CCHD Grantee Celebrated by US Bishops Caught Indoctrinating Immigrants in Homosexual Activism

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) tweeted yesterday encouraging support of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development’s (CCHD) upcoming special collection.  In the tweet, the USCCB made sure to point out that 25% of every dollar collected “will stay within your diocese for anti-poverty projects.”

What the USCCB failed to mention was that 75% of the collection is used to fund grants elsewhere in the US, including the horrible grantees we’ve already profiled this year including:

• CCHD’s $65,000 grant to VOICE Buffalo
• CCHD Grantee Leaders Supporting Planned Parenthood and LGBT agenda
• CCHD’s $25,000 grant to Just Economics
• CCHD’s $750,000 grant to LGBT-promoting Ignatian Solidarity Network (ISN)
• CCHD Claims LGBT-Promotion by ISN was “in line with the catechism.”
• CCHD’s 750k grant financed ISN’s pro-LGBT 2019 conference

This set of reports should be more than enough to prove to any bishops willing to listen that CCHD’s “rigorous screening process” is nothing more than a smoke screen and a farce, convincing any reasonable Catholic that 75% of their donation to the CCHD will not be in the hands of a good and faithful steward.

Unfortunately for the CCHD, there are still more grantees supporting grave evils such as abortion and homosexual activism; grantees the CCHD claims were rigorously screened. But in a supreme twist of irony, one of the CCHD’s own flyers promoting this coming weekend’s collection spotlights a grantee that would never have gotten through the CCHD’s “rigorous screening process” had it bothered to even conduct one at all.

A supporter of the Lepanto institute forwarded the following bulletin insert from their Louisiana parish.  In the bulletin, which is nothing more than a full page advertisement for the CCHD collection, the CCHD highlights its grantee called the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice (NOWCRJ).  It says, “Thanks to your generosity to the CCHD, the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice (NOWCRJ) was able to …”

One would suspect that if the CCHD is going to spotlight an organization as a reason to give to the CCHD, then they would make absolutely certain that there is nothing about this grantee that would be fodder for criticism.  Either that wasn’t the case in this instance, or the CCHD doesn’t believe there is anything wrong with the organization, even in light of the findings we are providing below.

NOWCRJ is a social justice and organizing group from New Orleans, Louisiana, that was funded by the CCHD ostensibly for their work in defending minority and immigrant workers from injustice and racism. However, NOWCRJ is NOT an organization any Catholic of good conscience should support due to its organizational support of grave evil. NOWCRJ has received $150,000 in grants since 2016, including $50,000 in the most recent grants cycle.

NOWCRJ Board

The Board of Directors for any organization is what sets the philosophy and organizational direction of the organization itself.  The board members themselves are the ones who make introductions and set policy with regarding to which individuals and groups the organization should work.  So, the actions and ideologies of any board of directors is very important for understanding the organization itself.

The board members of NOWCRJ are pro-abortion, pro-homosexual and socialist radicals.  Very briefly, we will focus on just three members (the majority) of the five-member board.

Crystal Plati

As is evident in the image below, Plati is a board member of NOWCRJ.

In just a short amount of time, our researchers were able to discover that Plati has also done work for Planned Parenthood and a number of other pro-abortion organizations. She is also currently serving as the interim director of the Funders for Reproductive Equity, a major pro-abortion funding organization.

Also indicated in this profile of Plati’s work history is that she was the Executive Director for Choice USA.  While in this position, she gave a speech at the Women’s March in Washington, DC on April 25, 2004.  In this speech, she explains the very simple plan for the passage laws for open access to abortion, contraception and sex education. Her plan is all about intersectionality (which will come into play later in this report), cross-pollinating various policy issues that are less contentious.  She said:

“We will get there by building a movement that is connected to other issues like economic justice; by ensuring the leadership of our movement reflects our communities; and by guaranteeing young people many seats at the table. How do we know we have won? When parental notification for abortion is eliminated; when lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth have equal access to health care … and when every high school student has comprehensive sex education in the classroom.”

You can see the entire speech, here:

John Cavanaugh

As indicated above, John Cavanagh is also a board member of the NOWCRJ.  In addition to this, he is the Executive Director for a radically pro-abortion, pro-LGBT organization called the Institute for Policy Studies.

His organization regularly publishes articles and reports that heavily promote abortion and sexual depravity.  For instance, in 2012, the IPS published an article titled, “The Fight Over Reproductive Rights,” which railed against the Catholic Bishops for being upset about the contraceptive mandate in Obamacare.  An article from October of this year declared that, “The Supreme Court Needs to Protect Trans People from Discrimination.” An article from May of this year cried that “Transgender People’s Rights Are in Peril.”  As the Executive Director of the organization since 1999, Cavanagh clearly approves of the messages going out under his leadership.

In addition to his leadership of a pro-abortion, pro-homosexual organization, Cavanagh is identified as one of the original founders of the Socialist “New Party,” which existed from 1994-1998.  Included in the New Party’s list of “principles,” it states:

To promote a rebirth of freedom, equality and prosperity, we dedicate ourselves to the following:

• In all aspects of our economy and social life, an absolute bar to discrimination based on race, gender, age, country of origin, and sexual orientation, and absolute security in reproductive rights, fundamental liberties, and privacy.

Ted Quant

Another board member for NOWCRJ is Ted Quant.  On facebook, Quant has heavily promoted transgenderism.

For instance, on November 9, 2019, Quant promoted a play called “Trans Scripts,” which glorifies transsexuality.

On November 16, Quant again promoted the production on facebook, saying:

Tomorrow night, (11/17) is opening night for the play Trans Scripts. Please join me in supporting and attending the play.

“In commemoration of those who are victims of gender genocide, suicide, and psychological confinement and in celebration of the warriors of the LGBTQ community who fight for equal rights and equal justice, Voices in the Dark Repertory Theatre Company is proud to present:

NWOCRJ’s Own Activities promoting abortion and homosexuality

NOWCRJ “likes” Spark Reproductive Justice Now, another pro-abortion organization on Facebook. This shows the mindset of NOWCRJ and is a red flag for future problems with this grantee.

A quick scan of NOWCRJ’s social media presence revealed other red flags as well.  Just hours before this article was set to be published, NWOCRJ posted about its participation in the Transgender Day of Remembrance.

On May 1, 2018, NOWCRJ posted on Facebook in support of transgender immigrant activism. This showed us that NOWCRJ is cross promoting homosexual activism with its immigration work:

The theme of “intersectionality” or merging morally good or issues such as dignity for immigrants and evil ones such as homosexual activism is one that comes up again and again with CCHD funded grantees. NOWCRJ went so far as to accept a grant from a major homosexual activism funding group to use immigration as a vehicle for pushing homosexuality.

From 2014-2017, NOWCRJ accepted funding from the LGBTQ Racial Fund to work with an homosexualist organization called BreakOUT. The grant announcement states that the grant will “more fully explore the deep connections and overlaps between immigrants, people of color, low-wage workers, LGBTQ people, and youth in New Orleans.”

Together, BreakOUT and NOWCRJ created a program called From Vice to ICE that is still hosted on NOWCRJ’s website. This program is all about homosexual activism and even includes a section on how to introduce people to homosexual activism. The Objective section is quite clear that the goal is to “build common ground between communities,” meaning the homosexual activism and racial/immigrant justice.

The exercises (pages 40-46) go so far as to equate the horrors of racial segregation with gender segregated bathroom policies, and also equates the injustice of the separation of immigrant families with the Defense of Marriage Act!

“Snapshot 3” immediately follows a section on racial injustice and includes transgender bathroom segregation in North Carolina as equal to racial segregation and injustice:

Later, in the same section, the exercise equates the separation of Chinese immigrant married couples with the Defense of Marriage Act which prohibited legal recognition of homosexual “marriage”:

This group exercise culminates in indoctrinating participants to accept the homosexual agenda as a necessary component of their work for justice. The exercise states: “Explain that just as oppression is linked and that many of the same tools are used to criminalize Black, immigrant, and LGBTQ communities and have a shared history, linked too is our resistance.”

To illustrate this point, the document on P. 38 highlights the story of an immigrant named Sol who was taken advantage of by a greedy employer. However, his work with NOWCRJ’s Congress of Day Laborers indoctrinated him on supporting the homosexual agenda.

This is a precious human soul that has been misled by an organization funded by YOUR Catholic funding.

It’s been nearly 10 years since the CCHD’s Review and Renewal, which was to be a firming up of the CCHD’s standards and oversight that even formally apologized “for the violations of CCHD policies by these groups and for the damage and confusion they have caused.”  It is clear that the Review and Renewal has been a complete failure, which is why we are calling on bishops to completely withdraw their diocese from the annual, national CCHD collection.

In partnership with Life Site News, we have created and launched a petition that you can sign, asking your own bishop to end your diocese’s relationship with the CCHD.  The link to the petition is here, or, you can simply click the red button below.