New ministry:
"We are a program designed to help women after they are released from prison sucessfully re-enter the community and unite with their families. We offer a safe living environment with life skills training, employment training, employment, and housing to women ages 18 years of age and older. Statistics show that over 40% of these women will go back to prison without help, and 75% of these women have children. Statistics also show that a very high percentage of these children will follow the same pattern that their mothers have taken and end up in prison. Please consider helping us make a difference in their lives and change this pattern of destruction. These women, and especially their innocent children, need your help to break this cycle."
Denying Charities Your Support
Yesterday I was asked by a friend if I have a way of getting rid of charity junk mail from organizations that I don't want to support. Below is the text of the letter that Mary Alice and I send to some of the charities we can not in good conscience support. We have similar letters on file for groups and organizations that are involved with other activities and violations of human dignity and social justice. If you want to use this, just copy and paste into a Word document, add your address and, voila! No more amoral imbeciles begging for funds and filling up your recycling bin.To Whom It May Concern:
While I greatly appreciate your virtuous intentions to help those who are in need in our society, I am writing to advise you that I cannot in anyway support your activities or programs on the basis of moral and ethical objections....more:
Here:
Little Rock, AR, Mar 12, 2008 / 08:09 am (CNA).- A Catholic leader in Arkansas has apologized to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation for warning Catholics that fundraising activities for the breast cancer charity sometimes support Planned Parenthood.
Food for the Poor website:
Finally, we stress the need for regular prayer to guide and maintain the purity of our mission.
Their current appeal is to build a new church and community center in Ukraine. Checking their website, perhaps here is an organization that will help Christians in the East without the slight taint of the political that CNEWA has (as blogged here). All things being equal, I'm switching from donating to CNEWA to Aid to the Church in Need.
Charity workers are called to be witnesses of the value of life, says Holy Father
Vatican City, Mar 1, 2008 / 01:46 am (CNA).- The Holy Father received participants of the Pontifical Council "Cor Unum"on Friday, who are meeting to reflect on the theme: "Human and spiritual qualities of people who work in Catholic charity institutions". The Pope called on them to never let their work simply become ‘philanthropy’ but for them to always be “witnesses of evangelical love.”
The Pontiff spoke of how “charitable activity occupies a central position in the Church's evangelizing mission. We must not forget that works of charity are an important area in which to meet people who do not yet know Christ, or who know Him only partially. It is right, then, that pastors and those responsible for pastoral charity work ... should concern themselves with the human, professional and theological-spiritual formation" of people who operate in this field.
With this mission, "Those who work in the many forms of charitable activity of the Church cannot, then, content themselves just with offering technical services or resolving practical problems and difficulties. The assistance they provide must never be reduced to mere philanthropy but must be a tangible expression of evangelical love."
...from the EWTN Q&A forum. Someone asked,
"was it better for Bill Gates, when he became a millionaire, to have given away his money? Or was it better that he become plough the profits back in the business, become a billionaire, create well-paying jobs and later give tens or hundreds of millions to charity?"
Stan Brock is the founder of Remote Area Medical, featured on a recent 60 Minutes piece:
Brock is British by birth, and an adventurer at heart. He was a cowboy in the Amazon and then, incredibly, he was discovered by TV's "Wild Kingdom." Brock was a star - sort of a naturalist daredevil - for the program in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Today Brock is devoted to RAM - completely devoted. He has no family, takes no salary, and has no home. Brock lives in an abandoned school that the city of Knoxville leases to RAM for $1. Until recently, he took showers in the courtyard with a hose.
How does he pay for all the care and supplies?
"In the first place we really know how to stretch the dollar. We operate entirely on the generosity of the American people. I'd like to say that we had big corporate support in America but we don’t. So it’s the little checks from those people who send in the $5 and $10," Brock explained.
RAM operates on a shoestring budget of about $250,000 a year. Yet, last year, it treated 17,000 patients.
