DOJ: Bankrupt the Deep Church

[This article first appeared 11/20/2024 in the Stream.Org and reprinted with permission.]

“Untold numbers of the children — who were released into the US to “qualified sponsors” — are now at risk of sex trafficking, forced labor and other forms of exploitation“

I have a proposal for President-Elect Donald Trump’s new attorney general and Department of Justice: Launch a RICO investigation of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). Conduct the national investigation which my church’s bishops have so far dodged into 1) the systemic cover-up of clerical sex abuse and 2) the human trafficking conducted by church-controlled nonprofits of illegal immigrants.

The DOJ should also investigate the role which the Vatican itself has played in encouraging the sex abuse coverup — for instance by directly interfering with reform efforts by our bishops, giving the lie to the legal fiction that each Catholic diocese is an independent corporation enjoying bankruptcy protection, and that the Vatican ought to be immune to sex abuse lawsuits. Nor are the sex abuse and immigration issues completely separate. As The Stream reported in 2023:

Elizabeth Yore, former general counsel for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services and a conservative Catholic, called Catholic Charities “probably the number one or two NGO that is handling the trafficking of children,” she said. “Sexual predators go where vulnerable children are. You can’t tell me that there aren’t hundreds, if not thousands, of sexual predators who are posing as sponsors for these vulnerable children.”

We’re not talking about a few isolated cases. As The New York Post reported:

The Biden-Harris administration has lost track of more than 320,000 migrant children who crossed the border without parents, according to a shocking new report.

Untold numbers of the children — who were released into the US to “qualified sponsors” — are now at risk of sex trafficking, forced labor and other forms of exploitation, a Homeland Security Inspector General’s report released earlier this month said.

Did the Catholic bishops speak up about those hundreds of thousands of children at grave risk of abuse? Not a peep. Perhaps that’s because their own agencies, such as Catholic Charities, were implicated in importing those children, and dumping them with unvetted sponsors. When the Trump administration separated such children from those who claimed to be their relatives to vet those claims, the bishops were among the loudest in denouncing Trump for “separating families.” The Biden administration stopped administering DNA tests to determine if so-called “relatives” of the children were actually family members.

Billions of Taxpayer Dollars at Stake

A former federal prosecutor whom I consulted said the DOJ’s even launching such a case “certainly would” imperil the legal eligibility of the USCCB and its nonprofits for hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts — such as the moneys sluiced into church coffers under the Biden administration. The lights would go out at lucrative, utterly secularized leftist pressure groups such as Catholic Charities, which profit from resettling Muslim “refugees” across America — including the jihadist Abdul Razak Ali Artan, whom Dallas Catholic Charities helped import from Somalia to Ohio State University, where he attacked 11 American students in 2016.

Our intrepid Rome-based reporter Jules Gomes has already revealed that the USCCB is planning to massively resist and fight Donald Trump’s efforts to enforce our immigration laws in the wake of a massive, lawless campaign by the Biden administration to admit some 15 million illegal aliens for its own political gain.

The bishops have their own agenda, all of it self-serving and profoundly corrupt. As we’ve reported here, the U.S. Catholic bishops (via their lucrative nonprofits such as Catholic Charities, among others) have raked in $3 billion from U.S. taxpayers over the past 15 years — replacing dollar for dollar what they had to pay out for their systemic coverup of child sex abuse by clergy.

So any real enforcement of our immigration laws would devastate the finances of flaccid, inward-looking and increasingly LBGT-friendly dioceses. It would defund, almost overnight, the vast network that is the Catholic Left — including the far-left activists who control the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, which was created as a political weapon by students of Saul Alinsky, as an eye-opening documentary made by Catholics revealed.

Stealing Sheep to Keep the Pews Full

Bishops who lose a full 40% of native-born Catholics to other churches (or unbelief and apathy), and a high percentage even of recent immigrants plan to keep filling the pews, albeit briefly, with sheep borrowed from Latin American countries. That lets them keep up the façade that their lax, undemanding, post-modernist Catholic Lite services and programs aren’t catastrophic failures. Imagine a car company which saw 40% of its autos’ engines fail, whose executives dodged accountability by simply replacing those engines with cheap, illegal imports. That’s how the Catholic Church in America avoids simply collapsing, like dying Mainline denominations such as the Episcopal church.

The USCCB is an immigration Ponzi scheme and a gay employment agency with a Catholic problem.

As Gomes reports, those bishops are wielding worn-out “Seamless Garment” rhetoric, which pretends that being “pro-life” means everything and nothing. Some even pretend that shipping an adult back to Honduras is morally equivalent to dismembering a baby and sending her to a dumpster. (That seems a bit tough on Honduras, perhaps even a teensy tad racist.)

The same bishops who approved forcing an abortion-based vaccine on millions of Catholics, and who mostly kept silent while Joe Biden promoted abortion up through birth, now plan to use all their resources to obstruct and demonize Trump’s plan to remove fake refugee claimants and other illegal aliens. Count on sermons, op-eds, lugubrious prayer vigils, and self-righteous demonstrations, all funded by the Church’s tax-exempt revenues.

Disrupting Trump

I warned about such a plan back in 2017, during Trump’s first administration. The far-left Catholic organization PICO, funded by George Soros and lauded by Pope Francis, held a conference in Modesto, California, hosted by then bishop (now cardinal) Robert McElroy. It attracted 22 other bishops plus a Vatican cardinal, and received a fulsome note of support from the pope himself.
The manifesto these bishops issued and signed made a long list of outrageous claims and demands. I’ll quote a few of them again, since many of the same bishops are leading the current campaign. Leading Catholic bishops declared, with papal approval:

• We urge every faith community, including every Catholic parish, to declare themselves a sanctuary for people facing deportation …. All cities, counties and states should adopt policies that get ICE out of our schools, courts and jails, stop handing over people to ICE…

• We must put our bodies, money and institutional power at risk to protect our families and communities, using tools that include boycotts, strikes, and non-violent civil disobedience. As Bishop Robert McElroy said to us, ‘We must disrupt those who would seek to send troops into our communities to deport the undocumented, to destroy our families. We must disrupt those who portray refugees as enemies. We must disrupt those who train us to see Muslim men & women as a source of threat rather than children of God. We must disrupt those who would take away healthcare, who would take food from our children.’

• We ask our Catholic Bishops to write a covenant that spells out specific actions that dioceses and parishes should take to protect families in the areas of immigration, racism, jobs, housing and the environment.

• We propose to develop a shared curriculum and popular education program to equip people with analysis and tools to transform the world. We will focus on the development and leadership of young people. We will draw on the wisdom of our faith and cultural traditions, including Catholic Social Teaching. We recognize that our spiritual and political selves are inseparable. We have a moral obligation to confront and disrupt injustice.

• To defend our families and protect our values we must build political power. We must change the electorate to reflect our communities, through massive efforts to reach out to tens of millions of voters who are ignored and taken for granted by candidates and parties. We must hold elected officials accountable to the common good and encourage people in our communities to take leadership themselves, including running for office, so that we can govern the communities in which we live.

Pastors or Human Traffickers?

The bishops who signed off on this are the same ones profiting massively by (as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton charges) engaging in human trafficking on a vast scale. As The Stream reported in 2023:

The USCCB not only acts as a contractor distributing funds. It also uses the money to finance dioceses and to compensate for funds lost in settling cases of clerical sex abuse. Complicit Clergy, a Catholic website, noted that the $3 billion in federal funds received matches the amount lost in those settlements.

To keep the money coming, various agencies actively encourage migrants to enter the United States illegally, even to the point of guiding large caravans to the border, as The Stream reported. “The Catholic ‘Underground Railroad’ of migrant safe houses that extend across Central America, through Mexico, and up to and into the U.S. is a well-oiled machine,” wrote Michelle Malkin, a Catholic.

Prominent faithful Catholics such as J.D. Vance, Bishop Strickland, and Rick Santorum need to be at the forefront of supporting such a move by the Trump administration to bat away predictable claims that the move is “anti-Catholic.” Quite the contrary: The biggest favor our government could do for faithful Catholics is to purge its ranks of political profiteers and radical leftists, who under Pope Francis have gained a stranglehold on Catholic institutions.

As I’ve quipped with bitter humor: The USCCB is an immigration Ponzi scheme and a gay employment agency with a Catholic problem.

Maybe the faithful enforcement of democratically enacted, just American laws by a duly elected president could be part of the solution.