Catholic campaign for human development: Still entranced by leftist activism, despite growing unrest

Human Events, Nov 10, 2000 by Lopez, Kathryn Jean

What's Needed Is a New Direction,

Some things never change. The Catholic Campaign for Human Development has sought to remake its image with a name change and stricter guidelines for its grants to antipoverty efforts. But despite its pledge to "help people help themselves," the annual program run by the Roman Catholic bishops still favors groups that advocate government programs or blame the free market for their woes.

For the past 11 years, the Capital Research Center has taken a jeweler's eye to the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), the American Catholic bishops' contribution to the Great Society. After a name change-it was founded in 1970 as the Campaign for Human Development-and a new set of guidelines, the campaign has struggled to clean up its reputation for funding class warfare and radical activism, but there are no clear signs that the campaign has shifted direction, except to avoid grantees that publicly violate Catholic moral teaching.

Every year, usually on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, Roman Catholic parishes around the country take up a special collection to fund CCHD. A national office in Washington, D.C., awards grants to more than 250 projects each year. Most dioceses keep 25% of the collection to fund hundreds of smaller local projects.

Through CCHD, unwitting Catholic parishioners have often funded leftist groups and causes, some already amply blessed with federal funding. Despite CCHD's promise to "help people help themselves," grants never go to "direct service programs" but to "poverty groups which work toward systemic change, economic strength and political power," according to CCHD materials. CCHD says funded "projects" must concern "a distinct constituency (e.g., a neighborhood, seniors, Blacks, Hispanics, women, handicapped) and/or a distinct issue or series of issues (e.g, hazardous waste, housing, tribal recognition, community development)."

In the past, some CCHD grantees have been involved in projects that are clearly contrary to what Catholics believe. Yet every year Catholics give millions to CCHD.

First Things Editor the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus has explained that parishioners continue to give "[n]ot because they know much or anything about CCHD, but because the church asks them to and they trust the church."

Its twofold purpose, according to the Campaign, has been to fund "organized groups of white and minority poor to develop economic strength and political power" and to "educate the People of God to a new knowledge of today's problems ... that can lead to some new approaches that promote a greater sense of solidarity."

But problem-solving is a role CCHD tends to reserve for government, and "solidarity" commonly means union organizing and grassroots lobbying in the style of 1960s radical Saul Alinsky.

CCHD from its onset "downplayed the traditional principle of subsidiarity" that had once been a guide in Catholic economic and social thought, historian Michael Warner explains in Changing Witness: Catholic Bishops and Public Policy. 1917-1994.

Subsidiarity, a principle embraced beyond the Catholic Church by advocates of individual freedom and limited government, was defined by Pope John Paul II in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus as a "community of a higher order [such as government] should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order [such as family or the workplace], depriving the latter of its function, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activities with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good."

That philosophy was questioned in the 1960s, as even the highly traditional Catholic Church was swept away with the promise of grassroots activism and "Big Government" social programs.

But Neuhaus thinks CCHD may be more willing than ever to try a new approach: "The critiques that have been launched in the last couple of years have made a difference, and have focused the attention for the bishops." (See previous years' reports on CCHD in "Organization Trends" at www.capitalresearch.org.)

In what some believe was a crackdown on the organization, the bishops issued a name change for the Campaign in April 1998, calling it, for the first time, "Catholic." A year following the nominal change, there came new guidelines to ensure CCHD's grants would not overtly conflict with Catholic moral doctrine.

That marked a fundamental divergence from previous-policy,which permitted grants to organizations so long as their "primary or substantial thrust" was not contrary to Catholic teaching.

The new guidelines specifically forbid the awarding of grants to applicants who "promote or support abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty, or any other affront to human life and dignity."

But since these changes were made, CCHD seems to have plodded along the same weary course. Efforts this year to find encouraging signs at the diocesan level yielded very little, after diocesan officials refused to turn over grant lists and issued broad defenses of the program.