!!!!
“Somebody has to get fired over this,” said Austin Ruse, president of the
Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM). “We fight groups like
PSI all over the world and now we find our own church funds them.”
BY Patrick B. Craine
BALTIMORE, Maryland, July 19, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Pro-life leaders are
expressing outrage after LifeSiteNews.com revealed Thursday that the U.S.
Bishops’ foreign relief agency is funding a leading abortion-marketing
firm.
Catholic Relief Services is distributing a two-year $2.7 million grant to
Population Services International (PSI), which networks and trains local
providers throughout the developing world to offer “safe abortion.”
“Somebody has to get fired over this,” said Austin Ruse, president of the
Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM). “We fight groups like
PSI all over the world and now we find our own church funds them. It’s
disgusting and for one I am bone-weary of these types of revelations. Heads
should roll.”
Fr. Shenan Boquet, president of Human Life International, said he finds it
“incomprehensible” that an organization like PSI was deemed worthy of
Catholic funds.
PSI’s “primary mission has always been to promote contraception,
abortifacient drugs, condoms, and even surgical abortion,” he said.
“Like many other population control groups in the mid-1990s, they started
to rebrand their mission as being about ‘health’, using more positive
language and adding malaria-prevention programs to their portfolio. But this
should not confuse anyone as to their purpose.”
Judie Brown, president of American Life League, said the news was “not
surprising.” “Catholic Relief Services has historically been advocates,
although not publicly – behind the scenes – advocates of population
control in the Third World,” she charged.
Brown’s point was echoed by Steven Mosher, president of the Population
Research Institute, who said CRS implicates itself in population control by
the very fact that it receives over two thirds of its funding from USAID.
“CRS knows very well what the principal purpose of USAID is. And it tries
to, in various ways, to massage that purpose, and avoid being implicated in
the purpose of population control,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned,
they know who’s paying their salaries, and that’s why the money goes to
CARE, that’s why the money goes to PSI, that’s why the money goes back
and forth to other population control agencies, because that’s what their
masters in the federal government demand of them.”
“This is not an agency of the institutional Catholic Church. This is a
separate aid agency, which, because it receives two thirds of its funding
from the U.S. government, is Catholic in name only,” he added. “No man
can serve two masters.”
The grant
The $2.7 million grant to PSI is part of a Global Fund-backed project run
by CRS in Guinea to combat malaria. The funds are disbursed over the two
years of the project’s initial phase, from January 1, 2012 to December 31,
2013.
When LifeSiteNews questioned CRS about the grant, they initially claimed
PSI had merely acted as a vendor by selling them mosquito nets, but when
presented with more information, the Catholic agency acknowledged that the
abortion giant is taking a decidedly more active role.
“To be clear, now that we have had more time to talk with staff involved
in the project, the money did not go specifically to purchase the nets but
rather to implement other parts of the grant which is focused on
distributing 3 million nets and making sure they are properly used to save
thousands of lives by preventing malaria,” Michael Hill, CRS’ Senior
Writer, told LifeSiteNews on Thursday.
PSI, he said, is leading the project’s mass media marketing campaign as
well as “training and overseeing community health workers” and
“community organizations.”
Though the Catholic agency stressed that PSI’s role was restricted only
to malaria prevention, concern over the grant is heightened by the fact that
PSI describes its work on malaria as “deeply intertwined” with its
“reproductive health” agenda.
“Reproductive, maternal and child health and malaria are all deeply
intertwined, affecting poor and vulnerable populations in rural areas
together,” the organization wrote in a program description [link] for a
USAID-funded project in Madagascar running from 2008-2013. “Success (or
failure) in one area, such as malaria, can free up resources to focus on
other areas, or drag down progress.” Integrating these programs, they add,
“offer[s] many opportunities to reach target audiences.”
As LifeSiteNews reported Thursday, PSI’s “reproductive health” agenda
is heavily abortion-focused. On its own webpage, the firm explains that it
“works to increase access to WHO-approved medical abortion drugs,” and
mentions its provision of medical abortions in Cambodia and Nepal, noting
that in Cambodia it launched the country’s “first safe medical abortion
drug, known as Medabon.”
The firm markets a “safe abort kit” in India as a part of a project
that aimed to “facilitate … over 200,000 safe abortions using medical
abortions” from 2008-2013 by focusing “both on the demand and supply
side” of the medical abortion market.
At a “maternal health” conference in Tanzania on January 16, 2013, a
PSI employee delivered a talk titled “Creating the misoprostol market”.
(See video here.)
Numerous job ads are accessible online showing PSI seeking to fill various
roles in its campaign for globally-accessible abortion. Among them is one
seeking a candidate with “clinical proficiency [in] surgical and
medication abortion.”
For more evidence of PSI’s work in the abortion industry view
Thursday’s LSN report.
CRS willing to go to ‘third level of hell’, just not the tenth
LifeSiteNews initially began investigating CRS’ relationship with PSI
because the Catholic agency’s IRS filings for 2012 showed that they had
given PSI a grant of $9,588 for “agriculture.”
But it turns out that CRS has a history of working with PSI going back at
least over a decade. A page on the website of the Centers for Disease
Control describes a safe water initiative in Madagascar, with an
implementation date of April 2000, that CRS partnered on with PSI and CARE.
On PSI’s website, CRS is listed as a partner in Zambia, Haiti, and Guinea.
According to PSI’s webpage on Guinea, CRS partnered with them on a measles
vaccination program there during 2009.
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CRS has defended similar grants in the past, such as its multi-million
dollar annual donations to the pro-abortion group CARE, by arguing that the
funds are given only for projects in line with Catholic teaching and are not
fungible because of the way the grant agreements are established.
But the Catholic agency has also said that it would never give a dime to
Planned Parenthood. “We would never partner with Planned Parenthood,”
communications director John Rivera told LifeSiteNews last year. “We’ve
given this a lot of consideration, and there’s a threshold in terms of
what the focus of an agency is, and the preponderance of their work.”
In Thursday’s report, Michael Hichborn, director of American Life
League’s Defend the Faith Project, said that CRS, in funding PSI, “might
as well be funding Planned Parenthood.”
Judie Brown, ALL’s president, slammed the funding policy. “If you read
Dante, there’s the ten levels of hell,” she said. By the policy’s
logic, she said, “CRS is willing to go to the first, second, and third
level of hell. They’re just not willing to go to all the way to the
tenth.”
“The underlying philosophical bent of all of those organizations is
ridding the world of poor people,” she added. “It’s just that
they’re pecking order of how they get that done is a little bit different.
The underlying philosophy is exactly the same.”
“CRS should not be collaborating with any of the population control
agencies funded by USAID, which means all of the agencies that receive money
for ‘family planning,’ ‘reproductive health,’ and ‘population
stabilization,’” said Mosher. “They are not as well known as Planned
Parenthood, obviously, but they are all cut from the same cloth.”
John Smeaton, chief executive of the UK’s Society for the Protection of
Unborn Children (SPUC), said CRS’s claims that their multi-million dollar
grants to groups like CARE and PSI are not supporting their evil actions are
utterly false.
“Firstly, CARE and PSI’s knowledge that, year after year, CRS will give
them millions of dollars for ostensibly ethical projects enables them to
budget and plan ahead for their unethical activities,” he said.
“Secondly, receiving millions from CRS helps whitewash their reputations
in the wider world and entrenches their presence in the countries where they
operate.”
“Lastly, there are legions of pro-life/pro-family Catholic initiatives
which desperately need funding, such as MaterCare International, the
Billings Ovulation Method and Culture of Life Africa,” he added. “CRS’
millions for CARE and PSI should be given to them instead.”
A plea to the U.S. Bishops
According to Brown, the problems at CRS are “something that we’ve tried
to call attention to the bishops for a long time.”
“The longer the bishops remain in denial, the more obvious this
population control aspect of CRS is going to become. Because they have
nothing to lose, they have nothing to fear,” she cautioned.
In her view, the issues are so deep that an attempt at reform simply
wouldn’t be enough. “What has to happen is that the USCCCB itself has to
dismantle this organization completely,” she said. Unfortunately, she
added, “I just don’t see that happening.”
Mosher urged action from individual bishops in their dioceses. “What we
need in the United States is for a number of bishops to … say that until
these problems with CRS are cleared up, they will not be taking a collection
for CRS,” he said. “They will be encouraging Catholics in the U.S. to
give to authentic Catholic charities.”
“If you sup with the devil, you need a long spoon,” said Mosher, but
“there is no spoon long enough to sup with this particular devil.”
“This particular devil is in the business of destroying human life and
any agency that’s supposed to be Catholic must not have anything to do
with that agenda.”
Contact info:
Cardinal Robert Sarah
Pontifical Council “Cor Unum”
Palazzo San Pio X
V-00120 Vatican City State
Phone: +39-06-69889411
Fax: +39-06-69887301 or +39-06-69887311
E-mail: corunum@corunum.va
Find contact information for all U.S. Bishops here.
Readers may also comment on Catholic Relief Services’ Facebook page.
ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT / DEEP CALLS TO DEEP 