This week's meeting of the United States bishops received a stern warning from the president of the Pontifical Council "Cor Unum," that charitable institutions that are recipients of Catholic funds must not sell their souls by supporting causes that offend Catholic morals. According to a National Catholic Reporter article, Cardinal Paul Josef Cordes told bishops that Catholic charities must not become “indistinguishable from secular organizations such as UNICEF, the Red Cross, and others.”
The Cardinal also took the opportunity to applaud particular organizations for their fidelity and generosity, naming Catholic Charities USA, Catholic Relief Services, the Saint Vincent De Paul Society, and the Third Order Franciscans.
Amid their success in generating funds, the cardinal said that such institutions must be particularly “vigilant about their side-effects.”
“Charitable organizations must not forget the Christian meaning of their activity, influenced by the present philanthropic climate or by excessive reliance on public funds,” said Cordes, who emphasized that Catholic charity should primarily be a “sign of God’s goodness.”
According to Cardinal Cordes, Cor Unum, the Vatican agency overseeing the church's charities around the globe, has organized a cycle of spiritual exercises grounded in Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical Deus Caritas Est. The exercises are designed to help Catholic charity organizers root their efforts in the Pope's theocentric doctrine of charitable activity.
The cardinal's talk elaborated on Catholic charity as springing from the faith of the Church and the example of Christ, rather than from abstract philanthropic motivations.
“The first aim is not to change society and structures, but the human heart, which is the foundation for those structures,” Cordes said.
Cardinal Cordes issued his remarks in the wake of a scandal in which it was revealed that the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) had supplied considerable funding to ACORN, the network of local community groups now notorious for boosting Barack Obama's campaign through widespread voter registration fraud. The bishops' meeting plans to discuss the future relationship between the US church and CCHD, which benefits from an annual collection in American parishes.
U.S. Catholic Charities have also recently been embroiled in controversy, with Catholic-funded adoption agencies being pressured to allow adoptions to homosexual couples, contrary to Church moral teaching. LifeSiteNews.com reported that San Francisco Catholic Charities director Brian Cahill violated Church teaching by refusing requests to prohibit homosexual adoptions, and monetarily supported homosexual "marriage" in California's campaign against Proposition 8.
A Catholic charity in the Richmond, VA diocese also came under fire when two workers helped an immigrant girl obtain an abortion.
Richmond Bishop Francis DiLorenzo, however, later confirmed that the workers had been fired.
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(Source: LSN)