To Archbishop Perez & Cardinal Tobin, re: Catholic Relief Services

By Joe Tevington

03/08/2024 • View profile

To Archbishop Perez & Cardinal Tobin, re: Catholic Relief Services

Photo by Hermes Rivera on Unsplash

Most Rev. Nelson J. Pérez (Chair)

Archbishop of Philadelphia (PA)

His Eminence Joseph W. Tobin, C.Ss.R.

Archbishop of Newark (NJ)

Catholic Relief Services

228 W. Lexington St.

Baltimore, Maryland 21201-344387

Your Excellency and Your Eminence:

At least in the 1990s, the moral writings of Dr Germain Grisez were held in highest esteem at St Charles Borromeo Seminary. Along with John Ford, SJ, Grisez is believed to have helped embolden Saint Pope Paul VI to proclaim Humanae Vitae. That prophetic encyclical continues to meet with deafening silence and shameful dissent:

We need to testify with our lives to the union-procreation paradigm affirmed in Humanae Vitae; we need to trim the tree, as it were, of Church teaching on sexual ethics with married lives of manifest good works and of joyful endurance of the daily sufferings of family life, and, in all things, pray for grace to perspicuously witness to the truth, beauty and goodness of that despised reality that sex is for marriage and marriage is for babies and bonding.

Paraphrasing what is attributed often to St. Francis, “Preach the Gospel of marriage, and if necessary use words.”

(Dr E. Christian Brugger, 7/25/2018)

Thirteen years ago, Dr Grisez raised dire moral concerns about Catholic Relief Services (cf, The Church Betrayed?, Catholic World Report, 4/17/2011). As per a report from this very week, those concerns remain "essentially unresolved":

We suggest that, rather than taking federal funding, CRS should rely on the goodwill and generosity of American Catholics for spiritual and financial assistance in carrying out international aid and development projects that fully comport with Catholic teaching.

We further recommend that, in carrying out such projects, that CRS should first seek the permission of each and every local bishop in each and every diocese that it intends to operate in, fully disclosing every aspect of the project and promising full cooperation with the diocese. Bishops are, after all, tasked with protecting and promoting the spiritual welfare of their flock, and would and should be the first and best judge of whether a given project would help or harm souls.

As our report demonstrates, this is not currently the case. In our view, the bishops who serve on CRS’ Board of Directors have both a moral and a fiduciary responsibility to ensure that CRS withdraws from such programs.

Indeed, as Germain Grisez noted a decade ago, “Faithful Catholics who have donated to CRS in recent years for AIDS relief did so because they expected the program to be carried out in a distinctively Catholic way. Had they not expected this, they could have donated to a secular organization fighting AIDS. If CRS officials have used donations otherwise than they have led donors to expect, CRS officials have misappropriated those funds.”

Our review of CRS’ USAID/PEPFAR practices in several African countries strongly indicates that the concerns that prompted our, and Germain Grisez’s, earlier concerns remain essentially unresolved.

At the present time we do not see how lay Catholics can in good conscience support or donate to Catholic Relief Services. We recommend that the bishops of the U.S., both individually and collectively, withdraw their support as well.