US Bishop Conference Lobbies Congress to Fund Agency Funding Planned Parenthood

US Bishop Conference Lobbies Congress to Fund Agency Funding Planned Parenthood

Michael Hichborn

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and Catholic Relief Services (CRS) have once again written to Congress requesting “robust funding” for two agencies deeply committed to the promotion and distribution of contraception, one of which provides millions of dollars to Planned Parenthood.



In a 1 December 2017 joint letter to the director for the Office of Management and Budget, and copied to all members of Congress, Archbishop Broglio, the USCCB’s chairman for the Committee on International Justice and Peace, and Sean Callahan, the president of Catholic Relief Services, urged Congress to “fully fund” both PEPFAR and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria.
Despite acknowledging in the letter that both PEPFAR and the Global Fund are highly involved in the distribution of contraception, neither the USCCB nor CRS asks for the cessation of those immoral activities in its bid for Congress to provide American tax dollars to both projects.  Key portions of the letter read:

With the approach of World AIDS Day on December 1, we write to urge that the administration’s budget request for FY19 fully fund U.S. global HIV and AIDS programs …

Although we have principled concerns about those PEPFAR and Global Fund prevention activities we find inconsistent with Catholic teaching and do not implement or advocate for these activities, we support the lifesaving missions of PEPFAR and the Global Fund and urge robust funding for both programs…

As you craft the 2019 budget, we urge you to protect HIV and AIDS programs from efforts to reduce funding or to alter the U.S. Government’s PEPFAR strategy in ways that would diminish the progress we have made.

As we’ve reported before, PEPFAR is deeply involved in the promotion and distribution of contraception, including abortifacients.  For instance, in a section on PEPFAR’s website titled, “Linking HIV/AIDS to Women’s and Children’s Health,” PEPFAR makes clear that its work to fight HIV/AIDS includes the promotion and spread of contraception.  PEPFAR says:

As part of its overall prevention, care and support, and treatment efforts, PEPFAR is leveraging and linking HIV services to broader delivery mechanisms that improve health outcomes for women and children. Some of these activities include:

• Expanding integration of HIV prevention, care and support, and treatment services with family planning and reproductive health services, so that women living with HIV can access necessary care, and so that all women know how to protect themselves from HIV infection

In 2016, a representative of the USCCB reluctantly admitted that PEPFAR does indeed promote and distribute condoms, but claimed that PEPFAR is not permitted to distribute or pay for other forms of contraception.
While PEPFAR is prohibited from directly funding or distributing abortifacient contraception, it establishes a framework for such distribution, allowing other organizations like USAID to provide the contraception to people in PEPFAR projects.
The Global Fund, on the other hand, not only funds the distribution of contraception, but actually provides large grants to the world’s largest abortion network, Planned Parenthood.
Here are just a few examples of the grant disbursements from the Global Fund to Planned Parenthood affiliates world-wide.
From 2012-2015, the Global Fund provided over $13 million to the Indonesian Planned Parenthood Association.

In another grant from 2009-2013, the Global Fund provided an additional $9 million to the same Planned Parenthood affiliate.

In Ghana, from 2009-2015, the Global Fund provided the Planned Parenthood Association of Ghana with over $3 million.

In another grant to the Planned Parenthood Association of Ghana, which ran from 2015-2017, the Global Fund provided $1.4 million.

In Nigeria, from 2010-2015, the Global Fund provided $6.6 million to the Planned Parenthood Federation of Nigeria.

In addition to funding Planned Parenthood, the Global Fund is promoting homosexuality and transgenderism, as can be seen from this Global Fund publication in 2012:

In 2014, the Global Fund boasted that the work of a self-professed “Condom Man” in Vietnam was supported by the Global Fund:

In January of 2017, the Global Fund published a fact-sheet which provides data that “corresponds to Global Fund’s actual mid-2016 results.”  Page 2 of that fact-sheet shows that the number one indicator for its HIV programs … by far … was the distribution of 5.28 billion condoms.

The USCCB/CRS letter to Congress claims that PEPFAR saved 11 million lives and Global Fund saved 22 million lives.  But the question here is, “how many souls did these agencies destroy in the process?”  In his 1930 encyclical, Casti Connubii, Pope Pius XI exclaims:

“Since, therefore, the conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children, those who in exercising it deliberately frustrate its natural power and purpose sin against nature and commit a deed which is shameful and intrinsically vicious.”

In other words, the deliberate use of acts, devices or potions which prevent conception are all intrinsically evil.  When the USCCB and CRS ask Congress to provide “robust funding” to these two agencies, they are asking Congress to use American tax dollars to fund the spread of contraception.  And in the case of the Global Fund, the USCCB and CRS are asking Congress to fund the funders of Planned Parenthood.
While Catholics are left scratching their heads, asking “Why on Earth would the USCCB and CRS ask Congress to take my money and fund two agencies that are notorious in the promotion of intrinsic evils?”  The answer is very simple as it all comes down to the money that CRS would get out of it.
The PEPFAR website which tracks all of its grants to various organizations indicates that PEPFAR has allocated over $892 million to Catholic Relief Services since the year 2005.  This does not include the money CRS has received through PEPFAR as a result of being a sub-partner on other PEPFAR projects where CRS was not the principle recipient of the grant.

It’s difficult to know exactly how much CRS has received from the Global Fund over the years because the Global Fund website isn’t as comprehensive as PEPFAR’s.  That said, we have been able to confirm that CRS has received at least $264,226,459 from the Global Fund for 10 different grants.  The amounts are as follows:

• From 2012-2015, CRS received $13,810,139 for a project in Indonesia.
• From 2003-2008, CRS received $1,439,778 for a project in Madagascar.
• From 2016-2017, CRS received $6,034,778 for a project in Mali.
• From 2013-2015, CRS received $6,795,038 for another project in Mali.
• From 2010-2018, CRS received $11,098,900 for a project in Gambia.
• From 2012-2018, CRS received $85,454,539 for a project in Guinea.
• From 2011-2017, CRS received $13,064,548 for a project in Sierra Leone.
• From 2008-2017, CRS received $21,749,047 for a project in Benin.
• From 2016-2017, CRS received $32,128,902 for a project in Niger.
• From 2008-2016, CRS received $72,658,405 for another project in Niger.

Of course, all of this funding is in direct contradiction with Article 10 § 3 of Pope Benedict XVI’s 2012 motu proprio On the Service of Charity, which commands the bishop to whom a charitable organization answers “to ensure that charitable agencies dependent upon him do not receive financial support from groups or institutions that pursue ends contrary to Church’s teaching.”
Our Blessed Lord was very clear when He said that one cannot serve both God and mammon.  And when the USCCB and CRS ask Congress to take American tax dollars … your money, our money, and the money of over 70 million other registered Catholics in the US … and give “robust” amounts of it to the contraception-promoting and distributing PEPFAR and the Planned Parenthood-funding Global Fund, just so they can sweeten their own bids for funding, it becomes abundantly clear whom they are serving.
Contact the USCCB and CRS and tell them that it is unacceptable for the Catholic Church to be lobbying Congress to fund agencies that are spreading grave evils throughout the world:
Catholic Relief Services: 877-435-7277 info@crs.org
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops: 202-541-3196 scolecchi@usccb.org