A Wrong Turn for Catholic Charities

By BRIAN C. ANDERSON

As policymakers rediscover the power of faith-based institutions to rescue the down-and-out, one would think that Catholic Charities USA would be the perfect model.

But rather than trying to promote traditional values and God-fearing behavior, Catholic Charities — and the same could be said about the Association of Jewish Family and Children’s Agencies or Lutheran Services in America — has become over the last three decades an arm of the welfare state, with about two-thirds of its $2.1-billion annual budget now flowing from government sources and little that is explicitly religious, or even values-laden, about most of the services its 1,400 member organizations and 46,000 paid employees provide.

Catholic Charities is one of the nation’s most powerful advocates for outworn welfare-state ideas, especially the idea that social and economic forces over which the individual has no control, rather than his own attitudes and behavior, are the reason for poverty. Over the past three decades, Catholic Charities has come to depend more and more on government money for its operations, while also relying less on the power of the Roman Catholic faith to bring about social change. The organization received nearly a quarter of its financing from government by the end of the 1960s, more than half by the late 1970s, and more than 60 percent by the mid-1980s, where it has remained ever since.

As its alliances with government have grown, Catholic Charities has compromised its religious heritage in ways that traditionalists would find disturbing. Catholic Charities in Albany, N.Y., has proposed starting a health-maintenance organization that would make abortion referrals. Catholic Charities in San Francisco, to keep its city contracts, now complies with the local law extending spousal benefits to unmarried heterosexuals and homosexual live-in partners. In a wide-ranging survey of nonprofit religious charities, Stephen Monsma, a sociologist, found that a third of Catholic child-care groups had felt government pressure to curtail their religious practices.

Under Catholic Charities’ pugnacious current president, the Rev. Fred Kammer, a lawyer and Jesuit priest, the organization’s 40-member central headquarters in Alexandria, Va., assembles a legislative agenda, lobbies Congress and the White House, and, through weekly faxes alerts member organizations, politicians, and other interested parties to impending federal and state legislation on social policy.

The policies that Catholic Charities advocates in its lobbying activities hurt, rather than help, the poor.

Catholic Charities was the nation’s loudest opponent of the 1996 welfare-overhaul law, lobbying hard on Capitol Hill and meeting with the president to derail it. Father Kammer prophesied that the new law would be “a national social catastrophe.” But today, with the welfare rolls plummeting 50 percent in just three years and anecdotal evidence suggesting that many former recipients are happy to be liberated from dependency and in control of their lives, Father Kammer’s dire predictions seem ludicrous.

Catholic Charities also has lobbied to raise the minimum hourly wage above $6 from the current $5.15. Most reputable economists point out, however, that such an increase would cost the nation hundreds of thousands of entry-level jobs, hurting just the people — immigrants, inner-city youths, or former welfare recipients rejoining the work force — whom Catholic Charities says it cares about most.

In addition, Catholic Charities vociferously opposes the privatization of Social Security. But, asks Stephen Moore, a tax specialist at the Cato Institute, a Washington think tank, why would an organization dedicated to helping “the poorest among us,” as Catholic Charities’ motto states, urge Congress to reject a proposal allowing the poor to opt out of a system that offers them a dismal return on their tax dollars?

Finally, Catholic Charities tirelessly argues that racism “is a root cause of the economic and social oppression in our society.”

This unrealistic view of race distorts the whole organization’s thinking about black crime. Catholic Charities lobbies hard in favor of requirements that force states to provide detailed explanations for why so many blacks are behind bars — the presumption being that racism is to blame. Catholic Charities believes that if black 10- to 17-year-olds make up only 15 percent of the population but 26 percent of all juveniles arrested and 46 percent of all juveniles doing time, this is prima facie evidence of racism. But if black youths have, as they do, a far higher rate of criminal activity than white kids, why would anyone expect them not to be arrested and convicted at a higher rate?

At bottom, Catholic Charities appears to suspect that, for black kids, crime is somehow justified.

Not only does Catholic Charities lobby for its point of view at the federal level, but some 90 percent of Catholic Charities’ local organizations follow the lead of the central office and lobby in state legislatures.

Patrick Johnson, director of Catholic Charities’ affiliate in Hartford, Conn., notes: “We have one of the largest social-justice advocacy programs in the country, with a lobbyist on staff, actively lobbying the state legislature in the area of welfare reform, against the death penalty, juvenile justice — the social-services agenda, if you will.” As Mr. Johnson, a prominent member of Catholic Charities’ national board, sums up, “Charity is never enough; you have to do other stuff.”

The “other stuff” includes “parish social ministry,” the second big thrust of today’s Catholic Charities. In part, parish social ministry just means spurring the members of local parishes to do traditional, and effective, good works. But it also means politically oriented community organizing, which is troubling. As one disgruntled local Catholic Charities representative explains, this means encouraging low-income parishioners to form “agitation networks” to lobby politicians, stage protests, and pursue “social change” by demanding more entitlements from the welfare state.

If Catholic Charities’ lobbying and community organizing is of questionable help to the poor, what about the third and largest area of its activities — the array of services that local organizations provide? Here, it’s hard to be categorical: The groups serve more than 10 million people with a staggering number of individual problems, and some organizations and programs are atypical. Making judgment harder, Catholic Charities’ affiliates haven’t traditionally tried to measure the outcomes of their activities, so nobody knows what they’re accomplishing.

Still, it’s clear that Catholicism’s traditional social doctrine doesn’t look much like the big-government line that Catholic Charities espouses.

In recent years, many Catholic thinkers have focused on the kind of society that best fosters moral development. They have stressed the idea of “subsidiarity,” by which they mean that “higher,” or larger, associations should help “lower,” smaller associations but not replace or inhibit them except when they no longer function. In other words, the state should not displace the responsibilities of the family or the neighborhood but should try to strengthen those entities so that they can fulfill their appropriate duties. Thus, responsibility for social and moral life, subsidiarity holds, resides first with the individual, and then, in ascending order, with those closest to him: family, friends, neighborhood, local government, and — only as a last resort — the state.

But Catholic Charities is openly unenthusiastic about subsidiarity. “There has been a lot of romantic nonsense lately in Washington,” Father Kammer grumbled a while back, “to the effect that state and local governments are always more effective and efficient than the national government. The claim is that local people know best.” As for holding people responsible for their plight — suggesting, for example, that welfare mothers shouldn’t have gotten pregnant out of wedlock — Father Kammer bristles. “I don’t buy the argument that it’s moral turpitude,” he says.

As both major political parties seek to extend “charitable choice,” the provision of the 1996 federal welfare law that allows faith-based institutions to receive government funds to serve the needy without veiling their religious character, some conservative critics worry that government funds might make other faith-based institutions more like Catholic Charities — more secular and less concerned with saving souls. But that argument assumes that it was government financing that corrupted Catholic Charities. In fact, Catholic Charities officials already sincerely believed that government entitlements are the best way to help the needy when they began accepting government support. There’s no reason to think that effective faith-based institutions would lose their way once they receive government money under charitable choice.

Unless Catholic Charities changes its vision — embracing subsidiarity, following the example of charities that shun government money and pursue a strong moral message, and abandoning its illusion that the United States is an unjust and racist country — charitable choice won’t make a bit of difference for it, or for those it serves.

Brian C. Anderson is senior editor of

City Journal, a quarterly magazine published by the Manhattan Institute, in New York. This article is adapted from “How Catholic Charities Lost Its Soul,” which first appeared in the winter 2000 issue of City Journal and was republished this fall in What Makes Charity Work?: A Century of Public and Private Philanthropy, edited by Myron Magnet and published by Ivan R. Dee, Chicago.