Faith in Values: Purity Police Miss the Point

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http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/religion/news/2013/06/19/67050/purity-police-miss-the-point/


Pope Francis waves as he leaves St. Peter's Square at the Vatican after his weekly general audience on

Wednesday, June 12, 2013.
By Sally Steenland | June 19, 2013

Pope Francis made news last week when he publicly outed what the pontiff called a “gay lobby” in the Vatican—an influential group of gay priests and laity operating within the Holy See that supposedly engages in blackmail and other shady practices in order to gain influence and power. Any news story that leads with sex and corruption is sure to grab headlines, especially when the offenders are supposed to be celibate, so it’s no surprise that the gay-lobby story topped the news rounds.

But there was another story about the Catholic Church that also made the news last week. Faith in Public Life, a resource center for the progressive faith movement, released a new report exposing the McCarthy-like tactics of some conservative groups in America that want to eviscerate funding for a number of antipoverty and community-organizing programs supported by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, or CCHD. CCHD is the antipoverty initiative of the U.S. Catholic Bishops and has been doing good work for more than 40 years.

Programs funded by CCHD provide lifelines to the poor and marginalized, work on behalf of immigrants, offer social services and legal aid to low-income communities, engage in faith-based organizing and advocacy, and more. At a time when economic inequality is shockingly high and millions of Americans have not recovered from the Great Recession, such programs are more essential than ever. What’s more, these programs embody the essence of Catholic social teaching, which is clearly on the side of empowering the disenfranchised and vulnerable.

Given the long list of benefits, why do conservative Catholic groups want to smear these programs and starve them out of existence? The report, “Be Not Afraid? Guilt by Association, Catholic McCarthyism, and Growing Threats to the U.S. Bishops’ Anti-Poverty Mission,” spells out some of the reasons for conservative attacks and provides vivid examples of programs that have been targeted.

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