This needs to be investigated

A story from The Catholic World Report available at Ignatius Insight chronicles a policy paper put out by Catholic Relief Services the charitable arm of the USCCB.  Their position includes giving information on condom use and the report chronicles tactics used by CRS against those who conscientiously object to doing this.  Germain Grisez has provides a in depth report on this that shows how they have taken some older documents from the bishops out of context and that they are probably presenting one thing to the donors and the bishops while their actual practice on this issue has been along secular lines.

The authors believes that there needs to be an investigation of CRS and concludes.

Since CRS is an agency of the United States bishops, its officials should act as their agents. If CRS officials have been pretending to follow the bishops’ policy while disregarding it, they have betrayed their responsibility and misled the bishops. Any bishop would fire a real estate agent who did that to him.

As the bishops’ agency, CRS acts in the person of the Church. CRS officials should be managing a charitable apostolate of the Catholic Church in the United States. But they have been distributing material on which they have prohibited putting the CRS logo. If they are doing what they cannot make clear that the Church is doing, how can they be conducting a charitable apostolate in the Church’s name? But if and insofar as they have not been conducting a charitable apostolate in the Church’s name, they are betraying the Church herself—not only the bishops but all the faithful, and even Jesus himself, the Church’s Head.

Moreover, it seems that some partners have been pressed to cooperate despite their conscientious objections. Negative reactions of bishops and churches in other countries seem to be regarded as a problem to be dealt with rather than as expressions of conscientious judgment to be respected.

Faithful Catholics who have donated to CRS in recent years for AIDS relief did so because they expected the program to be carried out in a distinctively Catholic way. Had they not expected this, they could have donated to a secular organization fighting AIDS. If CRS officials have used donations otherwise than they have led donors to expect, CRS officials have misappropriated those funds.

Finally, even by secular standards, people encouraged to use condoms to prevent the transmission of HIV have been ill-served. Genuine charitable apostolate in regard to the prevention of HIV transmission helps save lives but also does something infinitely more important, namely, offers everyone it reaches help to rise from the life of this corruption to the life that never dies. However, the opposite was offered if, as it seems, people who should have received loving service in the Church’s name were scandalized in the strict sense by being encouraged to continue engaging—or worse, as early adolescents, to begin engaging—in sinful sexual activity rather than to live chastely.

What has been going on at CRS must be investigated. The CRS board is ultimately responsible for its operations. I urge the board to begin by examining the items described in this article. The questions those items raise suggest many further questions.

It does remind me of the line George Weigel recently used where he mentioned "salvation-through-latex approach to AIDS prevention."