The Corruption of Catholic Church Organizations Beyond Human Trafficking

Photo by Austrian National Library on Unsplash

In Part Five of the five-part series “Student Loans, High College Costs, and Illegal Immigration: A Solution,” we explored the involvement of church organizations in the Biden administration’s human trafficking of illegal aliens into and throughout the United States. That involvement included millions and millions of dollars going to those church organizations. That exploration led to the discovery of other ways in which Catholic Church organizations are corrupted by the Democratic Party and government and corporate influence, monetary or otherwise. Because that corruption goes beyond the scope of the five-part series, we offer it here separately though it does extend from that series. Before we delve into that corruption, we do want to point out that though some Catholic organizations do participate in the Biden administration’s human trafficking, other Catholic organizations are working to combat human trafficking and to rescue its victims as is documented in this article in Catholic Near East Welfare Association’s magazine One, September 2023, “A Crime Against Humanity.”

Sara A. Carter, in her 30 August 2023 podcast, spoke of the NGOs “keeping that money in their coffers.” And Daniel Greenfield in “The Islamization of North Dakota” in Front Page Magazine, wrote “Lutheran Social Services, its coffers swollen by dumping migrants from Islamic terror states on the area. . . .” [Italics mine]. So what about that “coffers swollen” business with these NGOs. For some time now, various observations have led me to wonder if and when the Catholic Church started taking government money, especially given that so many Catholics—apparently due to hereditary politics, political naivete or ignorance, social status, peer pressure, ignorance of Church teaching, ignorance of the Catholic Church’s divinely appointed and inspired magisterial authority to teach, or who knows what else—are members of the Democratic Party that is committed to abortion, same-sex “marriage,” contraception, transgenderism, and other things anathema to the Catholic Faith. It seems that the misplaced loyalty of Catholics to the Democratic Party is due to a confusion of the roles of church and state. And consequently, I fear that too many leaders in the Catholic Church who come from Democratic backgrounds have abdicated some of the Church’s missions and obligations to government, and in doing so have lost independence and thus, especially when abortion-loving Democrats are in control, much of their integrity. All this money is going to to these NGOs, Catholic Charities being “the 800 pound gorilla” among them. How much money is going to Catholic Charities from the Cloward-Piven proponents? How corrupted has Catholic Charities thus become? How much to the USCCB? And how far does that extend into the rest of the Church? How compromised or corrupted have various endeavors of the Church become due to participation in government programs that require conformity with their goals and objectives even when these contradict the moral teaching of the Church?

Have Catholic schools been thus affected? How much is curriculum affected? How much teacher training? I have an imperfect memory of mentioning to a bishop about twenty years ago a comment about keeping the Church free of government funding, and, as I remember it, his response was that he was committed to never closing a Catholic school. Was I to infer from that that the Church was receiving government funding for schools? (For an article on the topic of Catholic school closings see “75 More Catholic Schools Nationwide Say They Are Shutting Down” in The Epoch Times.) On the website of the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA), it is written: “To ensure that private school students, teachers, and other personnel have every opportunity to participate in federal education programs for which they are eligible, private school officials should contact their local public school district (LEA) and establish a positive, productive working relationship with the LEA [Local Educational Agencies] federal programs coordinator.” Interesting. At the bottom of the page, under the title “Available Federal Programs,” it lists six links to such programs. So, the NCEA is encouraging “private school officials” to contact the local public-school district “and establish a positive, productive, working relationship with the LEA federal programs coordinator.” Huh. Sounds like encouragement to seek and get federal funds.

Has Catholic healthcare been affected? How much are hospitals and clinics corrupted by government or corporate money? I know for a fact that some doctors in Catholic medical institutions provide contraception and refer for abortions no matter how much their administrations posture otherwise. And the Lepanto Institute has published a report regarding “the largest Catholic healthcare network in the United States – CommonSpirit Health,” which “derives its Catholic identity through sponsorship from the Catholic Health Care Federation, a ‘public juridic person’ whose authority is granted by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life. This means that direct oversight and jurisdiction over CommonSpirit Health belongs to the Apostolic See in the Vatican, alone.”

That Lepanto Institute report provides evidence that:

The largest Catholic health system in the United States, CommonSpirit Health, is acting directly against Catholic moral teaching in direct defiance of its Catholic identity.  This report will prove that CommonSpirit Health is performing transgender surgeries, providing hormone-based transgender therapies, providing puberty blockers to children under the auspices of so-called ‘gender-affirming care,’ is financially subsidizing the same through its employee benefits packages, is financially subsidizing medical institutions performing these procedures and therapies, is providing all forms of modern contraception (including abortifacients) to patients, and is even performing elective abortions and surgical sterilizations.

What! This is absolutely diabolical. A Catholic institution cannot get much more corrupt than that.

Well, there is more. Turning again to The Epoch Times article “IN DEPTH: Abortion, Transgender Services, Communion, and the ‘Transition’ of Catholic Church Leadership” we find that it identifies one of CommonSpirit’s partners as Tia Women’s Health, which claims that the partnership with CommonSpirit will help it expand its reach. CommonSpirit has also placed Dr. Marijka Grey, as its representative, on Tia’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Advisory Council. There’s a red flag for you. And Tia offers abortions. In addition, the article identifies subsidiaries of CommonSpirit that offer “transgender care, sex-change surgeries, employee health care benefits that cover such services, abortion, contraception, or surgical sterilization.” And the response of the Archdiocese of San Francisco to reporting of these matters was most disappointing.

That Epoch Times article further reports: “In an undated post by the USCCB, the bishops announced that their ‘Catholic Campaign for Human Development,’ established in 1970, mandated that the ‘Campaign  fund such projects as voter registration, community organizations, community-run schools, minority-owned cooperatives and credit unions,’ providing ‘capital for industrial development and job training programs, and setting up of rural cooperatives.’”

I wonder for whom those registered are going to vote. “Community organizations,” sounds a little Saul-Alinsky-ish. You remember Saul Alinsky, the guy who included Lucifer in his list of “Personal Acknowledgments” in his Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals. And we know that Alinsky’s devotees include Barack Hussein Obama and Hillary Clinton. You know them, the radical Marxist abortion-promoting Democrats. We quit giving to the Catholic Campaign for Human Development years ago too.

How much is preaching and teaching affected? I have listened for decades of Sunday and daily Mass attendance in Catholic churches all over this country and abroad and can count on one hand, with fingers left over, the number of times I can remember hearing articulated, let alone elucidated, Church teaching on contraception (Catechism of the Catholic Church [CCC] 2370, 2399), as courageously expounded by Pope St. Paul VI in Humanae Vitae in 1968. The Catholic Church, especially in the Magisterium, is the guardian of the “deposit of faith” (CCC 86). Why then does it seem that Church leadership has stood by quietly, if not silently, as contraception has infected family life and homosexuality tinged religious life. And beyond the money, how much has such reticence resulted from fear of backlash in a culture poisoned by the heterodox positions taken by the Democratic Party—to which way too many Catholics belong—on matters like abortion, same-sex “marriage,” transgenderism, and child sexual mutilation?

I heard a Catholic bishop say not long ago that he does not care if one is Republican or Democrat.  Well, in my humble opinion, I believe he ought to, as my articles

“Can a Catholic be A Democrat”and

“The Devil’s Bargain Behind ‘Let’s Go Brandon” make clear.  Political party membership is not inherent; it is a choice.  One chooses to belong to the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, or any of the dozens of political parties in the United States, or to none at all. One can even start a new party.  One who chooses to belong to the Democratic Party thereby chooses to support and participate in a party committed to abortion, same-sex “marriage,” transgenderism, child sexual mutilation, population control, and on and on. The Democratic Party’s commitment to abortion alone ought to preclude any Catholic from joining or continuing membership in the Democratic Party or voting for Democrats.  (The Republican Party, on the other hand, has had a pro-life plank in its platform since 1976, the year of the first general election after Roe v. Wade.) The Democratic Party’s history of slavery; the Trail of Tears; the Confederacy; The Civil War; the Ku Klux Klan; Jim Crow; lynching; discrimination; internment of US citizens; Marxism; and opposition to the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments only serve to enhance that preclusion.

One can just imagine how if Catholics voted according to the teachings of the Church they could stop the Democratic Party’s Marxist culture of death in its tracks and return church and state to their proper roles, where the faithful were not alienated from the obligatory corporal works of mercy by the Godless government that confiscates their taxes to supplant such obligations with programs devoid of the free will acts of love so necessary for a culture of life. And yet untold members of that Democratic party of death contribute to the toxic, control-hungry, elitist cliques—and their paranoid, indefatigable defamation mills, devoid of due process—that hold sway in too many parishes and dioceses across this country. And the climate these cliques produce (in addition to scandal) contributes to the lack of involvement and, often enough, the departure of many mature, open-minded, though not necessarily well formed, congregants. Have Catholic Charities and other organizations become such cliques willing to serve the Democratic Party, with which too many Catholics identify, to break the laws of the United States and traffic human beings and fill the pews emptied by those whom the cliques have driven away? Just asking.

The exclusivity of such cliques is destructive and unnecessary, and can serve to drive people from the Church. Though as sinful human beings with a fallen nature we are prone to such distortions, as a Church we should beware the bunker mentality that sees the Church as a place to climb into and hunker down and close off, not only from the rest of the world, but even from those other Catholics that are not in the clique. The cliques mentioned above do so to gain and hold control that they would be unable to gain outside the Church. Plenty of Catholics who use the Church as a bunker for control do not agree with the teachings of the Catholic Church and are often enough hostile to the moral teaching of the Church. Anyone or anything that might challenge their control, even if only in their own minds, is a threat, and they can get surprisingly vicious in repelling such threats. Illegal immigration works well for Catholics in these elitist cliques, because like the Democrats they usually are, they seek a permanent underclass in the Church over which they can rule, whether they subscribe to the teachings of the Church or not. On the other hand, some Catholics who are truly committed to the teachings of the Catholic Church can be so threatened by temptation, attraction, false teaching, and sin that they too use the Church as a bunker against the world, and indeed against other faithful Catholics they do not deem Catholic enough or whom they otherwise deem a threat. The cynical nature and attendant behavior of these poor souls can sometimes prove disconcerting to those raised in a time and place when and where friendliness was considered a virtue and a smile and hello were usually met in kind, especially among fellow Christians. Of course a good antidote to the bunker-Catholic mentality is the admonition of St. John Paul II to “put out into the deep,” in exegesis of the words of Jesus in Luke 5:4. Sister Mary Benedict in the movie The Bells of St. Mary’s proffered a practical application of the antidote: “You don’t become a nun to run away from life, Patsy. It’s not because you’ve lost something. It’s because you’ve found something.”

I remember hearing years ago that according to a poll, on average, Democrats were more likely to be close to friends than family, and Republicans were more likely to be close to family than friends. Could that mean that Democrats look more to their party to make up for something missing in family? Like people who join gangs? I don’t know. I remember another poll that found that people on the political right identify more as conservatives than as Republicans; whereas people on the political left identify more as Democrats than as liberals. So folks on the left identify more by party membership than ideology. That would make sense for Catholics voting Democrat against the teachings of the Church and the interest of the most vulnerable. It’s more about being on the right team than standing for the right things. As I wrote in “Can a Catholic Be a Democrat?”:

Long recognizing the irrationality behind Catholics and other good people voting for Democrats, I finally came to the conclusion that for these people the Democrats are the good guys. They are the cowboys in the white hats or the home-town team for some reason. Maybe it is because their parents were Democrats, or the union took the place of religion for them. Who knows. Regardless, for them, despite the fact that the Republican Party was founded as an anti-slavery party, that it fought to free the slaves, to recognize the citizenship of the freedmen, to recognize and protect their right to vote, to protect their civil rights, to fight for and win the vote for women, to fight for protection of the unborn and their mothers, all the time being opposed by the Democratic Party, the Democrats are the good guys. Go figure.

And there is a phenomenon I have come to recognize about Democrats that is due to an inherent self-absorption in the Democratic Party that confines the perspective of its members to the limits of the party, fostering narrow-mindedness and lack of empathy. For instance, the left often makes the case that the United States has long been a racist country, and that the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, attributed largely to President Lyndon Baines Johnson, finally began to heal the racist past of the United States. But that is not the history of the United States, though it is the history of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party was founded by Martin Van Buren, Thomas Ritchie and others in the Albany-Richmond Axis to create a national party in a nation divided by slavery and did so by keeping, as best it could, the issue of slavery out of the national debate. It is a party of expediency, created to gain and hold power. The first Democratic president was Andrew Jackson, a slave owner. Thereafter Democrats gave to the United States the Trail of Tears; the Kansas-Nebraska Act; the Dred Scott decision; the Confederacy and the Civil War; opposition to the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments; the Ku Klux Klan; lynching; Jim Crow; segregation of federal office buildings; water cannons and dogs turned on civil-rights advocates; blocking of Black students from schools; internment of Americans of Japanese, Italian, and German descent; and much more. The worst public racists in US history were Democrats like Andrew Jackson, John Calhoun, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Bull Connor, Preston Brooks, Ben Tillman, Woodrow Wilson, Orval Faubus, George Wallace, and many others. Lyndon Johnson finally signed civil-rights legislation of the mid-1960s after years of opposing Republican civil-rights legislation in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Johnson betrayed at least part of his motivation by claiming that his Great Society would “have them [n-word] voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.” I have never been part of that party. That’s not my history. It’s not that the nation finally arrived at the idea that Black Americans deserved civil rights, but that the Democratic Party was finally beginning to catch up to where the Republican Party had been from its inception over 100 years before.

The Republican Party, on the other hand, was founded in 1854 as an anti-slavery party in reaction to the Democrats passing the Kansas-Nebraska Act that nullified the Missouri Compromise and allowed the extension of slavery into the territories. The first Republican president was Abraham Lincoln, after whose election one slave state after another began to secede citing the threat to the institution of slavery as the cause. Lincoln not only conducted the Union through the Civil War that followed but also promulgated the Emancipation Proclamation. Republicans passed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments which freed the slaves, recognized their rights of citizenship, and their right to vote. Republicans passed civil rights legislation in the 1860s and thereafter. Republican President Ulysses S. Grant destroyed the Ku Klux Klan to protect the former slaves. Republicans fought against lynching and for the civil rights of former slaves and their descendants from that time forward. And they were opposed by Democrats. The Republican Party does not have a racist and discriminatory past like that of the Democratic Party. And that accounts for more or less half of the registered voters in the United States. Why should they be saddled with the Democrats’ racist history? So the Democrats’ racist legacy should not be projected onto Republicans or the entire country. Let the Democrats own it. Leave the rest of us alone.

And that’s what so many of us Americans want, to be left alone. It is understandable that Democrats have a guilt complex. Their party has been guilty of so much since its inception. We have not even mentioned all the wars the Democratic Party, “the party of peace,” has got us into, besides the Civil War. (Just consider the most recent one: the US has sent hundreds of billions of dollars to Ukraine in an unnecessary proxy war that is killings hundreds of thousands of people in a country where Joe Biden leveraged aid money provided by US taxpayers to get a prosecutor fired who was investigating the egregious corruption of an energy company on the board of which his son Hunter sat and from which Hunter received over $80,000 a month. Ukraine is just one of the many countries, most of them adversarial to the US, from which Hunter, Joe, and several other Bidens received tens of millions of dollars laundered through over twenty shell companies. Ukraine also had bioweapon labs that had been set up by Anthony Fauci after the US outlawed the work done in them.) The Democratic Party has had this control complex from slavery to the present day. They just have to stick their noses into everything and bully the rest of us into participating in their ongoing “progressive” adventures into iniquity like abortion, population control, Covid mandates, same-sex “marriage,” transgenderism and child sexual mutilation, drag-queen story hour, human trafficking of illegal aliens, “climate-change” tyranny, and on and on and on .

And as the Democrats stick their noses more and more into our business, government grows. And as government grows, church attendance decreases and the Church abdicates more and more of its role to government, which confiscates more of people’s income, leaving less to give to the Church. The Bradford Tax Institute reports that after the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913, instituting the federal income tax, “the top tax bracket was 7 percent on all income over $500,000 ($11 million in today’s dollars1); and the lowest tax bracket was 1 percent.” One percent! Just imagine how much more the faithful could contribute to the good work of the Church when there was a healthier understanding of the roles of church and state. And just imagine how much more confident they could be that the work of the Church was indeed good when its organizations were not colluding with government and corporations in abortion, human smuggling, and sex-change operations.

All this does not mean all Democrats are bad and all Republicans are good. All members of both parties are sinners. It means that one party, the Republican Party, with all its flaws and disappointing politicians, has remarkably stood for the rights of the most vulnerable in our nation from its inception; the other, the Democratic Party, has been the enemy of the most vulnerable since its inception. And yet half of Catholics in this country vote for the Democratic Party. Something is wrong with that.

In “Can a Catholic Be a Democrat?” I recounted my memory of Reverend Monsignor Christopher Huntington’s account of the preaching at a Catholic church in Germany during Hitler’s reign: “The Catholic Church preached that Hitler, Goebbels, and Goring were wrong because Christ was right.” Add that to the history of bishops in the earliest days of the Catholic Church, when Sts. Peter, Paul, and the Apostles were martyred. When the successors of St. Peter and the Apostles, the bishops of the Catholic Church, knew that by accepting the office they might very likely be accepting martyrdom. And this raises the question that I realize has been welling up inside me despite an inclination to suppress it—out of respect for the office and my love of the Church—since this examination has brought us into this topic: Where are the bishops! Where are the successors of Peter and the Apostles? Where are the pastors of the Church? Where are the shepherds of the flock? It is deeply distressing to have to ask the question to which Catholics deserve an answer. Well, at least part of the answer may rest with yet another bit of Democrat devilry, the Johnson Amendment.

Yes, that brings us back to the Democratic President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Before the Johnson Amendment, church leaders could and did speak out and engage in the political process. That only makes sense in a country with a First Amendment. And yet for almost seventy years now the churches have been precluded from involvement in politics, with exceptions for Democrats. Is that why the bishops are quiet? Michelle Terry explains the Johnson Amendment and how it came to be in “How the Johnson Amendment Threatens Churches’ Freedoms” at ACLJ.org. While Johnson was a United States Senator, in 1954, he proposed an amendment to Section 501 (c)(3) of the US tax code that provided tax exempt status for a church as long as it “does not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing for statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office” (“or in opposition to” was added in 1986). In his characteristic way, Johnson pushed through the amendment in retribution for two Texas non-profits supporting his primary opponent. The article quotes Larry Witham from a Washington Times article, “Texas Politics Blamed for ’54 IRS Rule LBJ Wanted to Keep Senate Seat,” August 27, 1998: “The IRS rule that strips tax exemption from churches engaged in electioneering was born of Lyndon Johnson’s Texas politics, not the U. S. Constitution. . . . The ban on church electioneering has nothing to do with the First Amendment or Jeffersonian principles of separation of church and state. . . . It was prompted by Johnson’s desire to challenge McCarthyism, protect the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in Texas, and win re-election.”

How . . . Democratic. Democrats have done so much damage to this nation founded upon God-given inalienable rights. Whether it was Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Bill Clinton, Barack Hussein Obama, or Joe Biden, they just keep picking away at rights and pushing government ever deeper into our lives. They just cannot leave us alone, cannot stop bullying.

Still, a Catholic comes back to that question: Where are the bishops? Where have they been since 1954 in seeking repeal of the Johnson Amendment? Is it just easier to let it stand? Where were the bishops during the Children of Winter (James Demers) years? Where were they when, instead of the sacred Tradition of the Church, the faithful were treated to heresy and idiocy from pulpit to classroom? Where were they when homosexuality seeped into the seminaries, decimating their ranks, and on into the clergy? Where were they when unspeakable abuse popped up here and there and festered? Where have they been during the contraception and abortion years, and during this period of new perversities, like child sexual mutilation, that the Democrats champion and force upon the American people? Where are they when abortion-promoting politicians, mostly Democrats, so obviously and publicly merit excommunication?

Where are the bishops? Do the bishops support organizations like Catholic Charities and the USCCB taking millions of dollars of government money to participate in the Biden administration’s trafficking of migrants illegally into and around the United States? Do they know that Catholic Charities is the “800 pound gorilla” in this human trafficking scheme? Do they support the Biden open-border policy that has turned over the control of our southern border to the drug cartels that murder, rape, and prostitute migrants, even children? Do they support CommonSpirit Health’s “performing transgender surgeries, providing hormone-based transgender therapies, providing puberty blockers to children under the auspices of so-called ‘gender-affirming care. . . . providing all forms of modern contraception (including abortifacients) to patients, and is even performing elective abortions and surgical sterilizations,” as reported by the Lepanto Institute. Do the bishops support all this? Is this some kind of secret? Catholics have a right to know. They have a right to refuse to fund such illegal and immoral activity. Where are the bishops? Where are their voices? It is a profoundly painful question to have to ask. More painful is the range of possible answers as the bishops continue to oversee the Church while the corruption rages on.

For those who would say, “Then why don’t you leave the Catholic Church?” After all, there are millennia of precedent. The simple but profound answer is: Because I know what the Catholic Church is. That’s it. The Catholic Church is the Church that the Holy Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit founded upon Peter (Mt 16:13-19) and the Apostles and animated with the Holy Spirit (Acts 2) and to which was given the great commission: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Mt 28:19-20). Christ entrusted to the Church the seven sacraments, the Eucharist being “the source and summit of the Christian life (CCC 1324),” and the Church stands upon the three legs of Sacred Scripture, Holy Tradition, and Magisterium. And all of the sins piled up by all of its members from Peter and the Apostles to those of us in this present day cannot negate that reality. Those of us who know this and believe it are gravely obligated by that knowledge and belief. Therefore, sinner that I am, I remain and persevere in the Christian Faith as a member of the Catholic Church and write this article, as I hope I am inspired to do, rather than abandon Holy Mother Church. And I am deeply grateful to my fellow Catholics, my fellow Christians who are not members of the Catholic Church, all who believe in God, and those who do not for their support of this witness, as I have long contended that we should come together where we agree and discuss respectfully where we do not agree in our search for the Truth. God bless and keep you all.

Thank you.

P. A. Ritzer

If you think this article worthy, please “heart,” “restack,” share, comment, or subscribe for free. Again, thanks.