Looking to learn more about a critical issue affecting millions here and abroad this Lent? Check out "Mobilizing Faith, Fighting Poverty," an initiative from Yale Divinity School.
The goal of the movement is, "to spark conversation and resolve among people of faith on issues of poverty, and challenge poverty’s perennial threat to humanity."
Each day during Lent, the Mobilizing Faith website and facebook page offers a resource with the aim of rallying "heartfelt action that reduces misery and rekindles hope."
Several faith-based organizations and nonprofits are involved in the efforts, and representatives from Catholic Charities USA and CRS, Catholic Relief Services, attended the launch at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, where YDS alumnus Sen. Chris Coons spoke eloquently about his relief work in Africa. A panel representing agenicies devoted to fighting poverty exhorted Christians and all citizens of the US to add their voices to the debate around Congressional budget cuts on the backs of the poor, both at home and abroad, echoing sentiments put forward by US bishops.
Read some compelling essays on poverty and Christian responses in Reflections, the journal of Yale Divinity School, here, and check out the Mobilizing Faith website and facebook page.
International Planned Parenthood Federation – $41,876,150 since 1998
Planned Parenthood Federation of America – $12,984,000 since 1998
Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health – $9,864,398 (2009-2011). Sponsors world-class population control conferences which push modern fertility control techniques, abortion and sterilization including female condoms, injectable abortifacients, and “menstrual regulation” kits.
Buffet donations included:
International Projects Assistance Services- Promotes sexual and reproductive rights. Buffett gave IPAS $20,000,000 for the manufacturer and distribution of manual abortion suction pumps for use in poor countries.
NARAL – $1,500,000. A promoter of abortion rights in the United States.
· Catholics for a Free Choice– $485,000. Money used to challenge and undermine Catholic opposition to abortion.
· Center for Reproductive Rights – $737,000. Carries out pro-abortion litigation. Helped strike down Nebraska's ban on partial-birth abortion/infanticide.
Can someone please tell me that this is untrue, please?
If it is true, can someone please explain how Catholic Bishops justify this. Maybe there is something I don't understand about how charity works.
Senator Chris Coon, the newly elected Senator from Delaware to the United States Sneate and former Yale Divinity School alumnus seems more interested in advocating foriegn missions than providing urgently needed political leadership in stopping and reversing the extreme national hazard of annual trillion and a half dollar increases in federal debt. zThe federal debt is now $14 trillion dollars and growiing.
Has YDS or the Catholic Bishops got the memo yet that the United States has a perilously serious debt problem? Budget cutting is urgently needed to save the United States from bankruptcy. A more down to-earth perspective is needed on budget cutting. After all how moral is it to recklessly accumulate massive national debt that economic and finacial experts warn are unustainable? Budgetr cutting is where moral leadership is urgently needed.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the annual total of all goods and services produced in the United States, is now 15 Trillion dollars. Our national debt is currently $14 Trillion dollars. This means conservatively stated the national debt (or sovereign debt) the amount the United States federal government owes is over 90% of GDP.
Further the new budget for fiscal year 2012 is scheduled to add an addition $1.6 Trillion dollars in debt. This addition will make the national debt 100% of our Gross National Product.
This debt is extremely large and left unchecked is projected to grow indefinately at well over a 5% rate. Expert warn that this is not sustainable.
This is a massive out-of-control condition that is being very feebly addressed. The mass and speed of increaae of national debt accumulation has near-unstopable momentum.
Greece and Ireland last year suddenly found that they were no longer able to sell their bonds to finance their national debt becasue investors and banks no longer beleived that they could repay their debt. Experts warn that the United States will have the exact same problem when investors come to beleive that the United States will no longer be able to finance its debt. Greece and Ireland are able to be bailed out by other more wealthy nations, but the United States has no where to turn once its credit worthiness is in doubt.
Experts do warn that United States national debt accumulation is unsustainable and the consequences of massive federal debt accuulation are dire.
Regarding the deficit, Our Lord said, among other things, do not worry about what you will eat or what you will wear, but rather do good. I can balance the budget tomorrow if you will allow me to meaningfully cut the so-called defense budget and to actually tax profitable trans-national corporations.
St. Francis may have said ''it is in giving that we receive''. I see a pattern. I pray that every day more people will also see it.