National Review
AP’s Deceptive Attack on the Catholic Church for Accepting COVID Help
In early 2020, a pandemic hit America. We started staying at home, then we were ordered to stay home. The market plummeted. The economy plummeted. Unemployment soared. You remember all that, because you lived. We all did. Congress created a program to keep people in their jobs. (By the way, it was a miracle that Congress did anything). The program would help companies and nonprofits to make money. Keep people buying groceries. Help us to overcome this. Federal law defines the eligibility requirements for the program. Established specific criteria for churches. Some churches asked for money, got the money and kept people working. End of story, right? Not for the Associated Press. For the Associated Press, this story is a scoop. A massive investigation, reports the AP, proves that religious fanatics conspired together to perpetrate an indecent plunder of honest Americans – look at this – by participating in a government program. A program for which they were eligible. For which they signed up. For which they were approved. Stop the printers. In fact, it gets a little worse. The AP reported this hole, not once, but twice. In July, the AP reported that Catholic institutions “accumulated” more than $ 1 billion in aid for the coronavirus, lobbying for “preferential treatment” from the Trump administration – treatment that ensured that diocesan offices, parishes and institutions such as seminaries or secondary schools do not see their employees grouped and therefore have a limit of 500 people. But what the AP called “exemption” was, in fact, just clarity about basic corporate law. Parishes, dioceses and other Catholic institutions are incorporated separately into civil law. But as the PPP rules were being written, it became clear that Catholic entities close to each other, which sometimes have contractual relationships that allow them to centralize the infrastructure, were at risk of being inaccurately accounted for by the Small Business Administration (SBA ) as an organization. Lobbyists from the United States bishops’ conference intervened with the SBA to explain that the civil organization separate from Catholic institutions was not just legal fiction, but was actually a reflection of the Catholic Church’s theological and canonical self-understanding. While the PA saw the Catholic Church as a monolithic structure with some creative legal arrangements, the Catholic Church understood itself as a communion – both of people and institutions – connected, but distinct. The PA saw parishes as branches of a unique diocesan reality, while the Church sees them as “parts of the People of God” – true communities, under the rule of a bishop, but distinct, religiously significant in their own right, and neither administered nor managed. easily closed by a bishop. (The Vatican stated this fact more often than most bishops would like.) But this kind of theological nuance prevents the kind of grim and dark anti-Catholicism propagated by the July AP report, which was careful to connect – albeit vaguely – Church financial pressures amid the lewd sex scandals of dishonored bishops Theodore McCarrick and Michael Bransfield. Apparently not satisfied with just one bite of the apple, the AP reported Thursday on the same subject. The report contained the same mistaken assumptions about Catholic theology and organization last July. But this time, the AP also drew from the 2019-2020 financial statements of some dioceses to suggest that while the Catholic Church received money from taxpayers, it was also on top of piles of money. Of course, it didn’t matter that these reports dealt with a fiscal year in which only a few months were affected by the pandemic. Nor did it matter that it was illegal – not to mention immoral, unethical and sometimes impossible – for bishops to unilaterally transfer money from well-performing Catholic organizations to Catholic organizations at risk of firing people. It also made no difference that parishes, schools and dioceses across the country actually fired people during the pandemic and would have made much deeper cuts had it not been for the PPP. And the AP was disheartened by the fact that many of the assets it flagged in diocesan fiscal reports were restricted funds, in some cases legally linked to particular, unalterable uses. And finally, the AP report did not mention exactly, although it came close, that PPP money is still available – that no company or nonprofit has been turned down for lack of funds, and that interest in the program is really waning. In short, the fact that Catholic schools and homeless shelters receive money has not prevented predatory payment lenders or Hooters restaurants from taking their own pieces of the pie. No, the Associated Press did not allow any of these facts to stand in the way of a good old “scandal” of complaints. With the headstrong reporting that comes from some things on Google, the AP found that somewhere in America during 2020, some Catholic institutions had some money. And at the same time, Catholic institutions – the kind of place that serves meals for homeless people and visits the elderly – have had the courage to ask for government help to survive. We should all be grateful that the PA is taking care of the boy. Thank God for that dedication, if you want. Just don’t let him borrow money from the government.