I don't want this blog to be overly negative, but I do not understand this capital campaign at all as reported in the Catholic Herald. The Archbishop has been told time and time again about how parishes are strapped for money, so now he wants to introduce a $105,000,000 capital campaign that raises money by taking money from parishes. And if I understand his logic, he's doing it to combat the sexual abuse crisis because "We've been beaten up." Making parishes more strapped for money will bring us together. This just seems like an excuse to put forward his Catholic schools agenda. He states that the money will be for all religious ed programs, but who uses more money under the auspices of religious ed than Catholic schools. Catholic schools are huge money pits compared to your average Sunday school program.
So if you are at a parish with a school, the parish will probably get back their campaign money plus some. But if you are at a parish without a school, kiss that money good-bye. I suppose my bias is that I'm not a strong advocate of Catholic schools.
The larger issue is that the Archbishop said that he is doing this based on his "listening," but that's just a fancy catch word. Nobody told him, according to his own testimony, that they wanted money taken from all the parishes in this Archdiocese to be given to Catholic schools. Some people told him that they wanted Catholic schools strengthened, but I don't even know what that means. And there definitely no listening sessions that I'm aware of that asked the people of this Archdiocese what they wanted to do with their parish's money. I might be completely wrong, but I think this is just the Archbishop's pet project and he is using the sexual abuse crisis to get it off the ground. Not that Catholic schools is a bad thing to support, but he definitely did not ask anyone I know if we wanted to make that the number one priority in this Archdiocese. It's all very disappointing.
A Faithful Catholic
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