The Annual Bishop's Charity Appeal: The Good, the Sad, and the Inscrutable

I received my annual mailing this past week from the Diocese of Orlando [you can fill in your own diocese here] inviting me to participate in the annual bishop’s appeal, an event that always seems to fall around the beginning of Lent. There is a certain appropriateness to that, I guess. I chuckled a bit, because this notification causes me much less stress as a layperson than it did when I was a canonical pastor 30-40 years ago. We pastors got a different invitation, one without the standard promotional photo shoots of Catholic school kids in uniform, nuns in habit, seminarians in cassocks praying in a chapel, or food baskets being delivered to a hungry family. A “pastor’s invitation” then in 1979 [my first] and a pastor’s “invitation” today is an assessment, a cold hard number of what your parish is expected to raise in the annual campaign. My first “assessment” in 1979 for my country parish was $8000, and as a new pastor I did wonder if we could ever reach the goal. I honestly cannot remember if we did or not—sometimes it was just easier to roll some of the Easter collection into the fund.
 
As president of the Orlando Priests Council for several terms, I soon became aware that pastors overall were always unhappy about their assessments. More secret than any of our nation’s nuclear war codes was the “formula” by which the bishop and the diocesan finance board determined each parish’s campaign goals. [I must admit that I arrived in Orlando just as priests were given a substantial salary raise, making us the third best paid priests in the U.S.] As a layperson today, the only trends I can discern is that parishes which struggle to meet their assessment goals in a calendar year may get a slight reduction in the following year. Early in my time here in Florida the diocesan policy was adapted so that if a parish went over its assessment for the annual bishop’s appeal, the excess—or at least a percentage of it—is returned to the parish for its own internal use.
 
Catholic donors, including me, are no different from anyone else. We hope that the needs of the Church get the biggest bang for our bucks. I have always been a bit queasy about the gap between the presentation of the campaign each year [and I am referring here to my life experience in the church, not just my present abode.] Catholic Charities-Bishops Appeals in general have an in-church and on-line video shown at all the Masses which features clipped interviews from those who minister for the Church and those who are helped by the Church, usually both. The video, of course, augments the mailed brochure and donation instructions. The pastors have discretion, I believe, in how they choose to emphasize the campaign locally. If you say too little at Mass, many of your members may get the impression that the project is a “slam dunk” appeal; if you say too much—particularly week after week if you have not met your parish goal yet—then you drive people like me up the wall. I already ran the plastic through my diocesan web site for the 2024 campaign before kick-off Sunday, and now I will sit through twelve weekly pulpit reminders of “For those of you who are still praying and meditating at home upon the size of your gift…” [A personal letter to non-participants was my practice as a pastor after the second week of the campaign. Whether your congregation gave or not, they were grateful.] 
 
But in recent years I have concluded that the term “Catholic Charities,” or just charity, for that matter, is much more complicated than it used to be. As pastors we had to give our parishioners honest reasons for them to make substantial gifts, and that was not always easy to do. Let us suppose you call your campaign “Catholic Charities,” as used to be quite common, and you use videos and photos of Catholic school children at your appeal at all the Masses. [At Catholic University I took a course called “Elements of Semiology,” the psychology of sign and symbol. I still have my notes: “pictures of nuns in habits and kids in Catholic school uniforms loosen wallets.”] The titles and visual prompts strongly imply that the donation to “charity” here is tuition assistance to Catholic kids who cannot afford the standard tuition. Does an annual diocesan campaign provide tuition assistance to Catholic kids who need it? It depends on how you interpret that. From my diocesan website, the office of schools serves as a facilitator of access for a variety of aid from state programs and private [not Catholic] foundations for students with identifiable learning issues. Here is the link: you be the judge. It is true that some parishes in my diocese have cultivated endowments over the years to assist with tuition, but eligibility and funding is a parish affair. The FACTS program, a financial assessment tool, appears to be widely used in my part of the diocese, but again, we are not talking about cash funds from the bishops’ appeal for students X and Y.
 
I need to add here that a number of diocesan charitable entities must conduct fund-raising efforts throughout the year to meet their annual budgets. Parishes, of course, have done this for years [remember bingo?] but social service operations are under the gun to stay open and they need the involvement of those of a certain tax bracket. Hence the gala ball or the golf tournament. [We attend one every year for a favorite diocesan charity, and at the last one I accidentally made a pocket phone bid at an auction, winning a large basket of WAWA goodies. It is frightening that an excellent ministry depends upon fools like me who can’t operate their phones properly.]
 
The sticky issue—and pastors have to deal with this when their savvy donors ask them—is the truth that diocesan annual campaigns usually fund chancery bureaucracies—salaries of administrators and programs of all sorts, from school superintendents, tribunals for annulments, fundraising and development, and even a new and critical need—regularizing the immigration status of hundreds of foreign priests, many of whom are in imminent danger of deportation. [My own diocese has been impacted.]
 
I am not opposed to funding diocesan ministerial operations—and I do contribute modestly to my own diocesan appeal. My issues would tend to be the nature of the programs funded, quality of the administrators—where there are administrators--and the programming that sometimes leaves much to be desired, or in other cases does not exist at all. Locally there is nothing here for the Catholic with a college education [or acumen] and quality life experience who would like an ongoing adult-oriented immersion in Catholic scholarship in their parish or locale. This population is also the real or potential heart of the batting order where donorship is concerned, and its potential contribution to the process of synodality would be noteworthy [if the parish took the trouble to schedule Synodal listening sessions as instructed by the pope.]
 
A half-century ago in the larger metropolitan areas it was easy for seminary professors to speak regularly at adult ed theology classes at the local parishes. Not so today. When I reviewed the literature for Catholic Charity drives around the country, it is obvious that seminaries are backbreaking costs for dioceses. A seminary should be an accredited state educational site awarding master’s degree in accordance with the standards of Middle States or Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, etc. In accredited colleges and universities there are strict standards for everything from the number of professors holding doctorates to library facilities. Cardinal Dolan in New York makes an excellent case in this America essay for a merger of seminaries into regional universities of excellence. [Also, see this piece from Forbes.] The Cardinal makes a fine point—there is a correlation between the academic and professional quality of seminaries and the effectiveness of preaching in parishes. This is the kind of issue in which an informed donor ought to have say.
 
It is also true that the initiative of religious and lay Catholics is developing new and energizing ministries independent of the diocesan financial grid. The renowned Cristo Rey network of high schools is preparing to open its doors here in Orlando soon, having recruited from among the best and the brightest of Catholic laity in my region to build the program from the ground up. The cloistered Trappist monks have broadened their influence from their own means. My wife and I belong to an online Trappist Spirituality sharing group based in Mepkin Abbey near Charleston, South Carolina, where we also retreat. Mepkin is a charity close to our hearts here. One can only guess at the number of book clubs, “pod communities” and other novel ways that Catholics find to feed themselves and one another with a concrete exchange of faith, study, and grace, totally without diocesan funding. Again, the shame is that we have no professionally structured ministerial assistance for these motivated folks.
 
But as I have often said to my wife, the American Church is changing, and with that the old methods and labels of donations and fundraising do not mean precisely what they used to. When I was a child the term “Catholic Charities” was about little kids in orphanages, in the same league as ransomed pagan babies and later Operation Rice Bowl, which today takes plastic online. The cost of “doing charity” is higher today: the most obvious reason is the disappearance of so many lay, religious and priests who voluntarily worked for minimal compensation. Today a lay person entering professional ministry needs a much higher rate of compensation to live reasonably and, let me add, to become sufficiently educated and proficient to exercise ministry to a well-schooled Catholic community.
 
The term “Catholic Charities,” by the way, is not just a generic tag. Wikipedia explains: “Catholic Charities USA is the national voluntary membership organization for Catholic Charities agencies throughout the United States and its territories. Catholic Charities USA is a member of Caritas Internationalis, an international federation of Catholic social service organizations. Catholic Charities USA is the national office of 167 local Catholic Charities agencies nationwide.

Many local dioceses have partnered with state and local civil governments to deliver social services. The Archdiocese of Chicago’s website states: “The majority of funding for Catholic Charities’ operations is provided by governmental agencies. Catholic Charities recognizes revenues in the fiscal year that the services are rendered. Fee and grants from government agencies revenue and support revenues are recognized in the fiscal year that they are received. Program fees include fees for programs that are received from individuals as well as federal, state, and local governments. The fees relate to case management and fees for other services provided to clients.”
 
Put simply, many services offered by Catholic Charities years ago are now done so in financial collaboration with governments. In recent years, some dioceses—Boston, Washington, and Chicago, to cite some—have disengaged from adoption and foster care services because of civil requitements that forbid exclusion of same sex couples from parenting roles. My own diocese has no mention of adoption on its Catholic Charities site. This is sad: I can recall years ago working with my diocese on monitoring costs of the adoption process.
 
Alongside of Catholic Charities is Catholic Relief Services. Its website explains its mission: “Catholic Relief Services was founded in 1943 by the Catholic Bishops of the United States to serve World War II survivors in Europe. Since then, we have expanded in size to reach more than 130 million people in more than one hundred countries on five continents.” This is one of my favorite charities because it allows us to instantly respond to national or international crises with an online response. Now that I think of it, CRS—whose ratio of funding to services versus administrative costs is enviably high [95% going to direct aid] -- is a much faster way for parishioners to instantly respond to crises.
 
But in the final analysis, a special caution needs reflection where all Catholic charity fundraising is concerned. Charity is a “theological virtue” along with faith and hope. It is a disposition of our faith. When we speak of organized fundraising in a church framework, we need to emphasize that by no stretch of the imagination have we “solved a problem”—not the desperate straits of our local neighbors nor the urgent need for faith formation. A ‘bishop’s appeal” is a sacramental gesture of the Church’s deep concern that we address both communally and individually the hungers of the body and the soul.
 
My wife Margaret—among her many apostolates—assists at a food bank, and she has educated me about the dynamics of hunger. Her busiest times are right before school vacations and summer. It seems that many children here in Central Florida depend upon their local public schools to eat. To reinforce her experience, I note with amazement that the Florida Legislature now in session is debating a bill for universal breakfast and lunch for all public-school students in the state. It has come to a point where a sizeable portion of our school-aged students need state assistance to eat. That is a stunning realization. It does not seem normal in the nature of things. Food, housing, health: meeting these needs is a gargantuan challenge to both philosophy and execution.
 
The virtue of charity includes good citizenry. Charity needs the dollars; it also calls from us prayer and the shaping of private and public policy. But fill out that pledge card in the meantime.