Fr. Don’s Weekly Letter ~ 6 July 2025

Dear Good People of Saint Bernadette,

I’ve been wanting to write an article about Catholic Relief Services, a charity that I personally support, and how they have been impacted in the first half of this year. CRS was established by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops 82 years ago, to be the global heart and hands of the Church in her outreach to the poor and marginalized. Now that our country’s commitment to foreign aid has significantly changed, CRS’s funding has been cut and they face an uncertain future.

The impact of the halt in USAID funding is profound. Projects have been terminated which guarantee food security for families who can’t put food on the table. A leader of one organization who assists CRS in farming and irrigation projects says that as a result, poverty will only increase. These are communities where young people are going to lose opportunities or end up living in an eternal cycle of poverty and, most probably, will end up immigrating. CRS works with more than 1,000 local partners like this.

Today, the organization works in over 120 countries with both faith-based and secular nonprofits. CRS was one of the largest recipients of USAID funding, which made up nearly two-thirds of its total budget. That money was used to distribute lifesaving food aid, prevent the spread of infectious disease, and run community development programs.

Sean Callahan, President and CEO of Catholic Relief Services, asks, “Why are they doing it?” If the U.S. doesn’t want migrants, why would you stop investing here so that people have fewer alternatives?

“We had over 130,000 metric tons of American food sitting in warehouses overseas, and we couldn’t distribute it. Vaccines, polio vaccines for kids, we had them in the clinic. We couldn’t give them out. Treatment for HIV and AIDS, at first, some of that was frozen, so we can’t give antiviral therapy to a mother or a child.”

Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development: “I think the best evidence that USAID works is how quickly people started dying when it went away.
We also know that U.S. assistance gets where it’s meant to get to because we track it really carefully. That’s not to say there’s no fraud and there’s no abuse in the system. And there certainly have been failed aid programs over time.

But the portfolio, if you look at the record as a whole, of U.S. assistance for this fraction of a percentage of the federal budget, I think it shows a massive success.

In 2023, the U.S. government spent about 70 billion on foreign aid, or just about 1 percent of the federal budget. But now, Kenny says, the longstanding relationships that aid organizations like CRS formed with local partners will suffer, organizations like the Justice, Development and Peace Initiative in Northeast Nigeria.

In 2017, with CRS support, the group expanded their scope to emergency humanitarian work as a response to civilians fleeing militant group Boko Haram.

Fr. Vincent Okoye, Executive Director: “I actually fear for the future because it would mean that all the gains with the humanitarian interventions and the targeted programs, if they are not sustained, we will lose all that progress, and I’m afraid of what it will lead to.”

He explains. At such a time when we change our minds and decide to fund feeding and education programs again worldwide, there won’t be the people there who will know how to run a program. We’ll have to start from scratch. Even if that happens, this damage is permanent.

Sean Callahan’s greatest fear is “that people will start feeling that Americans don’t care anymore, that we have stopped caring for other people. That puts us in a very weakened position around the world. The American ethos will be lost and it will take many, many years to build that up. We have earned this reputation over many, many years. It’d be a shame if we destroyed it in a very few number of months.”

CRS emphasizes the moral responsibility of the U.S. to assist the most vulnerable and believes that ending these programs weakens peace, stability, and prosperity, and leads to greater suffering and higher costs in the future. The cuts have damaged the trust between the U.S. and the global community, potentially leading to a loss of allies. Please include CRS in your prayer intentions.

The Lord be with you.