Here at America magazine, various colleagues have already called attention to the rightwing attacks on the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, the anti-poverty effort of the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference, and most recently, the attacks on Mr. John Carr who has served as the USCCB pointman on social justice issues for many years. We have reported that CCHD works with many groups, including non-Catholic groups, and that the critics are concerned that some of the people who work at these other groups do not share the Church’s teachings on various issues, especially abortion and same-sex marriage although presumably the Jewish groups CCHD works with presumably also do not share our Catholic belief in the divinity of Christ. We have reported that the bishops have defended both Carr and the CCHD, with Bishop William Murphy calling the charges "calumnious" and Bishop Roger Morin calling them "ridiculous."
It is my sad duty to inform the readers of America, and the Catholic Church nationwide, that there is yet more scandal at CCHD. Sources told me that last week there was a staff pizza party for the CCHD workers at the USCCB’s headquarters on Fourth Street in Washington. The pizza delivery man has a second cousin who works at an office that shares a parking lot with Planned Parenthood. This is shocking. How could the CCHD staffers be indifferent to the acute manner in which the pizza delivery man was morally compromised? How could they not know? They are winking at abortion. They are spitting on Christ. They exhibit a systematic pattern of cooperating with evil. The horror.
The conservative attacks are not just calumnious. They also contain a fundamental error that betrays the partisan agenda of the attackers. In portraying the anti-poverty efforts of the CCHD in a political light, they highlight their agenda, not CCHD’s. Most of the people who engage in the social justice work of the Church do not do so out of political convictions. Their work may lead them to political convictions, but they are a distinctly non-partisan group of people. "We’re not doing this because we’re Democrats or Republicans," said Kathy Saile, the director of domestic social development at the USCCB. "We don’t really fit into either party because we care about both Life and Dignity. We do this work because we want to help the poor." Indeed, Saile’s personal story is indicative of the non-partisan background of most social justice and CCHD staffers at the USCCB. In 1993, having just arrived in Phoenix, Saile began attending Mass at Most Holy Trinity parish. She got involved with the parish’s community organizing efforts thinking "it would be a great way to meet people." After volunteering for the Valley Interfaith Project, where she eventually was part of their leadership team, she moved on to work at the diocesan level, and now works at the USCCB headquarters in Washington.
There is something more sinister at work in the current spate of attacks, however, than a mere mischaracterization of CCHD’s works. There is something deeper than partisan wrangling or ideological dispositions. The attacks, especially in their venom, appear rooted in an essentially psychological pathology. Like a recessive gene, the religious temperament occasionally manifests itself in an extreme judgmentalism, fearful of betrayal, devoted to "faithful remnant" fantasies, attentive, always, to the speck in their brother’s eye, unhinged by their paranoia to the point that common standards of decency are ignored. The attacks on CCHD and on Carr bring to mind nothing so much as the witch trials at Salem. Then, too, calumny was considered fair game. Then, too, the ends justified the means. Then, too, those who claimed to be defending their Church were in fact betraying one of the most basic teachings of the Christian faith: Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
Michael Sean Winters
Something that we all have a tendency to be guilty of and and that we all have an obligation to be aware of is that many of us highlight our own political agenda. This sadly (in my opinion anyway) is the problem of such intense political identification in an era where political self-definition is so potentially incendiary. It is also a time when in our own micro-targeted world, qualifiers like Repblican and Democrat are further defined by other words such as tea party, death panel, blue dog, Acorn supporter etc. We whittle ourselves and each other into nothing by doing so and as a result, a loss of the dignity of the human person truly occurs.
In the name of full disclosure, I would probably be typified as a liberal or a democrat (gasp). I now take great pains to reframe my own ideological writings and expressions from the self-definition that is most deeply at the heart of who I am - Catholic. My energy to fight against those of a different stripe is exhausted. My energy to find solutions, while often frustrated, is enthused by reminding myself of who I really am - a Catholic.
Ideology is not the only reason people go after CCHD, however. Hubris is another. There are some who cannot consider for a second that their approach to an issue might be flawed.
As you pointed out with your "recessive gene" schpiel at the end, there are certain sins which seems to attend portions of Catholic culture in America. And your characterization of conservative Catholics in this respect is spot on. As a bit of a conservative myself, (I wouldn't call myself that, but I've been called it enough to think I might be so) I recognize that this tendency towards at least some of the evils and failings you've listed above in myself. That said, I also think that there are similar evils among those in the more liberal quarters of the church. Certainly, as MSW well knows, there is a general notion among some of the more liberal Catholics that they would rather pretend the Church wasn't emphatic about things like birth control, abortion and gay marriage. In some ways, then, when it comes to CCHD, it's rather like the worst parts of both "sides" of the church coming together to fight it out. The conservatives accuse the liberals of collaborating with moral evil; the liberals accuse the conservatives of hubris, of making the perfect the enemy of the good. What both sides need to do is just sit down and recognize their own failings and acknowledge the kernel of truth in the other party's grandstanding.
My experience with Mr. Winters since I have been reading this site for about six months is that he is a constant stone thrower who uses inflammatory language continuously as part of his stone throwing. In this diatribe he uses ''rightwing'' ''conservatives are calumnious'', ''sinister'', ''psychological pathology'', ''unhinged by their paranoia'', ''witch trials at Salem'' and more. And this is just a mild commentary by Mr. Winters.
He then refers to efforts as a ''partisan agenda of the attackers.'' Which I find extremely ironic and amusing since nearly everything Mr. Winters says is a partisan attack. Can someone please tell me how someone with so much vitriol is allowed to be a commentator on a Jesuit site.
Perhaps some CCHD critics should offer guidance.
I find this one of the most arrogant and condescending statements I have ever heard by a Catholic if in fact you are one. Who is being self righteous on this site? Mr. Winters is the epitome of self righteousness as far as I can see by what he writes.
In July on this website, MSW promised to oppose not only health reform but politicians behind it if it funded abortion in "any way, shape, or form," including accounting schemes that "segregate" money but still federally fund insurance that covers abortion.
Now, since it has been clear that his party will not give up funding abortion insurance, MSW has broken his promise. He supports the Senate and Obama versions of health reform, which federally fund abortion insurance, thereby making abortion insurance available to the hundreds of thousands of women who PP agrees Dont have abortions because they lack coverage, and which also in Obama's bill gives $11 Billion to "community health centers" every penny of which can be used to build PLanned Parenthood mega-facilities and even pay directly for abortions. He supports these bills in stark disagreement with the USCCB, with the Stupak coalition of real pro-life Democrats, and with his own prior position. And he not only supports the bills, he shills for them and offers the same faulty reasoning in their favor that was offered in favor of the fake compromises in the House prior to Stupak. Stupak's amendment funds no abortion insurance and mandates total separation with any private "riders." Obama's funds insurance that includes abortion coverage, making abortion insurance available to all the women who don't abort now because of a lack of coverage. No pro-life Catholic can justify the latter, as the USCCB has made clear.