Children’s Defense Fund = Big Government Defense Fund

From the Institute on Religion & Democracy:

Marian Wright Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) is organizing churches, synagogues and mosques once again this year for the annual “Children’s Sabbath” on October 17-18. As the Welfare State’s chief prophetess, Edelman infamously admitted years ago that Americans are supposedly not concerned about poor people, therefore “children” must be the declared objects of concern for CDF’s political demands. Naturally, the Religious Left hails Wright as though she were an Old Testament heroine, jousting not against the Philistines but against their perceived callous modern equivalent, the Republicans and other skeptics of Big Government as panacea.

The CDF explains its justification for the Children’s Sabbath:

• In our wealthy nation today, one in six children lives in poverty while the rich get richer and millionaires reap tax breaks they don’t need.
• In our powerful nation, we still resort to guns and violence rather than the power of non-violence to solve problems in our homes, neighborhoods and among nations.
• In our nation, founded on the truth that all people have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, rampant racial and economic disparities in access to quality health care and education combined with zero tolerance laws that criminalize children at younger and younger ages put black boys born in 2001 at a one in three and Latino boys born the same year at a one in six lifetime risk of being incarcerated.

On the Children’s Sabbath, religious believers are summoned by CDF to the altar of big government, to pray for government controlled health care, for government enforced gun bans, for expanded government welfare programs, and for higher taxes and greater government regulatory control. Ostensibly, the children finally will be safe when the even more empowered gods and goddesses who reign from their temples in Washington, D.C., will smile down upon a completely pacified nation. Or at least, that is why Children’s Sabbath worshippers will pray for next month. Among the faithful endorsing the Children’s Sabbath are: Catholic Charities U.S.A., the Islamic Society of North America, the National Council of the Churches, several Jewish groups, the United Methodist Board of Church and Society, and 200 other religious groups who are largely happy for the state to displace religious institutions as the moral guardians of children. (In fairness to the Islamic Society, it probably is not quite so secularized as the other religious groups. Instead, it likely sees political cooperation with left-leaning Christian and Jewish groups as vital to its larger political goal of mainstreaming political Islam.)

Revealingly, the Children’s Sabbath never really talks about nurturing children in religious faith, or protecting unborn children, or providing children the security of two-parent families, or guarding children from the heightened risk of poverty, physical and sexual abuse, and reduced quality of education that illegitimacy and divorce precipitate. Nor does the Sabbath address the failed public schools to which poor children are often held hostage because private education is unavailable. Equipping children with virtues and the motivation for hard work, self-control and service to others also does not seem to rank high in the Children’s Sabbath. Instead, care for children seems to entail persuading them that they are the victims of American greed.

It’s interesting that, in addition to the usual suspects among liberal Protestantism, and the Islamic Society of North America (which is doubtless less secular than the other organizations and more concerned with making Islam “mainstream”) is Catholic Charities U.S.A.

A lot of people doubtless assume that if the word “Catholic” is in the name or an organization, it’s Catholic.

Bad assumption.

All sorts of “Catholic” organizations have been taken over by people who, although they may be nominal Catholics, are essentially secular. The Office of Student Development at Marquette and the Manresa Program come immediately to mind.

Catholic Charities USA is been closely tied to leftist priest Bryan Massingale, of the Marquette Theology Department.

Massingale is pretty much your standard race hustler along the lines of Jesse Jackson. His committment to Catholic teaching (or lack thereof) is shown by his opposition to a Wisconsin ballot measure that would have banned gay marriage in the state. Wisconsin’s Catholic Bishops supported the measure.

Anybody who wants to see that a genuinely Catholic agenda for helping the poor and children is should read John Paul the Great’s Centesimus Annus.

Catholics who are actually loyal to church teaching need to be careful about any organization -- and this includes universities -- that claim to be “Catholic.” Often, they are simply secular.