The Catholic Campaign for Human Development Serves Up Tainted Alphabet Soup

Every year around Thanksgiving, there is a brief kerfuffle in the U.S. Catholic Church. At that time, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) sends out its annual appeal asking for special collections for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), the bishops’ program that awards millions of dollars to “grassroots” community groups that “work for justice” and “address the root causes of poverty.” Simultaneously, concerned Catholic laymen crank up their blogs and start their annual buzz about the leftward tilt of the grantees and the urgent need to “boycott CCHD.”

In 2011 it happened again, but in a strikingly new context. The controversy took place amid a series of unprecedented political attacks on Catholic institutions that threaten their identity and even their existence — attacks that emanated from state capitals and Washington, D.C.

The long-term “Catholic strategy” of the secular statists, who enjoy dominant social and political power at the moment, appears to be to undermine and dismantle the institutional presence of the Catholic Church in the U.S. The statists include the present presidential administration and its allies who are committed to the culture of death. They will not and cannot tolerate those who believe life begins at conception, that it is sacred, that abortion is a “moral evil” and a “criminal practice” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 2271, 2274), and that human sexual differentiation (“male and female He created them”) has, by God’s design, an intrinsic orientation toward marriage, fertility, and family.