What Brought the Church in America to its Deplorable State?

Silence on contraception. If Humanae Vitae had been proclaimed loud and clear from its release in 1968 we would not be battling on all these other fronts today. And if the bishops had been committed to preaching the truth on contraception, they would never have funded all these evil groups that are in bed with the family planners. We would not be seeing headlines like this:

U.S. bishops’ relief agency gives $5.3 million to major contraception-providing charity

The U.S. bishops damage control apparatus is in high speed trying to explain away this latest abomination, but they can't. The fact is that CRS has a long history of supporting contraception. Catholic World Report did an expose by Germain Grisez in 2008 about their condom promotion and tainted AIDS education project working again with "partners" who are adamantly opposed to the Church. 

Jon Merrill who has worked in humanitarian programs in Africa is highly critical of CRS and its entanglement with government that leads to funding moral evils. Here's what he wrote in a February article on SperoForum.com:

I have worked on and off in Africa, for “humanitarian” organizations, for some thirty years, during both Republican and Democratic administrations, and I have not seen that the U.S. Government’s efforts to promote the sexual revolution – with the willing cooperation of the U.S. bishops’ own overseas “humanitarian” organization, and of other “Christian” subcontractors – has varied much in intensity over those years. The “foreign aid” agencies of both the U.S. federal government and the USCCB (the latter a contractor of the former) are both “owned” and staffed by either secularists, or by fellow-traveling-sexual-revolutionist “Catholics” and other vaguely “faith-motivated” types. Regardless of the particular ideology of the sitting president or of the very-theoretical anti-sexual-revolution stance of the bishops, those agencies find ways to effectively advance the sexual revolution. Personnel is policy.

In view of the serious problem with their international relief programs, is it any wonder the bishops' domestic "charity" program, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), is so bad? The only way this will end is for a new Catholic charity to form that 1) takes no government money, 2) hires real Catholics to run it, and 3) funds ONLY Catholic groups that are totally committed to the teachings of the Church. There are so many Catholic missionaries around the world, why should we be funding secular groups anyway? Isn't the most important thing we have to share our faith?

Sunday Meditation: The Unkindness of Friends

I was reflecting today about those who really have the power to hurt us. It isn't strangers, goodness knows. Most of us couldn't care less about what they think. But when someone close to us, a family member or someone we thought of as a friend, hurts us, says cutting or unkind words or judges us in the most negative light...well, that's when words cut like a knife. And that's when relationships break down sometimes never to be mended.

How often do we say mean things to someone, sometimes in front of others which adds to the humiliation. How often do we feel justified because we believe our assessment is the true one?

For the rest of Advent I want to keep close guard over my tongue and examine my conscience to see where I have used that "little member" to hurt instead of heal. God gave us the gift of speech to uplift and build up the body of Christ. May we never use it like St. James warns as "a restless evil, full of deadly poison." One of the first obligations of the Christian is control over the tongue. God help us if we fail in that and use our tongue instead to see "how great a fire it kindles."

Non Catholic Catholic Charities: Straight Talk on Caritas

Most national and international Catholic charities today reflect the thinking of the world and not the Church. Pope Benedict is trying to resurrect their Catholic identity but has an uphill struggle as the article below indicates. Here are a few excerpts:

Yet on my own many trips to Africa with Catholic Relief Services, for example, it was not uncommon to hear locals refer to them as the “non-Catholic Catholic agency.” (Imagine what they say about CAFOD – the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development).


African bishops would tell me (after my talks about AIDS) how surprising it was to hear a young Western CRS employee speak the common Catholic language, whereas my superiors back in Baltimore told me that I would change my thinking about the way we should approach AIDS prevention – that I’d begin to oppose Church teachings – once I spent yet more time in Africa. That Caritas’ new motto, “One Human Family – Zero Poverty” – platitudinous, vapid, quintessentially secular-NGO-ish – also doubles as the title of their strategic plan for the next four years should dispel any notion that striking reforms will occur overnight.  “Business as usual”, it’s fair to surmise, will prevail within many of the Caritas member agencies for some time to come.  Read the complete article here.

Stop, Mary! Boycott CCHD!

Busy Bigot Democrats Bash Catholics in Minnesota!

Not just Catholics, but specifically Catholic priests as you can see from the photo at left. The priest's button reads "Ignore the Poor." Can you imagine the uproar if a group of Republicans sent out a postcard attacking rabbis in yarmulkas and prayer shawls? Or Muslim imams in turbans? The liberal media would be frothing at the mouth with indignation. As for the button, the Catholic Church gives more money to the poor than any other denomination. This is nothing but a disgraceful slur on both Catholic priests and Catholic laity. In fact, it looks like hate speech to me.

But apparently the post card bigotry hasn't aroused even a whisper in the mainstream media. A google search on the issue didn't provide one secular outlet in Minnesota or anywhere else about the bigoted campaign. But there were plenty of articles criticizing Archbishop Nienstedt's refusing Communion to homosexual activists. Interesting, eh?


For more on this see: Minnesota Democrats distribute anti-Catholic postcard