“Much has been said lately of the massive amounts of government money going to Catholic Charities, and some are beginning to awaken to the grotesque salaries taken by their CEOs.”
In the 1951 film, “People Will Talk,” Dr. Noah Praetorius (an unconventional doctor, played by Cary Grant, who questions a medical industry that treats patients like machines) asks a colleague (Dr. Baker, played by Walter Slezak), “What is my business?” Dr. Baker responds with a rather conventional answer: “To diagnose the physical ailments of human beings and to cure them.” Dr. Praetorius immediately retorts that he is wrong, saying: “My business is to make sick people well. There’s a vast difference between curing an ailment and making a sick person well.”
This little dialogue (in what is truly a wonderful, pro-life movie) provides a philosophical question to the nature of the real purpose a doctor has in practicing medicine. The difference between “curing an ailment” and “making a sick person well” has less to do with methodology and everything to do with relationships. “Curing an ailment” places the focus on the ailment, whereas “making a sick person well” places the focus on the person, and in this post-modern world it is well and right to apply this difference to the question of charity.
Many organizations throughout the world claim to be “charities” or “charitable organizations,” and if you asked those who worked for them what their business is, they would respond with something akin to, “ending poverty,” or “relieving poverty,” or “ending the root causes of poverty.” As with Dr. Baker, such answers place the focus on the ailment, rather than the person. However, if one were to ask a Traditional member of a mendicant order what his or her business is, the response would be, “to serve the bodily needs of the poor while instructing them in the Faith in order to draw them to Christ.”
This little difference is subtle, and what it amounts to is a motive of love. When one is working to end an ailment, the motivation is the banner of a cause, whereas when one seeks to treat a person, the motivation is compassion and love. It’s easy to fight for a cause, while it is often difficult to love a person. Furthermore, when one fights for a cause, there are often expectations placed upon the outcome and remuneration for work done. On the other hand, when one is motivated by love to do some good, there are no expectations placed upon the outcome and remuneration is not only not expected but is rejected.
Simply put – love is characterized by the desire and pursuit of the good for someone else without any recourse to the self. Purchasing and handing out sandwiches to the hungry, giving away clothing to the naked, and providing shelter to the homeless without any sense of payment for these acts are all acts of love. Conversely, being paid to do these things is simply a job, and while there may be true compassion in the midst of the act, the material payment for the action merits little in Heaven. As our Lord said of those who perform righteous deeds so that others may see them, “they have received their reward.” And so, much the same is true of those who perform the works of charity for payment.
If those who perform works of charity for payment will have already received their rewards here on earth, and have not stored them up in Heaven, what of those who are actually getting rich in the name of service to the poor? Much has been said lately of the massive amounts of government money going to Catholic Charities, and some are beginning to awaken to the grotesque salaries taken by their CEOs. Here, we will examine ten Catholic Charities organizations, analyzing their reception of government grants, the salaries paid out, and the payments received by their CEOs.
The Catholic Charities of Baltimore (aka Associated Catholic Charities, INC)
The senior employee for Catholic Charities of Baltimore is William J. McCarthy, Jr, and his salary and benefits total $510,904. With a total revenue of $127.6 million (52% of which came from government grants), $92.9 million – 73% of the revenue – paid salaries and compensation.
Catholic Charities of New Hampshire
The senior employee for Catholic Charities of New Hampshire is Thomas E. Blonski, and his salary and benefits total $336,785. With a total revenue of $92.9 million, $40.1 million – 43% of the revenue – paid salaries and compensation.
Catholic Charities Neighborhood Services
The senior employee for Catholic Charities Neighborhood Services is Emmie Glynn Ryan, and her salary and benefits total $346,005. With a total revenue of $118.8 million (71% of which came from government grants), $61.7 million – 52% of the revenue – paid salaries and compensation.
Catholic Charities of Ft. Worth
The senior employee for Catholic Charities of Ft. Worth is Christopher Plumlee, and his salary and benefits total $297,082. With a total revenue of $140.2 million (92% of which came from government grants), $19.3 million – 14% of the revenue – paid salaries and compensation.
The senior employee for Catholic Charities of Chicago is Sally Blount, and her salary and benefits total $264,329. With a total revenue of $174.8 million (72% of which came from government grants), $70.2 million – 40% of the revenue – paid salaries and compensation.
Catholic Charities of St. Paul & Minneapolis
The senior employee for Catholic Charities of St. Paul and Minneapolis is Michael Goar, and his salary and benefits total $290,987. With a total revenue of $68.1 million, $36.5 million – 54% of the revenue – paid salaries and compensation.
Catholic Charities Community Services
The senior employee for Catholic Charities Community Services is Beatriz Diaz Taveras, and her salary and benefits total $294,282. With a total revenue of $87.4 million (69% of which came from government grants), $46.9 million – 54% of the revenue – paid salaries and compensation.
Catholic Charities of Galveston-Houston
The senior employee for Catholic Charities of Galveston-Houston is Cynthia Colbert, and her salary and benefits total $225,497. With a total revenue of $99.4 million (82% of which came from government grants), $32.5 million – 33% of the revenue – paid salaries and compensation.
The senior employee for Catholic Charities of Syracuse is Lori Accardi, and her salary and benefits total $233,353. With a total revenue of $79.9 million (57% of which came from government grants), $45.1 million – 57% of the revenue – paid salaries and compensation.
Catholic Charities of Rochester
The senior employee for Catholic Charities of Rochester is Karen Dehais, and her salary and benefits total $215,141. With a total revenue of $67.2 million (79% of which came from government grants), $49.4 million – 74% of the revenue – paid salaries and compensation.
The senior employee for Catholic Charities of Trenton is Marlene Lao-Collins, and her salary and benefits total $206,561. With a total revenue of $56.6 million 41% of which came from government grants), $40 million – 71% of the revenue – paid salaries and compensation.
A very wise priest – commenting on the exorbitant salaries of those “doing charity” – once said to me, “Very often people start off doing good, and end up doing well.”
The Great Commission, which is the primary act and purpose of the Catholic Church, has never changed. The conversion of peoples and nations to the teachings of Our Blessed Lord is the charge given to the Church, and everything done by the Church is done to this specific end. And anything done without this specific end is empty and without purpose.
Until the 20th century, the Catholic Church had worked through religious orders to provide aid to the poor, health care to the sick, and education to the ignorant. Catholic hospitals were filled with nuns and priests well educated in the healing arts, and the cost of health care was quite low. Catholic school classrooms were led by nuns and priests, and even the poorest kids in the neighborhood could afford a world-class education there. And the care of the world’s poorest was done by missionaries who sought first the salvation of the souls they served, while also working to provide food, housing and clothing … and it didn’t cost billions of dollars to do it.
I will never forget a conversation I once had with Sean Callahan, the current CEO of Catholic Relief Services whose full compensation is $643,085. I expressed my concern that Catholic Relief Services does nothing to evangelize the souls it claims to serve to which Callahan responded, “Oh we evangelize, we just don’t proselytize.” When I asked what he meant by this, he said, “CRS works to convert people’s minds to how to treat people and how to do things, but not to the Catholic Faith.” I reminded him that Catholics are obliged to proclaim the Gospel and to bring souls to Christ, and he balked. He then equated feeding people and preaching the Gospel with “bribing the poor.”
Just a couple of years later, Bill O’Keefe, CRS’s Vice-President for Government Relations and Advocacy, said something similar during a CNN interview in 2014. He said:
“We assist people of all backgrounds and religions and we do not attempt to engage in discussions of faith. We’re proud of that. We like to say that we assist everybody because we’re Catholic, we don’t assist people to become Catholic.”
The industrialization of charity is robbing both the wealthy and the poor – those receiving healthy salaries to “do charity” are being robbed of a great and eternal reward in Heaven, while the poor are being used as political pawns for expanded use of federal funds. Meanwhile, those who pay taxes are being squeezed in the socialist scheme to redistribute wealth. But this shouldn’t be too surprising, since Pope Paul VI predicted this very thing in his 1975 encyclical Evangelii Nuntiandi. He wrote:
We must not ignore the fact that many, even generous Christians who are sensitive to the dramatic questions involved in the problem of liberation, in their wish to commit the Church to the liberation effort are frequently tempted to reduce her mission to the dimensions of a simply temporal project. They would reduce her aims to a man-centered goal; the salvation of which she is the messenger would be reduced to material well-being. Her activity, forgetful of all spiritual and religious preoccupation, would become initiatives of the political or social order. But if this were so, the Church would lose her fundamental meaning. Her message of liberation would no longer have any originality and would easily be open to monopolization and manipulation by ideological systems and political parties. She would have no more authority to proclaim freedom as in the name of God. This is why we have wished to emphasize, in the same address at the opening of the Synod, “the need to restate clearly the specifically religious finality of evangelization. This latter would lose its reason for existence if it were to diverge from the religious axis that guides it: the kingdom of God, before anything else, in its fully theological meaning….”
The meaning of the word “charity” is love. There is no love in mere philanthropy, and certainly not in an industry masquerading as a charity. The only difference between Catholic Charities and a prostitute is that a prostitute at least admits what she is. In selling the Church to the highest bidder, Catholic Charities CEOs are making bank on the backs of the poor.
As the Venerable Fulton J. Sheen would say, “If souls are not saved, nothing is saved.” If the hierarchy of the Catholic Church is truly interested in reducing poverty throughout the world, the poverty it must begin with is the poverty of the soul.
Mother Theresa always speaks of serving Christ in the poor. (She is still speaking in heaven!)
She also insists that her sisters pray for hours a day and not become a social service agency.
The people whom they serve are given the opportunity for pray and/or bible study. They get conversions (and vocations!)
Charities can become rackets. Even pro life. I asked someone in a prolife org about what they were doing after Roe versus Wade was reversed. The response was nonspecific “strategy sessions”.
(I hope this is not a double post. I don’t see the previous one in moderation. If it is a repeat please delete).
If you asked Mother Theresa, she would say that she is serving Christ in the poorest of the poor. She was adamant though about not letter her order become a social service agency. The sisters pray for hours each day. The people that the y serve are given opportunities for prayer and bible study.
I would add that it isn’t charity for Catholic Charities to drop off bus loads and plane loads of illegal aliens on cities and towns across the country and burden these communities with the costs of providing for these people.
I fully agree with your comment.
Very true! CC’s actions are uncharitable to American citizens. And also uncharitable to illegal aliens, whom they teach to LIE and falsely claim to be refugees, when they are economic migrants, seeking to sponge off American taxpayers or take American jobs.
Charity begins at home ! True poverty of soul is a must ! Love God with all your heart mind body and soul 🙏🌹🕊️🌹🙏