Analysis

The truth about Catholic Relief Services: It is not merely a non-profit that helps the poor

From 2013 through the 2022 fiscal year, USAID awarded CRS a whopping $4.6 billion in total funding, more than any other organization on the planet.
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Stephen
Kokx
Stephen Kokx
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(LifeSiteNews) — President Donald Trump’s attacks on the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has Catholic Relief Services (CRS) worried it may have to let half of its staff go, according to an internal email written by its CEO.

“We anticipate that we will be a much smaller overall organization by the end of this fiscal year,” Sean Callahan reportedly said this week.

News of the potential firings infuriated dissident laity and clergy but has given conservative Catholics like Michael Hichborn reason to celebrate.

Speaking with Raymond Arroyo on EWTN’s The World Over last night, Hichborn praised Trump’s actions as being long overdue.

“Catholic Relief Services, as an organization, shouldn’t be receiving federal funds anyway simply because USAID was created primarily as a population control organization,” he said.

Hichborn is the founder of the Lepanto Institute. He has spent the last decade exposing corrupt institutions and clergy in the Catholic Church, especially the Marxist-supporting Catholic Campaign for Human Development fund.

Hichborn explained to Arroyo on Thursday that CRS is not really a “Catholic” organization but rather a “government” entity that regularly hires non-Catholics who simply carry out USAID’s marching orders, even when it comes to promoting contraception.

“Whenever somebody applies for a grant, what they are applying for is to participate or to control a program already instituted by USAID,” he said. “So, it’s not that USAID is giving them money in order to drill wells or to put out malaria nets and that kind of thing. USAID is saying we have a program that we want you to implement and when you implement the program, here are some partners that you can work with and these are the parameters that we have in mind.”

USAID distributes over $44 billion in taxpayer dollars every year. Some of the controversial grants it has made in recent years includes the funding of Ukrainian media, supporting Tel Aviv University in Israel, promoting “diversity” initiatives in Serbia, and backing an anti-Catholic event in Ireland.

Over the past 48 hours, scores of social media users have exposed the bizarre programs USAID has supported. LifeSite’s in-house geopolitical analyst Frank Wright has said that the agency essentially operates as an arm of the Deep State in that it promotes secularism and left-wing policies abroad.


CRS has been the top beneficially of USAID funding over the past nine years. Starting in 2013 and lasting through the 2022 fiscal year, USAID awarded CRS a whopping $4.6 billion in total funding, more than any other organization on the planet. A 2024 audit discovered CRS had received more than half of its $1.2 billion budget from the U.S. government. It currently employs roughly 7,000 people across the world.

“USAID in implementing these global structures is creating a new form of global governance,” Hichborn said Thursday. “What they’re trying to do is create these supply chains that go beyond governance … so that they can create an infrastructure that is globally reliant.”

As would be expected, upper-level CRS staff are well compensated for their services. As pointed out by Hichborn on social media this week, CRS president Sean Callahan makes over $600,000 per year. Top executives at other Church-backed organizations such as Catholic Charities make similar amounts.

“Nobody should be getting wealthy on the idea of helping the poor,” Hichborn told Arroyo.


But it is not just the generous compensation packages that are unsettling. As Hichborn has pointed out on his website over the past nine years, CRS employees themselves are extremely liberal.

In 2016, the Lepanto Institute published a study that found 98% of political donations made by CRS workers went to “pro-abortion candidates and causes.” In 2024, that figure had risen to 99%.

Catholic Charities in the U.S., another non-profit backed by the Church, was also shown to have a left-leaning bias, with 76% of its employees giving donations to Democrats.

Claims that CRS is just a non-partisan, agenda-free charity only interested in helping the poor are obviously false.

What’s more, in 2019, Hichborn’s group concluded that CRS is “morally complicit in the promotion and spread of condoms and contraception through federally funded projects.” In 2020, a group of prominent Catholics, including LifeSite’s John-Henry Westen, called on Congress to investigate CRS for its involvement in such matters.

Liberal Jesuit James Martin has been one the most outspoken defenders of USAID as of late. On X this week, he praised its work as a form of charity. But he was rightly called out by, among others, X user Jeff Carlson as well as former Apostolic Nuncio to the U.S. Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who reminded him of the many nefarious activities it has been involved in.


As Trump’s reassessment of USAID continues to unfold, it remains to be seen if CRS or any of the other Church-aligned groups that receive millions of dollars from taxpayers will keep their funding. The appetite for backing them appears to be on the wane especially given that Barbara Graham, program director and immigration attorney for Catholic Charities, released a video on YouTube last month advising illegal immigrants on how to avoid being deported.


Why should taxpayer dollars go to organizations that so blatantly make money off encouraging people to break the law?

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