CV NEWS FEED // A “new model” is needed for the United States Bishops’ Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) according to John Paul II biographer George Weigel.
“The Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), rhetorically oversold as the ‘U.S. Church’s anti-poverty program’—Do no other such programs exist?—was an interesting idea in its time. That time has passed,” Weigel wrote in a recent column for First Things Magazine.
CCHD is an anti-poverty program launched by US Catholic Bishops in the late 1960s, “as a kind of Catholic analog to Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs,” Weigel remarked.
According to Weigel, the CCHD has failed, in a similar way to government-funded “community organizing,” did: by failing to recognize that “urban deterioration” had occurred “in the breakdown of marriage and family structures,” which, he notes, is “a cultural crisis not amenable to solution by cash.”
The CCHD should depart from this approach, Weigel argued, and recenter its mission on fostering the spread of Catholic education in poor areas, as proposed by Pope St John Paul II in Centesimus Annus.
John Paul II’s encyclical asserted that the true Catholic approach to anti-poverty work should start “with an affirmation of the potential latent in the poor” and proceed to facilitate the development of this potential through empowerment programs that give them tools to generate wealth.
“If that’s the Catholic anti-poverty paradigm, then we don’t need to invent new programs,” Weigel stated: “We already have in place the most effective empowerment tool the American Church has ever devised: our Catholic schools.”
“Thus, my proposal,” he continued:
Repurpose the Catholic Campaign for Human Development as the Campaign for Urban Catholic Schools, funded by a national collection. I guarantee that any such transformation would double, triple, or possibly quadruple the amount of money raised by CCHD, if the new campaign were properly promoted and run with transparency.
I know I would quintuple what I used to give to CCHD, and I know many others who would do the same.
In order for the Church in the US to continue working to address poverty, Weigel concluded, it is “imperative” for the Church to expand and redirect the work of CCHD to “empower the poor through Catholic schools before they crumble under the terrible financial pressures they now face.”
