TRANSCRIPT
A large — very large — percentage of Catholics have no idea the incredible wealth the nation’s bishops have at their disposal, and we are talking billions of dollars.
If you were to look at the bishops collectively as a corporation, there’s no doubt that would register in the Fortune 500. Inside the Church, they have amassed a multibillion-dollar slush fund, as Church Militant has reported on before, in a tidy little operation in Omaha, Nebraska, called “Catholic Mutual.”
They require every diocese to pay regular premiums for almost anything they need in terms of insurance and so forth — auto insurance, health plans, everything. And as you might imagine, they are pretty skinflint about paying out. Estimates are that fund has billions upon billions in it because each diocese is not allowed to shop for cheaper rates, nor is any parish. They have a “captured market.” Not bad if you can swing that.
Then there are the infamous diocesan tax rates on every parish, which vary in percentages according to which diocese you are in. But 10% is a decent average to think of. That goes supposedly toward funding the chancery, but what you don’t normally hear is a percentage of that money goes to, you guessed it, the U.S. bishops’ conference to fund that bloated liberal Democrat-loving bureaucracy in D.C.
Then there are the “special collections” of the bishops nationally, as well as the special collections on the diocesan level. The national ones amount to tens of millions each year — again straight to the bishops’ conference in D.C., while the local special collections help make up the shortfall from your collection-basket money going to feed the D.C. machine.
It’s a racket of unimaginable proportions, which, if the Church was doing well and you saw mass conversions and tremendous catechesis and faith formation and all that, you could understand. But the reality is that while the bishops are awash in cash, the Church is on life support, and even then, barely.
But all of that is inside the Church, a careful crafty game of shifting money around — and none of the movement of these billions is traceable because the bishops will not and are not required to reveal any of it. So much for them being “transparent.”
Again, that’s all Catholics’ money, given by them to their corrupt leaders, and it isn’t required to be made public. However, as we have been talking about for the past number of days, the bishops, unsatisfied by the billions they bilk out of Catholics, are also taking billions from Uncle Sam, hundreds of millions each year, all under the cover of “social justice” programs, which support the Democratic agenda of undermining and destroying America.
In short, the bishops are bilking billions to fund their bloated bureaucracy in D.C., which could not exist if it weren’t for the government handouts and NGO contracts.
Here, in a nutshell, is how it works. Aside from the tens of millions gotten from Catholics in the pews each year, tens of millions more are awarded to the USCCB in the form of government contracts year after year.
The USCCB has an annual operating budget, according to its latest filings, of about 200 million annually. Sixty-seven million comes directly through government contracts, largely for operations involving illegal immigration, a Democratic Party top priority.
But of the 100 or so staff at the USCCB, the vast majority of their work is wrapped up in lobbying Congress for their monies, for which, of course, a cut goes to administrative costs to keep the bishops’ bureaucracy chugging along. The bishops’ conference is nothing but a congressional lobbying firm that relies on those contracts to give itself an excuse for existence.
If the government money were to dry up, so too would the conference; it’s just that simple. You can’t lose 25%/30%/40% of your revenue and keep the lights on. And once the lobbying effort aimed at keeping the money flowing in to keep the bureaucracy going to keep the money flowing in to keep the bureaucracy going was to cease, maybe they could get down to their real business of evangelization (the bishops, that is).
Those millions and millions of dollars are not only destroying the Church in a secular setting, because the Church is directly tied to the Marxist Democratic agenda and reliant on it for its existence, but it’s also destroying the nation. So to challenge and try to cut off these funds is a double duty for faithful Catholics, both for the nation as well as the Church.
That’s the entire point of the upcoming Deposit of Faith Coalition event this Thursday in D.C. The prayer rally is to focus on the spiritual, and the press conference is to draw politically conservative media attention to the temporal. The bishops get all this money because of the lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill of their USCCB staff, true, but also because they do not rock the boat with the Democrats on touchy issues like abortion and so forth, and carry their water for them on illegal immigration, gun control, shutting down freedom of religious speech and raging against fossil fuels.
It’s quite the quid pro quo they’ve got going on.
And remember, the bishops’ conference was among the first to come out in support of “Obamacare” back in 2009 and 2010, even with its provisions for abortion and contraception. They only reversed course at the very last minute, a day late and a dollar short, which, of course, they knew.
New York cardinal Timothy Dolan even gave a national TV interview extolling the “health plan,” saying the bishops have wanted something like this for a hundred years. That was telling. The USCCB is the greatest well-funded enemy of “America first” that you never knew you had.
So we have decided to take this fight to them, the political fight as well as the spiritual one.
As a reminder, on Thursday, July 20, the Deposit of Faith Coalition will sponsor, first, a prayer rally outside of the headquarters of the bishops’ conference in D.C. at 11 a.m. that will go to 11:45.
To find out all those details, just click on the Deposit of Faith graphic and scroll to the bottom and click on the prayer rally button.
Then, starting at 1 p.m., the coalition will be hosting a large press conference with politically conservative media outlets to explain to them how the bishops are using U.S. tax dollars to help destroy America by pushing the Democrats’ agenda under the guise of social justice.
Church Militant will be livestreaming all of it beginning at 12:30, and wrapping up our coverage at 3 p.m. ET. All that information and further details are available by clicking on the provided link.
To help us financially with this much-needed endeavor and make a donation, please use the form below, where you can make your tax-deductible gift to help choke off the bishops’ money supply of your tax dollars.
If you are in or around D.C. that day, please come to the prayer rally in front of the bishops’ headquarters. Then feel free to attend the press conference at the National Press Club at 1; seating will be on a first-come, first-served basis.
For those who cannot attend, again, you can watch the entire coverage, wall to wall, right here on Church Militant as we livestream this historic challenge to the U.S. bishops’ destruction of the American Republic.
Please donate whatever you can to help us turn this thing around. The time has come to defund the bishops.
And let’s hope the politically conservative media understand how the tax-exempt status and privilege of the religious Left is being used to undermine the nation, not just from the pulpits but also on Main Street.