Left-Wing Radicalism in the Church: CCHD and ACORN

It must have been a sad day at the offices of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) in Washington, D.C., last year when the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) announced that its temporary suspension of funding for the embattled radical group ACORN was being made permanent. Each November around Thanksgiving, every Roman Catholic parish takes up a collection for the non-profit campaign. CCHD is the grant-making arm of USCCB, which acts on behalf of the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops, a group widely assumed to be conservative defenders of traditional morality. However, CCHD and ACORN share a left-wing ideology that puts a premium on aggressive community organizing. It is an error to think of CCHD as an ordinary charity. In fact, it is an extreme left-wing political organization whose ties stretch back to the “father” of community organizing himself, Saul Alinsky, and to Barack Obama in his community-organizing days in Chicago. And unbeknownst to most Catholics, almost no CCHD grants actually provide direct relief to the poor. CCHD cut off ACORN after channeling $7.3 million of parishioners’ money to the group over the last decade. Bishops came under intense pressure from conservative Catholics outraged by reports of gross legal and ethical improprieties involving ACORN. [...]

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