US Bishops Take Up Anti-Poverty Collection Despite Lack of Transparency

The Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), the official anti-poverty program of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), formally states on the USCCB website that it “is committed to transparency and continues to publish a list of recent grantees online each year.”  Despite this commitment, however, the CCHD has refused to publish its grants list for over two years.  The Lepanto Institute has tried for over a year to contact CCHD officials, requesting publication of all grants lists from 2022-present, without any response, and this past weekend was the latest national collection for the CCHD.  What this means is that – once again – the CCHD reneged on its claimed commitment to transparency and asked Catholics to blindly contribute without knowing where the money is going.

From all outward appearances, the CCHD does nothing but pay lip-service to transparency and proper stewardship while deliberately hiding its list of grantees to avoid any scrutiny.  Why?  Because public criticism of CCHD grantees means fewer donations.  Earlier this year, the CCHD’s long-time executive director, Ralph McCloud, suddenly and inexplicably resigned under a cloud of suspicion regarding financial mismanagement.  CCHD assets have fallen from a cash reserve of around $55 million to around $8 million by 2022, and it is believed that by April of this year, the coffers were just about empty.  The annual collection has tumbled precipitously since 2016, when the Lepanto Institute began publishing annual reviews of CCHD grants.  The collection in 2016 was nearly $20 million, and by 2020 the collection had sunk to about $4 million.

The Lepanto Institute has sustained constant public pressure on the CCHD for nearly ten years, and through our efforts, we have helped Catholics all over the country see how CCHD funds are being used to promote abortion, contraception, LGBT ideologies, and Marxism.  But we aren’t the first to expose the grave funding errors of the CCHD – stalwart and faithful Catholics have been sounding the alarm on CCHD for decades.

One of the earliest criticisms of CHD (as it was called before the word “Catholic” was added to it in 1998) that I could find was a 1982 Op-Ed published in the El Paso Times.  Roman Varoz – a retired Army Lt. Col. and local Catholic parishioner – wrote a scathing rebuke of the CHD-funded organization called EPISO, which was an affiliate of Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF).  Noting that the CHD had given EPISO two grants of $50,000 each, Varoz wrote:

“EPISO is a creation of a few radical clergy and nuns who espouse a ‘new gospel,’ facetiously claim that they are as Marxist as Jesus Christ, and claim that they are committed to a free and open society based on the principles of American democracy.  They distort the gospel with political overtones, adhere to the Marxist ideas and methods and deceits of Alinsky and make a mockery of American democratic principles by denying the faithful their most basic rights and taking their donations for illicit purposes when they are given in good faith.”

What Varoz wrote strikes what would become a constant theme when it comes to CCHD-funded organizations.  Alinsky was indeed a Marxist who preached a constant revolution between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” applying the ideology of the ends justifying the means for the acquisition of power.  That this was being preached by both priests and nuns is appalling, but with the eyes of history on the CCHD, not altogether surprising.

In 1984, an article titled “Bishops Blast Reagan” appeared in the Lake Shore Visitor.  According to the article, two Texas bishops sent letters to President Ronald Reagan demanding he repudiate a document that was alleged to have been circulated by Thomas Paukin, a Reagan administration staffer.  According to the article, the 16-page document in question claimed that:

“funding from the Campaign for Human Development went to ‘organizations of the left-wing persuasion who seek fundamental, radical change in the American political economic system.’ … CHD-sponsored groups are ‘using our free enterprise system and our charitable impulse as a people to destroy our economic system.”

Again, the grave concern regarding the radicalization of the poor for the sake of political power is at the very heart of the problem.  A year later, Paulkin would publish a lengthy article in The Wanderer addressing CHD grants to ACORN and the IAF, asserting that both were Marxist in nature.

In November of 1989, the Richmond Times Dispatch published an editorial critical of CHD titled, “Charity or Political Activism?”  The article focused on a report by the Capital Research Center – a secular investigative think tank – recording several CHD grants going to pro-abortion organizations like the National Health Care Campaign and Marxist, pro-homosexual organizations like The Youth Project.  Four days later, the Dispatch published a letter by Bp. Sullivan, then bishop of the diocese of Richmond, defending the CHD against the editorial.  In Bp. Sullivan’s letter, he claimed that the charges leveled by the Capital Research Center had been discredited and are “without merit,” while simultaneously conceding that members of a CHD-funded coalition were indeed pro-abortion.  This sort of aggressive dismissal of concerns regarding CHD grantees would continue to be a theme for the years to come.

In 1996, the Wanderer published a 90-page booklet titled, “The Legacy of CHD,” which documented hundreds of millions of dollars from the CHD going to radical Leftist organizations.  That same year, the Baltimore Sun published an article indicating that the CHD provided funding to JEDI Women, 9 to 5 Working Women, and the National Health Care Campaign, all of which promoted abortion and contraception.  Incredibly, the CHD responded with a memo claiming that it “has never and will never fund a project not in accord with Catholic moral teachings.”

In 1998, the USCCB added the word “Catholic” to the name of the CHD making it the “Catholic” Campaign for Human Development.  The criticism of the CHD had grown so prominent that the USCCB saw a need to rebrand.

Despite the decades of published concerns and criticisms of the CCHD and its grantees, nothing ever seemed to change.  The collection would continue unabated, bishops would continue to solicit funds from unsuspecting parishioners, and only those who subscribed to conservative and Tradition-minded publications would even have a clue that there was anything wrong with giving to the CCHD.  But in 2009, that all changed.

With the advent of the internet and social media, information was suddenly much easier to acquire and share.  No longer reliant upon print media to carry a story, my colleagues and I were able to reach far more Catholics than ever before.  And what’s more, we came up with a new style of reporting the issues.

Up until our first investigations in 2009, the USCCB was able to dismiss concerns as “political” and allegations as “unsubstantiated.”  But our methodology turned all of that on its head.  Basing our research on moral issues like abortion, contraception, and LGBT ideologies, we were able to acquire direct links to the evidence.  And when the evidence would suddenly disappear after we reported it, we began supplying screenshots of our findings, proving beyond all doubt that what we alleged was substantiated.

With visual proof of our findings in hand, our detailed reports became shocking news in multiple Catholic news outlets.  Catholic News Agency, National Catholic Register, EWTN, Our Sunday Visitor, Relevant Radio, and even the ultra-liberal America Magazine, National Catholic Reporter, and US Catholic carried our reports.  Suddenly, there was no denying that the CCHD was indeed funding organizations pushing abortion, contraception, LGBT ideologies and even Marxism.

Within a year of reporting, the CCHD was forced to undertake what it called a “Review and Renewal” wherein the CCHD formally apologized “for the violations of CCHD policies by these groups and for the damage and confusion they have caused.”  The Review and Renewal was to be a firming up of the CCHD’s standards and oversight, even adopting a new stipulation that CCHD will not provide funding to “groups which are part of coalitions which act in conflict with fundamental Catholic moral and social teaching.”

But this was all smoke and mirrors.

From 2010-2013, I was personally in regular communication with Ralph McCloud and met with him in person several times to discuss our findings regarding CCHD grantees.  Our concerns were always met with a promise to investigate what we discovered and  provide answers, but neither promise was ever fulfilled.  In fact, in 2012 we sent the details of our latest report on CCHD grantees to every bishop in the US, eliciting an internal memo from USCCB’s “Mission and Identity Outreach Manager,” Dylan Corbett, sent to all diocesan CCHD directors.  The subject of the memo was “Recent allegations concerning CCHD funded groups.”  The opening of the memo says:

“As a mark good stewardship, each year CCHD publishes a list of groups which have received a CCHD grant. In recent years, grantees have been subject to exceptional scrutiny by organized pressure groups operating in exploitative ways.”

What this indicates is that the CCHD sees its duty to publish the most recent list of grantees each year as a sign of “good stewardship.”  And yet, the CCHD laments that there are organizations investigating its grantees, calling such organizations “pressure groups” engaging in “exploitation.”  The purpose of sending this information to all bishops was to alert them to a problem the staff seemed to be hiding from them.  Corbett called the report we sent “irresponsible criticism,” explaining that CCHD staff and diocesan directors are:

“investigating these claims responsibly, but prudence recommends considering them with reasonable skepticism based on a consistent track record of misreporting. As we work to adjudicate these claims, it has become evident that their near totality is based on false suppositions, tenuous connections and is repetitive of similar claims in the past.”

Note the tone of the memo.  Our report is “irresponsible,” but CCHD investigations are “responsible.”  Though we had produced these in-depth investigations for three years (forcing an apology from the CCHD and a commitment to improve their vetting process), Corbett called for “skepticism” due to our “consistent track record of misreporting.”  And though he asserted that they were in the process of investigating our reports, he claimed that our conclusions are “based on false suppositions, tenuous connections and is repetitive of similar claims in the past.”

This is par for the course for the CCHD.

What is happening now is quite clear.  The funds for the CCHD have nearly dried up, and the CCHD cannot continue if its collections fail to raise more funds.  Our reports have awakened American Catholics to the horror of what is being done with CCHD funds, causing the collection baskets to come back empty.  So, to avoid the scrutiny that would disrupt the collection, the USCCB feverishly rushed the national CCHD collection through this past weekend without informing faithful Catholics of how those funds have been used for the last two years, or how they are being used now.

This is a grossly dishonest practice at best!  Imagine telling faithful Catholics that your operation is fully transparent, that you publish a list of grantees every year, and that critics of CCHD grants are all wrong – while refusing to publish the list of grantees you are asking faithful Catholics to subsidize.

Enough is enough!  Call and email the grants specialist for your area (which you can find here) and your diocesan CCHD director/coordinator (which you can find here) and 1) ask why the CCHD grants list is two and a half years behind, and 2) demand that the CCHD grants list be published immediately.  Remind them of the CCHD’s stated commitment to “transparency” and its promise to publish the most recent list every year.  And when you receive a response, please let us know.  If the CCHD can’t even uphold its promise to be transparent and publish its most up-to-date grants list, then what other promises is it breaking?