The Origins Of USCCB Political Authority

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

Bishop David J. Malloy, chairman of the USCCB Committee on International Justice and Peace, writes a lot of letters to Congress. A lot of other bishops do too, and they usually identify themselves as the “Chair” of some conference committee or other.

I recently ran across Bishop Malloy’s April 2023 letter to Congress regarding the Foreign Aid Appropriations bill. In it, Bishop Malloy identifies over a dozen funding categories, offering the USCCB’s official recommendation of specific amounts for each of them.

For example, Bishop Malloy requests that Congress approve $2,728,500,000 for “USAID Malaria, TB, Global Health Security & other NTDs,” $4,725,000,000 for “DOS/PEPFAR HIV/AIDS,” and $1,600,000,000 for something called the “Green Climate Fund.”

He adds: “The U.S. Bishops strongly oppose any expansion of taxpayer funding of abortion,” but curiously, he does not insist that such funding decrease or cease altogether.

But while Bishop Malloy recommends funding this year’s appropriations for “Maternal Health and Child Survival” ($1,012,000,000), he does not oppose the Biden Administration’s funding for “family planning” that go to pro-abortion organizations throughout the Third World.

In fact, our bishops have endorsed federal foreign aid funding of abortion for years. In 2010, I wrote Bishop Howard Hubbard, who chaired the International Justice and Peace Committee at the time. He had recently written Congress with a request to continue legislation that included such funding.

“Your Excellency, I worked for many years on Capitol Hill, specifically on foreign aid legislation. Many Catholics, on Capitol Hill and elsewhere, disagree with your particular prudential views. Nonetheless, speaking for the USCCB, you endorse specific legislative particulars on which good Catholics disagree in the name of Holy Mother Church. In your words, ‘it would be wrong’ to oppose your views.

“My question, then, is this: Does your public advocacy of such specific legislation constitute a teaching of the ‘authentic magisterium of their bishops,’ like Humanae Vitae, to which the ‘faithful are bound to adhere with religious submission of mind’ (Canon 753; Lumen Gentium 25)?  Is a Catholic of goodwill bound by Canon Law ‘to adhere with religious submission of mind’ to your prudential political views? 

“I make this request in ‘Charity and respect for the truth’ [CCC, n. 2489] and look forward to your reply.”

Bishop Hubbard sent me a gracious and helpful reply. The USCCB offers “moral guidance on the general direction of proposed legislation” because “the Church is concerned with the temporal aspects of the common good….” (CCC, n. 2420). “The role of the state,” he wrote, “is to promote the common good of all,” and “political authorities are obliged to respect the fundamental rights of the human person…especially of families and the disadvantaged” (CCC, n. 2237).

In closing, Bishop Hubbard observed that “of course, it is possible for people of good will to disagree over how precisely to protect the rights and welfare of poor and vulnerable people, but the obligation to do so is without question. Sadly, this question is not a major element of the national debate on deficit reduction.”

“Financial Windows” And Other Magisterial Issues

A review of the USCCB website reveals that our bishops send literally hundreds of letters to Congress every year. They advocate spending in countless specific subcategories of federal legislation. They make authoritative statements regarding legislation on agriculture, the budget, taxes, the “Social Safety Net,” affordable housing, labor, “predatory banking” — even “Domestic Poverty in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.”

One wonders, where do our shepherds find the time to review millions of pages of proposed legislation and the accompanying reports before they write their letter and statements they give in testimony before congressional committees?

Bishop Malloy is ordinary of my old Diocese of Rockford, Ill. Right now, Rockford suffers economic decline bordering on disaster, yet the bishop apparently stays up night after night poring through data to identify those programs worthy of taxpayer funding.

Consider: He recommends that Congress “Increase U.S. funding of development banks” and support “additional replenishment of concessional financing windows.”

Does Bishop Malloy really understand the intricacies of “financing windows”?

Unlikely. For all we know, he might be recommending the waste of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars that will lead to another international bank bailout like that of the early 1980s. Which is his right, of course, like any other citizen. But he does it in the name of the Catholic Church. And our bishops have been doing it for years. 

But by what authority? How did the funding of “concessional financing windows” become part of the Church’s magisterial teaching? And where did that authority — or at least the bishops’ claim to it — come from, anyway?

How It All Got Started

Over a century ago, when there was no U.S. Catholic Bishops “Conference,” James Cardinal Gibbons was the lead spokesman for the Catholic Church in the United States.

Cardinal Gibbons, the archbishop of Baltimore, was known as the “Primate of America.” In the late nineteenth century, Catholics, millions of them only recently arrived, weren’t universally popular in the United States. In the face of intense opposition and considerable bigotry, the cardinal fought tenaciously to prove that Catholics were good citizens, and proud of it.

That animosity continued into the early 1900s. The Ku Klux Klan, whose members hated Catholics a lot more than they did Jews or blacks, had an extensive membership in the South and the Midwest. My father had been fighting them in the Ohio River Valley since he was a college student.

As war broke out in Europe in 1914, opposition to U.S. involvement was widespread, including among Catholics. German-Americans didn’t want to be drafted and forced to fight their cousins, and Irish-Americans had no desire to fight for their English oppressors.

Woodrow Wilson responded by running as a peace candidate in the 1916 campaign.

On election night my father, a Catholic University grad student at the time, led the cheers in front of the Democrat National Committee headquarters in Washington. “We want Wilson one time more we want peace we don’t want war,” the crowd roared.

Of course, Wilson quickly changed his tune, and Cardinal Gibbons was there to help — and that help included ignoring Pope Benedict XV.

Pope Benedict had urged Cardinal Gibbons to convince Wilson to keep his commitment to peace, but the cardinal feared that Catholics would be branded as traitors if he complied. He assured Wilson that Catholics were good Americans and would serve in the armed forces in numbers greater than their proportion in the population, and he was right: They did.

On April 6, 1917, Congress declared war on Germany. In August, America’s bishops, confronted with an unprecedented challenge, formed the National Catholic War Council to help Catholics in the military as well as their families here at home. After the war ended in 1918, the Council did not dissolve. Instead, it went further, addressing social issues that had arisen because of the war.

And there were a lot of them. In response, countless organizations, churches, political parties, and other groups were publishing their programs for reconstruction. The members of the Council decided it had to have one of its own, so in in February 1919, they published the text of a proposal written by Fr. John A. Ryan, and called it the “Bishop’s Program for Social Reconstruction.”

The Program was nothing short of a manifesto. It called for federal government policies ranging from taxes and labor laws to establishing a “living wage,” national healthcare, old age and unemployment insurance, and dozens of other unprecedented powers with very particular applications in the political and economic sphere all in the name of “Social Justice.”

With those marching orders in hand, the National Catholic War Council became the National Catholic Welfare Council. In 1923 “Council” was changed to “Conference,” and the once-temporary organization became permanent.

And that’s how Bishop Malloy’s authority on “financing windows” was born.