Mysterious Cash Flows At Catholic Relief Services

These days it seems that Catholic Relief Services is occupying as much of my blogging time as is its domestic counterpart, the CCHD.  I've written quite a bit about them over the past few months.  Others have too, owing to the revelations of their grants to various pro-abortion organizations overseas.

Last Friday LifeSiteNews published the reactions of some pro-life leaders to these latest revelations of scandal.  A number of other bloggers noticed that buried within is a rather matter-of-fact statement by Steven Mosher that the CRS receives over two-thirds of its funding from USAID.  Yesterday I tried to look up CRS on the Guidestar.  CRS has published none of its 990s thereon (I'm sure we know why!) but it was disclosed that during its 2009-2010 fiscal year, it received almost $920 million in various grants.  So for that year we can estimate that USAID ponied over approximately $610 million.

USAID is a federal agency.  Who funds that?  We the taxpayers do, of course!  From our tax dollars (or national debt) goes about $610 million per year (assuming that the 2009-2010 number is stationary) to the CRS.  One reason why we may not be seeing CRS's 990 is that this form will disclose the salaries and perks received by its officers, directors and other highly-compensated personnel.  Another reason is that we might actually see some details of their program expenses; might they be somewhat embarrassing for a Church organization?  And how about that other $310 million in receipts?  Is that all attributable to donation dollars are might some of that be coming from other, uh, "interesting donors"?

Now here's another puzzling facet to all of this.  I am hearing nary a peep from the "separation of church and state" gang.  Where's the "Freedom From Religion Foundation"?  Anytime a Nativity Scene is found on public property in some obscure town, they are "on the job" demanding its removal.  Why aren't they outraged about millions of tax dollars going towards a Catholic organization?  We can ask the same about "People for the American Way", etc.  Why aren't their undies bunched over this obvious breach of the wall between church and state?  Could it be that they're in "on the secret", that the goals are more about laundering federal dollars for "population control"?  That explains why they don't want to upset that progressive apple-cart.

Of course the mainstream media won't point out that obvious hypocrisy, so we bloggers must do it.  We also urge that no contribution money go towards CCHD, CRS and Catholic Charities when those collection baskets are passed in the pews.