The Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), rhetorically oversold as the “U.S. Church’s anti-poverty program” – Do no other such programs exist? – was an interesting idea in its time. That time has passed. A new model is needed.
The American bishops created CCHD in 1969 as a kind of Catholic analog to Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs. At the time, many well-intentioned people believed that the increasingly severe problems of America’s inner cities could be solved by large infusions of federal cash. That cash often flowed through “community organizing” associations led by “community organizers.” In college, I did some work for one of those associations in my native Baltimore and enjoyed the friendship of several community organizers in the years I worked in a poor parish.
Billions of dollars of federal money did not solve the problems of impoverished urban communities, however, because of factors already identified in the 1965 Moynihan Report, which located many of the sources of urban deterioration in the breakdown of marriage and family structures: a cultural crisis not amenable to solution by cash. And as Great Society programs evolved, “community organizing” often led to radical politics, the catastrophic effects of which are now visible in cities like Chicago, home of “community organizing” as defined by the movement’s guru, Saul Alinsky, in his books Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals.
From the beginning, CCHD, which was funded by an annual collection taken up in all U.S. parishes, made community organizing on the Alinsky model a focus of its grant-making. No doubt that CCHD funding has done some good over the past half-century. But CCHD has also been a jobs program for community organizers paid by CCHD-funded organizations, some of which have a tenuous connection (if that) to the Catholic Church and her convictions.
And insofar as CCHD funds have supported community organizers whose chief accomplishment has been to radicalize the Democratic Party to the point where the once-traditional home of American Catholics has become a poisonous environment for Catholics who take seriously Catholic teaching on life issues and related matters, CCHD has paid, if indirectly, for anti-Catholic political activity.
No one expected this in the late 1960s. What began as a worthy effort has been subverted by a flawed paradigm of what “anti-poverty work” means. Now is the time for a reassessment and a paradigm shift (if I may use a term familiar to prominent CCHD supporters).
As proposed by Pope St. John Paul II in his epic 1991 social encyclical Centesimus Annus, the Catholic approach to anti-poverty work begins with an affirmation of the potential latent in the poor, and then seeks to unleash that potential through empowerment programs that inculcate and develop the virtues and skills necessary to participate in the networks where wealth is created and exchanged today. If that’s the Catholic anti-poverty paradigm, then we don’t need to invent new programs, and we don’t need to channel Saul Alinsky. We already have in place the most effective empowerment tool the American Church has ever devised: our Catholic schools.
By all empirical measures, Catholic schools outperform government schools in American inner-urban areas. Inner-city public schools are a national tragedy and a national disgrace, as they are typically run by self-serving teachers’ unions that are arguably the most reactionary force in American public life. Thus, my proposal: repurpose the Catholic Campaign for Human Development as the Campaign for Urban Catholic Schools, funded by a national collection. I guarantee that any such transformation would double, triple, or possibly quadruple the amount of money raised by CCHD, if the new campaign were properly promoted and run with transparency. I know I would quintuple what I used to give to CCHD, and I know many others who would do the same.
CCHD recently ran a $5.7 million deficit, which prompted a discussion of its future in an executive session of the U.S. bishops’ spring meeting in June. That discussion was leaked to conscience-lite journalists, oblivious to the sleaziness of anonymous sourcing, by equally conscience-lite bishops, willing to violate the norms of confidentiality that govern the bishops’ executive sessions. Nonetheless, serious conversation about CCHD’s future has now been opened. And it isn’t going away because of the political commitments of journalists or bishops.
It’s past time to repurpose CCHD. It’s an imperative work of justice for the U.S. Church to continue, indeed expand, its efforts to empower the poor through Catholic schools before they crumble under the terrible financial pressures they now face. The connection seems obvious. All that is needed is the episcopal will to act on it.
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I have had first-hand dealings with the CCHD of the USCCB. In my experience, the CCHD has corrupted the Catholic Church. It is a well-established agent of leftist politics and the Democrat-Socialist Party. Joe and Nancy Catholic Pewsitter have been taken for chumps by our feckless bishops. Don’t give them a dime of you money.
Since some portion of your weekly parish collection will find its way to your diocese and then to the USCCB and the CCHD, I’d strongly recommend to NEVER contribute to your parish’s weekly collection. Instead, write out a check specifically earmaked for a particular use at the parish or to go into a restricted account.
Excellent suggestion Deacon! This is what I do and encourage others.
Spot on, George, quality education IS the answer. St Patrick’s Academy in inner city Rhode Island is a good example of what can and should be done. This is a Catholic High school which charges no tuition to the majority of its students. Almost 100 percent of these students go on to graduate from college. One graduate in now in our minor seminary, and many are involved in the parish’s ministry and outreach. This school is more than a school, it is a community which shares and cares. The students are very involved in giving back to the community. Their long time pastor, who himself drove a food truck giving out free meals, has recently been made the Bishop of the state of Maine. This man is more interested in people than programs.
Excellent suggestion, Mr. Weigel.
Hopefully, when the next pope comes, our American bishops will make it happen.
Nice try George.
But money siphoned to those schools adhering to Ex corde Ecclesiae would never see the light of day.
Weigel reports the congruence of the CCHD with the Great Society thing (both 1969), and then proposes that an effectively repurposed CCHD would support financially strapped Catholic schools, as a better way of getting at poverty. Weigel also mentions the “Moynihan Report.”
After the 1960s, the Great Society, itself, was congruent with the so-called sexual revolution. Senator Moynihan wrote:
“[F]rom the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future—that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder. . . are not only to be expected, they are very near to inevitable” (The Moynihan Report, 1965).
Therefore, might a repurposed CCHD also notice that reduced family incomes usually come with broken and other single-parent families? “Families”? What’s that…
Even in the 1960s single-parent families were the major explanation of family poverty in Black communities. Even then, at the front of the sexual revolution, the Black illegitimacy rate was already 40 percent, a figure that today is now matched by the Caucasian majority. Today, among Blacks the illegitimacy rate has climbed to 70 percent. By the early 1980s it was reported that by age nineteen, eight of every ten males of all races and seven of every ten females in the United States have “had sex”; four of every ten of those teenagers had had at least one pregnancy.
The solution, “the pill,” abortion clinics and even as “giving men more freedom” (recently announced by gay guru Buttigeig), and now off-the-shelf Auschwitz pills (Mifepristone), plus a not-so-Great-Society $34 Trillion national debt, plus the seamless-garment “chaos” of Minneapolis-Seattle-Portland, and only then January 6, plus a gutsy Aztec political party versus a now-gutted competing party platform, and plus—of course—the redefinition of the marriage, the family and even human sexuality.
SUMMARY: A repurposed CCHD should shore up education and civilization much more broadly, even as a corrective to the front-office Fiducia Supplicans with its flippant (“non-liturgical, spontaneous”!) blessing of “irregular couples” of all stripes.
“When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (Psalm 11:3)
“All that is needed is the episcopal will to act on it.”
Yes, and there lies the ruinous nub. Let’s assume USCCB could overcome its own apostatic want of zeal. The next hierarchical level—akin to Alinsky’s community organizers— pastors and teachers in parochial schools, are not likely to preach and teach orthodox Catholicism. Between these knot-poles lies a larger deficit drain and more broken pipe-promises than the CCHD delivered.
How long has the USCCB been in existence? For all that time, what good has it delivered? In all sincerity, I pose the question.
The precursor to the USCCB was the National Bishops War Council, formed in 1917 to help World War I veterans. Much later, two newer and parallel organizations were formed, and recently merged into the USCCB (2001). See https://www.usccb.org/about/a-brief-history-of-usccb. This was a vast improvement if I recall correctly, since staff-driven initiatives now also were made more accountable to the bishops and structured priorities.
Also, however, the limited role of bishops’ conferences remains intact—not to replace the institutional and personal responsibility of each bishop for his diocese (Lumen Gentium, as further clarified under Apostolos Suos, 1998).
That is, unless multi-layered synodal ambiguity now fully superimposes national and continental bureaucracies….Is this outcome a risk under the expert study groups who, themselves, now have been superimposed atop the muddled Synod on Synodality? This is one fine riddle: an authentic geographical unity complementing the already-sacramental unity and accountability of the individual Successors of the Apostles!
We pray that (a) the study groups respect the difference between the Church’s magisterium and theologian-notions of the moment, and further, that (b) the Synod in some trustworthy way can fine-tune communal harmony between the ordained and the laity—of which the sidelined (!) Second Vatican Council made a start (Lumen Gentium + Gaudium et Spes).
Short of such graced and still possible outcomes, it’s not likely that wordy pigs with wings can replace the silent voice of the Holy Spirit.
Mr. Weigel makes an excellent and very sensible suggestion. As a senior citizen who attended Catholic schools in the 1950s, I can attest to their high quality. For over 70 years I have been drawing on that foundation, intellectually and spiritually.
One thing more – I grew up under the “old morality” – no sex until you were married to a person of the opposite sex, take responsibility of marriage, family, children seriously, don’t think about divorce but work out your marital problems within a Christian context.
So many personal problems and social ills arise from ignoring these norms. And sorry to say, the Church has thrown in the towel on the sexual revolution. Rarely does it teach these norms or discuss sexual sin and its impact on the vulnerable. We have a pope who doesn’t seem to think there is such a thing as sexual sins. And, in any event, to him it is no big deal; let’s bless everyone and not look too closely at their lives.
Along with reviving Catholic education for the poor, the bishops should revive the traditional teaching. When the traditional norms are ignored, it is the poor, women and children who suffer. Mr. Weigel is correct. There are certain problems money cannot solve.
Moral leadership is required.
Excellent comment, Francy. I totally agree with you and feel the same way on a daily basis by my excellent Catholic education 60 years ago. Thank you!
Conspicuously absent in the essay is the name of what we might understandably be permitted to label as “the-bureaucracy-that-must-not-be-named”(our very own and yet unmentionable USCCB).
The essay simply asserts that all of the grave problems manifested by the CCHD (including its bankruptcy and its funding of political people hostile to the Catholic faithful), are to be attributed to “a flawed paradigm of what ‘anti-poverty work’ means.”
Readers might observe that certain authors are often inclined to suggest that opinions contrary to their own are “not voiced by serious people.”
With the above homage to “seriousness” recalled to mind, I think that a more serious assessment might answer this essay by observing that the cause of the financial losses and anti-Catholic political activity by CCHD are not attributable to “false paradigms,” but are instead (TO BE PERFECTLY SERIOUS) attributable to the bishops, clerics and laymen working at the USCCB who have decades-long persisted in their tendencies to hold and keep to “false paradigms.”
The essay thus fails in appealing for a vote of confidence, as Mr. Weigel is apparently suggesting that parishioners should keep funneling their money to the USCCB, and the long-erring people at the USCCB “who persist in holding false paradigms” can now suddenly be trusted to do things that are not “bankrupt” and “anti-Catholic.”
As to “repurposing,” I recommend that “serious repurposing” might better start a bit further back, with “reconsidering” the purpose of the USCCB, as to what master it exists to serve, and whether it might better be “thoroughly overhauled” or perhaps “put to pasture.”
Societal breakdown is a result of the AntiChrist’s Freemasonic Cancel Christian Culture – imposed via their powerful media and school programmes. The culture clash is between the Modernism without and the infiltrated Modernism within the Church which has seized the throne.
As Synodal Superlodge project advances against the Catholic Church, we stand on the prow with Me Weigle as the full impact of the Post-conciliar Cancel Culture iceberg attains its objective to submerge the barque of St Peter.
As per the dream of Don Bosco, will she not miraculously re-surface? And will the Vestiges of a Catholic School system not once again play their role?
Broken families,& single parent homes common,ie.u sually moms.My dad died at home suddenly in ’64 from a heart attack,leaving mom with 13, & 19 yr.old sons to raise, and few $’s.Her strong faith in God got us thru it.She had Alzheimer’s 12 yrs.,dying @95.4 years with us,& 8 in long term care due to a fall, causing a broken koczic bone in her back.Faith in God is needed for families to survive life’s many trials.
We have to avoid “over-selling” the poor. It’s not faith to be like that.
Some have a VOCATION to be among the poor, Mother Teresa, St. Vincent de Paul.
Some are “set apart” to “meet the needs of the poor”, the first deacons in Acts.
Some of us come from among the poor and helping is a matter of the nature of circumstances.
Some of us have access to resources that allow the build-up of common resources the poor can access with ease.
Many of us practice generosity and pray it acts from the grace of a Christian charity that reaches to open-handed brotherly love and unstinting.
Some are called to go an extra mile or two depending on the situation.
It is wrong to transfix the Second Commandment in the name of the poor. Our Lord never did that and His instructions do not add up to that.
Preaching on the poor must reflect the variety of encounter and possibility. Preaching on the poor must reflect the breadth -scope, vision- in our Lord’s own preaching.
We must rely on our Lord’s Providence where He says the poor will always be with us.