CFP Letter to Editor re: CCHD

March 29, 2010
cfpnews@catholicfreepress.org
fax: 508 756-8315

I found wisdom beyond her years in the words of Holy Name exchange student Jingyang Zhang in last week's CFP page 7 article Student projects help CCHD tell its story... Jingyang said, “we can never completely solve the problem of poverty if we neglect the personal touch of friendship, care and love.” The poor will always be with us: we should also always be with them.

I believe Jingyang's words underscore the Church's teaching on Subsidiarity. How can we have that personal touch in charity dispensed on a national instead of a local level? This I fear is a flaw in the very organization this article intended to promote, The Catholic Campaign for Human Development, (CCHD), a national organization that appears to be “acting like [a] mailman, delivering the material goods to [the poor] without thinking about the way of bringing them a hope fulfilled future.” And doing so without proper accountability.

The "Catholic" Campaign for Human Development, CCHD has a charter to donate to politcal and non-Catholic organizations that "work with the poor". In 2008 the CCHD had to stop funding for the voter fraud and prostitute promoting group ACORN (we await the forensic accounting report to determine if any of CCHD's $7.3Million was embezelled or misused by ACORN). In 2009, CCHD granted money to 31 pro-abortion groups aligned with the Center for Community Change (CCC). After calls from Bellarmine Veritas Ministry, CCHD defunded anti-life/pro-abortion groups such as the Chinese Progressive Association of San Fransico, which also supports same-sex marriage, the Rebecca Project for Human Rights, which worked with Planned Parenthood to sign a "wish-list" of reprductive rights, and Young Workers United, which in addition to same-sex marriage and abortion also promotes legalizing prostitution and whose 2008 Voting Guide counsels voters to vote against parental notification of abortion for minors.

However, the Los Angeles Community Action Network, LA CAN, remains funded by CCHD even though LA CAN members worked with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force campaign to defeat Proposition 8, which repealed the right for same-sex couples to marry in California.

The CCHD continues to fund a long list of grantees, including PICO and the Woman's Community Revitalization Project, who actively promoted health care reform while never qualifying that health care reform should explicityly exclude federal funding for abortion. So now, in 2010, we have Health Care with taxpayer funded abortions. Government funded Abortion was deemed the only issue more important that healthcare reform itself.

Why are we even discussing donations to CCHD after all this? As Fr. Richard John Neuhaus (RIP) has said "The bishops could really help poor people by promptly shutting down [C]CHD and giving any remaining funds to, for instance, Catholic inner-city schools." The CCHD should either be completely overhauled or eliminated.

Jay G