign for Human Development has not directly funded abortion, or any explicitly anti-Catholic project to our knowledge. It has also funded groups which legitimately serve and represent the poor and marginalized.
But it is hard to believe repeated assurances that the campaign always carefully vets its grantees given both its history and its continued funding of groups which openly oppose the Catholic Church's teachings on social justice, family and life issues. This must stop.
Do you want your money going to the CCHD on November 22nd?
It's time that we sent the CCHD a message.
Will you join us?
This year, instead of cash or a check, download and print out this coupon and put it in the November 22nd annual CCHD special collection at your parish. The coupon explains that your financial support will resume once the CCHD demonstrates that it will work only directly support groups that are in agreement with Catholic teaching on social, family and life issues.
Click here for coupon.
Posted Wednesday, November 18, 2009 4:36 AM By 4unborn
Bishop Paul Loverde of Arlington, Virginia, sent a letter to the priests of Arlington suggesting that he was considering canceling this year's collection in light of the heavy criticism the CCHD has received for funding groups that espouse causes such as abortion and same-sex marriage. "After much research and consultation, I have decided to authorize the collection again this year," he said. He also ask his priests not to make any "negative commentary."
Bishop Loverde is another example of the bishops trying to stop people, in this case, priests, from questioning what they say and do.
Listening to the press conference after yesterday's bishop conference, the head of CCHD admitted that there were two dioceses which do not have a CCHD collection, but he said that he did not "have the names."
I plan to call and/or e-mail EWTN at 6pm on Friday (The World Over) with the following question:
Raymond, due to EWTN not being allowed to telecast the bishops conference, will EWTN be more cautious in sometimes questioning what the bishops say and do?
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Posted Wednesday, November 18, 2009 10:03 AM By Laurette Elsberry
I like the coupon idea. It reminds me of pseduo-currency I have seen from time to time - a green dollar bill-sized notice that says "No dogma - no dollars", dropped in the collection basket.....Maybe this "Reform CCHD Now" coupon would be more effective if copies were made on green paper...... In the current state of the Catholic Church, I doubt that CCHD can be reformed. It would be better to chuck it entirely, but for now, let the pastors and bishops know that we will not support this blood-sucking organization.
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Posted Wednesday, November 18, 2009 10:32 AM By Layperson
Time to support our bishops and priests! We do this as laypersons by freeing them from the shackles imposed by Marxist pressure groups like CCHD, PICO, ACORN, PIA. Stand up and say, "No." Authentic Catholic teaching is too valuable, too comprehensive, and too charitable to be polluted by this theo-humanist drek. Topple that "money-changers table" (rhetorically).
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Posted Wednesday, November 18, 2009 10:49 AM By Gil
Just as a suggestion: for several years I have put a note in the second collection saying that I do not support left-wing political outfits. I send a check for what I would otherwise give to the CCHD to the Missionaries of Charity, who still observe Mother Teresa's rule never to ask for money, but to rely entirely on God. Since I am not subject to her rule, there's no reason I can't ask FOR them, right? For anybody's convenience, they're at 164 Milagra Dr., Pacifica CA 94044.
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Posted Wednesday, November 18, 2009 10:52 AM By Abeca Christian
I found this information very helpful. Thank you.
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Posted Wednesday, November 18, 2009 10:57 AM By Tom Amadeo
Can anyone give me a valid,logical reason for the continued existence of the USCCB ? "Their good works," is not an acceptable response.Many evil organizations do many good works---mostly as a disguise. As for as the "works"of the USCCB,one way or another,the benefits go mostly to the bishops themselves. Nice life they live,spending your money as they see fit. Of course,that is after paying huge money settlements pertaining to the ongoing sex scandal--a scandal in which many of them are involved personally,and which might have been precuded had they done their jobs as "episcopos",the overseers.I don't need or want them to manage my money. Much like the Freemasons,or La Cosa Nostra,the USCCB is a secret society. Frank Keating pegged them correctly in 2003.
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Posted Wednesday, November 18, 2009 11:30 AM By pete
It ALWAYS happens that when people create huge and expensive bureaucracies, inevitably such things escape the notice of the chief executive over time,
The bishops have been long removed from examining the need for such huge and expensive bureaucracies, that are the chosen instruments of leftists to remake the world in the image of their MENTAL and UNREAL ideology. So instead of actually giving grants to specific concrete needs, like keeping open schools for the inner city poor -- have you noticed that those religious orders founded to do just that now mostly teach the well healed?-- they give to AN ORGANIZATION that is supposed to deal with UNDERLYING ROOT CAUSES OF POVERTY etc. Our Lord's words do not impress them "The poor you will always have with you.." They are attempting to do the impossible by putting in place SYSTEMS instead of actually relieving actual needs! And the "saving souls" part of the equation at the same time of aiding the temporal needs is just forgotten.
The inspiration for all this is basically marxist in its "solution" to root causes of poverty: ie. love humanity in the abstract (feed a secular organization) and that will supposedly take care of concrete human beings!
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Posted Wednesday, November 18, 2009 11:40 AM By Dave N.
The CCHD wines and dines the bishops at the bishops' conferences. And it generally works since apparently only two bishops have the nerve to question it.
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Posted Wednesday, November 18, 2009 1:18 PM By WOODY GUIDRY
WOULD YOU BE SURPRISED if a lay person making announcements at Mass would announce the CCHD collection and sort of mumble, "Whatever THAT is?" I hear sneaky things like "pray for more inclusive language prayers", "pray for a cap and trade answer to climate warming", etc., and I realize we do have our ways to infiltrate. The congregation sings out, "Lord, hear our prayer", and the bus speeds away for the next stop. Fist fights may be the next freedom we exercise in church-or maybe we should stay awake during prayers for the people.
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Posted Wednesday, November 18, 2009 4:58 PM By Kenneth M. Fisher
I am very happy to announce that "Concerned Roman Catholics of America, Inc." has joined our brothers and sisters at "Reform CCHD Now" in their great apostolate.
We learned about them through our Affiliation with "Catholic Media Coalition".
God bless, yours in Their Hearts,
Kenneth M. Fisher
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Posted Wednesday, November 18, 2009 4:59 PM By cjo
In case you missed it..."4unborn's" blog above.. it apprears that the USCCB cancelled EWTN's coverage of their conference this week. Hmmm, these are our shepherds--were they playing "'getting even" for Raymond Arroyo telling the truth ????
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Posted Wednesday, November 18, 2009 5:04 PM By Dan
Gil, another group worthy of our support in lieu of dollars to CCHD would be Foor for the Poor. It was a Missionary of Charity years ago in Los Angeles who recommended them to me.
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Posted Thursday, November 19, 2009 3:43 PM By John F. Maguire
In 1985, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger observed that: "The decisive new emphasis on the role of bishops is in reality restrained or actually risks being smothered by the insertion of bishops into episcopal conferences that are ever more organized, often with burdensome bureacratic structures. We must not forget that the episcopal conferences have no theological basis, they do not belong to the structure of the Church, as willed by Christ, [they have no place] that cannot be eliminated; they have only a concrete, practical function." Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, _The Ratzinger Report_ (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1985). Given the reality to which Cardinal Ratzinger refers, the United States Catholic Conference -- today more than ever -- should return to its concrete, practical and, yes, eliminable function in service of the Church's bishops whose captaincy, by divine right, the USCCB can never trump.
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Posted Thursday, November 19, 2009 4:11 PM By John F. Maguire
In reply to Tom Amadeo: In my prior post, I quoted Cardinal Ratzinger's account of the perfectly eliminable and truly merely practical role of the national episcopal conferences in the life of the Church, not least the Unted States Conference of Catholic Bishops in the life of the Church in the United States. At the same time, however, Cardinal Ratzinger's critique of national bishops conferences in no way supports your diatribe against such conferences -- or rather, your diatribe against the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in particular. Your comparison of the USCCB with secret societies -- you mention the Freemasons and the Cosa Nostra -- is over-the-top. Mr. Amadeo, membership in secret societies on the order of the Masons and the Cosa Nostra is an excommunicable offense. Surely you do not want to suggest that episcopal membership in the USCCB is an excommunicable offense, even if the suggestion is on the basis of your notion that the USCCB is "much like" these, and just these, secret societies. ~ My objection to your post is that, in its alienation, it voices an anti-episcopal affect that seems to me difficult to square with sound ecclesiology, not to say a sense of proportion.
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Posted Thursday, November 19, 2009 7:11 PM By Tom Amadeo
JFM---my over the top referrence to the USCCB as being likened to the Cosa Nostra is shared,indeed authored by Frank Keating in the NY Times,when he was deposed by the USSCB,after they appointed him to try the clean up their act! He got too close to the truth for them. You have spun my statement suggesting some similarity between the actions of the USCCB and the Cosa Nostra into my possibly proposing that membership in the USSCB is an excommunicable offense! Oh,no sir! But on the other hand,maybe you have hit on something.Perhaps I might suggest this:while excommunication is not incurred by joining the USCCB,membership does not necessarily exclude excommunicants.My "anti-episcopal"affect is not directed to the offices of bishop,but there are those occupying those offices who do not belong there.Hey! Judas was one of the Twelve Apostles.So I say to you,Mr.Maguire,that in the time of Our Lord,the local Conference of Bishops was none other than the Twelve Apostles,the successorships of which are claimed by none other than the USCCB.There are indeed many successors of Judas and those are the ones for which I am "anti-episcopal." I want them treated as God dealt with Judas Iscariot. Try that on for your sound ecclesiology,and proportion.Surely you do not want to suggest we follow Judas.But was he not an apostle?
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Posted Thursday, November 19, 2009 8:27 PM By JLS
Woody, have you searched for a traditional Mass that you can go to?
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Posted Thursday, November 19, 2009 8:30 PM By JLS
pete, when a diocese hires all sorts of bureaucrats and employees, it is thus taking the poor off the streets. Now only if they would educate these bureaucrats.
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Posted Friday, November 20, 2009 6:50 AM By Dolores
I tried clicking on to "click here for coupon", and it would not work. I would love to get this coupon to send a message to my parish.
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Posted Friday, November 20, 2009 3:30 PM By John F. Maguire
In reply to Tom Amadeo: To cooperate formally in the sin of any prelate is itself a sin.
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Posted Friday, November 20, 2009 5:48 PM By JLS
What about stuffing the collection plates with coupons?
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Posted Sunday, November 22, 2009 4:38 PM By John F. Maguire
In reply to Tom Amadeo: You pose an important question: Wasn't Judas an Apostle? I've noticed your same question asked in this way: Was Judas TEMPORALLY ELECTED by Our Lord Jesus Christ to the Apostolic cohort of Twelve? For example, Fr. Cornelius a Lapide refers to Judas's
"temporal election" by which Christ, "as man, chose the twelve Apostles, and Judas also among them." Lapide's proof-text is Luke 6: "'He called unto him his disciples; and He chose twelve of them (whom He also named apostles) [Luke 6]' and [Lapide points out] among the twelve was Judas." At issue here then is the election of Judas to the apostolate (on this point, Lapide cites Toletus and Maldonatus as authorities) -- all, adds Lapide, "as if He said, 'I know whom and what manner of men I have elected to be Apostles; I know and have known which ones will be worthy of it, and who will not; who will persevere, and therefore will be blessed, and who will not; I know those who will do these things that I have said, and who will not, just as I know and have known that Judas, having been chosen by Me, would not do these things, but be My betrayer. Therefore I did not choose him in ignorance as an Apostle, as though I did not know that he would betray me; rather I foreknew and foresaw quite well that he would betrary Me; nevertheless, I chose him so that I might use his malice for the common good, so that through him, My passion might be fulfilled, and through it the salvation and redemption of mankind." Cornelius a Lapide, _Commentary on the Holy Gospel of Saint John_, vol. 4, _The Great Commentary_, translated by Thomas W. Mossman, revised and completed by Michael J. Miller (Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire: Loreto Publications, 2008), pp. 258-59.
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