One of the shocking things you’ll learn when you dig into the refugee resettlement program here in the U.S. is the unbelievable amount of federal money given to the Catholic Church by the feds. The other shocker is that the feds have incentivized bringing more refugees because they pay per refugee brought in to the Country. So it makes sense that the refugee resettlement programs want as many refugees they can bring without regard for the consequences to the communities they dump them in. The numbers are really shocking:
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is one of many Volags (Volunteer Agencies) in the U.S.:
Below are some of the sources of income:
a. $1,850 per refugee (including children) from the State Department.
b. Up to $2,200 for each refugee by participating in a U.S. DHHS program known as Matching Grant. To get the $2,200, the Volag need only show it spent $200 and gave away $800 worth of donated clothes, furniture or cars.
c. The Volag pockets 25% of every transportation loan it collects from refugees it “sponsors”.
d. All Volag expenses and overhead in the Washington, DC HQ are paid by the U.S. government.
e. For their refugee programs, Volags collect money from all federal grant programs – “Marriage Initiative”, “Faith-based”, “Ownership Society”, etc., as well as from various state and local grants.
The program is so lucrative that in some towns the Catholic Church has lessened support for traditional charity works to put more effort into resettlement. It uses collection offerings to promote the refugee resettlement program.
From the US Conference of Catholic Bishops 2012 Annual report for Migration and Refugee Services (be sure to check out the report and see all the things the Bishops lobbied on that year).
REVENUE:
Federal Grants/Contracts $65,911,344 (taxpayer money)
CRS Collection $ 1,369,807
Refugee Travel Loan Fees $ 3,622,886 (this is taxpayer $ too, feds loaned it and USCCB collects and keeps some)
Investment Income and $65,719
Private Grants/Donations
Other $5,481
Total Revenue $70,975,237
So, that’s about 98% of their funds for 2012 that came from you! That is not what I call Christian charity!
Not to be lost in the pomp and circumstance of Pope Francis’ first visit to Washington is the reality that the Catholic Church he oversees has become one of the largest recipients of federal largesse in America.
The Church and related Catholic charities and schools have collected more than $1.6 billion since 2012 in U.S. contracts and grants in a far-reaching relationship that spans from school lunches for grammar school students to contracts across the globe to care for the poor and needy at the expense of Uncle Sam, a Washington Times review of federal spending records show.
Former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York once famously noted in 1980 that the government funded 50 percent of Catholic Charities‘ budget, commenting “private institutions really aren’t private anymore.” Today, those estimates remain about the same, according to Leslie Lenkowsky, who served as the chief executive officer of the Corporation for National and Community Service under George W. Bush.
Catholic Charities USA, the largest charitable organization run by the church, receives about 65 percent of its annual budget from state and federal governments, making it an arm of the federal welfare state, said Brian Anderson, a researcher with the Manhattan Institute.
The federal government came to increasingly rely on the church to help it with Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” and the charities “imbued with their new faith in the government’s potential to solve social problems, eagerly accepted government money,” Mr. Anderson wrote in an essay for the Manhattan Institute.
Catholic Charities received nearly a quarter of its funding from government by the end of the 1960s, more than half by the late 1970s and more than 60 percent by the mid-1980s, the level where it has remained ever since, Mr. Anderson said.
Read more: WT
