March 2020
The CAFOD Chronicles: 3
Cradle to grave
If something is religious, secular CAFOD will cash in on it:
- Baptisms? Buy babe a CAFOD gift.
- Lenten fast? Give the cash spared to CAFOD.
- Harvest festival? More money for CAFOD.
- Want to go to Heaven? Leave a legacy for CAFOD.
- Masses for the dead? Pay CAFOD for a candle instead.
- Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela? Be sponsored for CAFOD.
- Christmas cards and gifts? Buy them from CAFOD.
Last year’s card was a joint effort from CAFOD, Christian Aid, Traidcraft and SCIAF. It wished recipients not a holy but a “peaceful” Christmas, and despite a sop to Jesus in “Cradled in a manger”, the main message lay in four photos of ethnic persons — with CAFOD’s well-paid photographers getting a credit as usual.
As to “World Gifts for Christmas”, CAFOD calls them “Gifts that show you really care” or “The true spirit of Christmas giving”: the definite article implying that sending chocolates to nurses at hospitals, donating clothes to the Salvation Army or answering any other Catholic appeal in December is uncharitable, and goes for nothing. Even more insidiously, “World Gifts aren’t just for Christmas” because CAFOD wants us to buy them all through the year for anything from Baptisms and First Holy Communions to Confirmations and Holy Matrimony — in fact, for “all occasions”.
Instead of getting a Bible or statue, a toaster or cheeseboard, friends and relations are told that they have identified with the African bush or high Andes. Donors will never see the items, let alone get an egg from a £20 chicken in Ethiopia. The money goes to CAFOD for CAFOD to send a “happy queen bee” at £4 or a £4,000 health centre out into the wild blue yonder. As to £7 for a mosquito net, the type for two sleepers, lasting four years, is sold for a couple of dollars (£1.54p) by the Against Malaria Foundation, located near the old Union Station in Kansas City.
Some parishes even have a Friday fast-day, which is actually about eating food, and the few participants pay more for a snack than do low-paid nurses or even City workers tied to their desks. The money raked in helps CAFOD pay all pension contributions for its top staff. Even in 1994, CAFOD was advertising in the liberal Guardian for a “Head of Regions” with a “sympathetic understanding of the Catholic Church,” and maybe experience in “sales management,” whose basic reward would be equivalent to a current £53,829 plus benefits. The job was to manage 31 staff in 12 locations “to ensure that CAFOD works effectively with parishes, schools and local groups” — in other words, get them to do CAFOD’s bidding, not forgetting Friday fast-day.
Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!
Going to Mass, an elderly widow will have all the demands for money constantly before her eyes, although her pension is only £129 a week. There are the envelopes for the plate as well as piles of pre-paid envelopes, as many as 400 or 500, bearing the imperious slogan: GIVE TODAY GIVE REGULARLY. The second collection for that weekend is sure to be mentioned in the parochial bulletin, at least on the same day and probably the previous bulletin, so nobody forgets — plus one the following week with the figure and thanks to the gullible for their “generosity”.
Other envelopes include the memorial one and an offer for CAFOD to help write a Will for free, but naturally expecting some monies being left to CAFOD. Who knows what pressure is brought to bear during face to face? One can envisage the following: “So, er, none of this will be left to CAFOD?!” … “Most who come to us leave something for CAFOD.” … “If you left one-tenth of your estate to CAFOD, it would cut inheritance tax from 40% to 36%.” And though one would like to think that anyone going to CAFOD for a free Will is told that an AIM investment may also cut heirs’ liability, according to current legislation, it is also hard to imagine.
Then there is the A3 poster (297 x 420 mm), which may well be the sole or largest or dominant advertisement. This features a smiling, grateful person in some tribe or other against an agricultural background, and oddly enough, although one of CAFOD’s key aims is to “empower women” the professional photo shows her, not him, doing the back-breaking labour.
The latest poster succeeds an obsolete one that glorified Bishop Helder Câmara of Recife who boasted of being called a saint when giving food to the poor, but a communist when asking why they were hungry. Far from being seen as saintly, the jet-setting Brazilian bishop was regarded as a fellow-traveller, not least for praising the Cuban dictator, Fidel Castro. CAFOD’s new Salvadoran poster-boy had criticised US military aid during the civil war, but is never known to have condemned communist assassins and arsonists who caused misery.
Put into his mouth is the slogan, “It is not God’s will for some to have everything and others to have nothing”. This is belied by the Bible as in the cases of Noah, Lot and Job, plus the three times that the Chosen Race was sent into slavery. Christ said “the poor you have always with you” and also “For he that hath, to him shall be given, and he shall abound: but he that hath not, from him shall be taken away”. Christ also contradicted CAFOD’s latest guru in the parables of the talents and wages in the vineyard.
Continuing with the outpouring of products from “well-managed forests”, displayed too are cardboard collecting boxes to take home. In some churches a CAFOD box is mounted in the wall, as also a loose tin for foreign coins brought home from holidays. There is even a larger-sized FREEPOST envelope for sending CAFOD unwanted trinkets of silver and gold. And it will also profit from recycling parishioners’ consumer items, ranging from mobiles to automobiles.
It is Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! It will all help cut CAFOD’s pension deficit of £770,000.
Handing in a battered frying-pan, the old widow may also have to brush past a big CAFOD display, or skirt an unavoidable CAFOD stand in the grounds, or pass volunteers seeking sponsorship for one of CAFOD’s frequent fund-raising stunts, like its “ecumenical” hike of 24,900 miles to show solidarity with refugees. Perhaps she will have to run the gauntlet of CAFOD activists seeking signatures for still one more printed petition to send to Downing Street about something or other. Furthermore, the bulletin and/or volunteers may also be recruiting for a CAFOD demonstration, and one wonders who pays the fares to London, leaving less money to send to Catholic missions.
Politicising the dioceses
As the harassed widow passes the table piled high with unread copies of the diocesan magazine, she cannot help noticing that CAFOD often grabs the headlines. If she bothers to pick up a copy, there is more CAFOD on the inside pages, including boastful accounts of fund-raising parties in other parishes plus advertisements for CAFOD and its offshoot, Fairtrade. In case this should be missed, a CAFOD insert may fall out, such as the Candelit one in November 2018.
The brainwashing is magnified in edicts, decrees and commands from the bishop’s secretariat.
My own diocesan directory, whilst recording ever lower churchgoing, regularly carries a full-colour advertisement for CAFOD on its back cover whereas, buried inside, Missio is the only overseas charity with even a mere black-and-white, and there is almost nothing else about corporal works of mercy. CAFOD wins once again, especially as the title page, while omitting the word Catholic, has to remind: “The Diocese of Arundel and Brighton is a Fairtrade Diocese”. Page 15 lists the layman and priest running Justice & Peace, and there is a whole page for this ubiquitous agitprop whose aims include “raise awareness of issues” (which means those selected by CAFOD and allied bodies) … “coordinate action on campaigning issues” (mobilising through CAFOD) … “Helping others access related agencies” which means CAFOD, Christian Aid, Oxfam, Pax Christi, etc.
Turn to page 23 of the diocesan directory, and this time it is the Caritas Social Action Network whose Social Action Co-ordinator turns out to be the same person as the Justice and Peace Adviser whose predecessor went to Pax Christi. Even the Youth Ministry on page 24 can be tapped for CAFOD’s canon-fodder. When demonstrating they will be sporting “CAFOD Just One World” tee-shirts, a product of the rag-trade that may exploit sweated labour. (Guardian, 28 November 2018)
CAFOD’s blasphemous liturgy
Perhaps worst of all, parishioners will have to listen to a salaried representative of CAFOD giving a slick sales-talk from the lectern while the priest is slumped in a chair. The rep even has printed instructions from CAFOD about how to flatter Father and persuade the pews. This requires yet another poster, this time A4, such as one in 2016: “Speak up for CAFOD. Come to a training session on Saturday 26th November to help you speak about CAFOD’s work in parishes and other groups”
Nobody in the congregation will dare tell Fr. Rob or Fr. Hub or Fr. Ant that he is still supposed to deliver a homily under Canon 767, that Canon 766 about appeals does not prejudice this, and that such must not be substituted for, or confused with, the sermon.
Setting that aside, the priest has an obvious duty in obedience to the Ten Commandments, New Testament, Canon Law, papal encyclicals and Catechism of Christian Doctrine to ensure that (a) the appeal is wholly Catholic and (b) that it is not at the expense of needier Catholic causes.
In fact, the speaker may well have allies inside the parish — in a political situation they would be called agents. It is quite common for CAFOD’s voluntary representative to add, or be after, one or more (usually more) of the following jobs: reader … welcomer … special minister … chief altar-server … parochial chairman … … school governor … Justice & Peace secretary … ecumenical delegate. This is a long way from Matt. 6:3: “But when thou dost alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doth”.
There is no local status, kudos or prestige in humbly representing a tiny, unknown charity such as Missionary Servants of the Poor; even the parish priest will not know this is pontifical. Being CAFOD’s person at the local church is not about helping the poor but “Power to be in your parish”. By the same token, anyone on a church committee who challenges its anti-Catholicism will be howled down or asked to resign by the fearful, ignorant or subservient, as has happened in parishes as far apart as Essex and Somerset.
And there is yet more Cafodism to come: it has also hijacked the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass: “Bring reflections on global justice and poverty into your worship activities, with our prayers, liturgies and reflections.” Its agents in parishes are primed to offer special texts, songs and prayers that politicise allegiance to someone they call “Creator God” with scant mention of Jesus Christ or Holy Ghost. CAFOD has its own bidding prayers and orations for peace and refugees plus specially slanted texts for Lent and Advent.
CAFOD’s prayer-cards, left piled in many a church-porch, are as bad. For example, the “Prayer for Africa” card is totally pagan, says nothing supernatural, and ends with “justice to your world”. The heap left during Lent 2015 showed an Asiatic woman besides mentioning a unisex deity who is supposed to care about life on Earth. In such cases, there are by-lines for the writers and a photo-credit for photographers, an army of which are commissioned by CAFOD all over the world.
Any more damage to the world’s forests? Yes, there are the pinned-up thank-you letters to the parish priest, and flimsies, postcard-size, that alert the zealous to the calendar of upcoming events such as a mass lobby of Parliament on 17 June 2015, organised by the Climate Commission, and to be sure to watch CAFOD’s website for news from the Climate Change Summit on 30 November.
On top of all that are blank postcards quoting not saints of old but the late Nelson Mandela, whose Pythonesque creation "The Elders", a puffed up clique of self-regarding problem-solvers, is now run by Lesley-Anne Knight, who went from CAFOD to head Caritas Internationalis only to blocked from further lack of evangelising by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. In the process he was quoted as stating:
“The Church’s charitable activity, like that of Christ, could never be limited to assisting people’s material needs….” (Catholic World Report, 30 June 2011). Indeed.
Brainwashing the innocents
The absence of evangelism continues to define we-do-not-preach CAFOD whenever it reaches out to 2,081 parishes.
One the one hand, a blessed 621 in England and Wales have been providentially protected from its constant, godless propaganda. While another 1,053 are spared an agitator among the parishioners. On the other hand, CAFOD has penetrated 1,184 schools with a Catholic signboard. Since this is less than half of them, however, it is likely that some better qualified heads at secondary and private schools have got wise to the doctrinal flaws and political strings.
Daphne McLeod, the former headmistress who ran so many Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice conferences (where CAFOD was not seen among the displays of many apostolates), tells of a headmaster who was telephoned for a talk by CAFOD, but took one look at the speaker, and sent him packing. Pity that did not happen at the earlier mentioned St Gregory’s in Margate!
It is enough, however, that 301,200 pupils are at risk from CAFOD which particularly concentrates on primary schools through 245 volunteers. The children are obviously at their most impressionable age, and staff tend to be less experienced and educated. Gullible teachers are even offered a free, politicised liturgical wall-planner (paid for by the likes of the elderly widow) that includes Earth Day, Toilet Day, and Nelson Mandela Day as well as Fairtrade Fortnight, all for the morning assembly.
This, of course, squeezes out feast-days and prayers for Catholic causes at home and abroad. Half a century ago, tiny tots in northern Albania used to sing the praises of the stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha without realising that their parents had sung Catholic hymns. Now, CAFOD’s children are meant to worship the late Nelson Mandela, a convicted terrorist and member of the South African Communist Party whose basis, like that of all such parties, is atheism.
The spiritual murder of the innocents goes beyond that. CAFOD’s hold on schools is as psychologically disastrous as is its parallel intrusion at Justice & Peace conferences “with programmes for children and young people”. It is like the Leninist pigs grooming whelps in Animal Farm. CAFOD’s geography is not about lions and tigers, nor is its history about Tudors and Stuarts. Its favourite free pack for “busy teachers” covers something totally irrelevant to the curriculum — El Salvador — typically indoctrinating little ones into CAFOD’s view of politics, economics and society.
Salvador, not Saviour
Smaller than even Belize (more relevant as a onetime British colony), El Salvador is the tiniest of seven republics in Central America. They are least among 18 Hispanic republics whose entire population, including six million Salvadorans, is outnumbered by 211 million Portuguese speakers in Brazil, the fifth-largest country by area and inhabitants who constitute the largest Catholic nation. Brazil also has the biggest financial centre in the southern hemisphere.
Likewise ignored is Latin America’s entire history, ranging from the conquistadors and Christianisation to independence and industrialisation. CAFOD focuses only on modern El Salvador in a time-warp, hailing it as a latter-day microcosm of World Revolution: “a few families were very rich and owned much land, but most people were very poor and earned very little. If people complained, they were put in prison or even killed”.
The truth about El Salvador is that, apart from having a rising middle class, it succeeded neighbouring Nicaragua, which went communist, as a battleground during Soviet expansionism, fulfilling Krushchev’s threat of “wars of national liberation” (6 January 1961). CAFOD omits that the Salvadoran guerillas, besides the usual mayhem with arms from Russia and help from Cuba, systematically destroyed coffee plantations that constituted 50% of the gross domestic product — the antithesis of development.
The website globalsecurity.org has a fair account of the rebellion between 1980 and 1991, mentioning “occupation of churches” by the revolutionaries “who drew much of their leadership from radical Roman Catholic groups known as Christian Base Communities (Comunidades Eclesiasticas de Base — CEBs) that had been established by activist clergy throughout the country”. Although the World Bank reckoned in October 2018 that inequality in El Salvador had narrowed to that of Uruguay, historically the model republic of Latin America, CAFOD still wants Miss to help her charges, aged between five and ten, to “write a persuasive letter to international leaders highlighting what is fair and unfair” for Salvadorans.
As to putting money where its big mouth is, CAFOD sent a mere £139,000 to El Salvador last year, which works out at two pence per inhabitant. Brazil got tenfold that figure, albeit being 35 times more populous. In 2017, the International Development Bank in Washington accorded El Salvador an easy loan of $350 million (equal to £45 per Salvadoran) as part of an enormous package of assistance from many financial and governmental organisations. U.S. aid has been running at $1 million per day.
By their fruits …
Close inspection of CAFOD‘s other projects suggest economic amateurism on top of the ecclesiastical agnosticism.
For instance, Mr Bain wasted expenses and salaried time in February 2018 travelling to the Clifton Diocese to tell Catholics how he had, effectively, wasted still more on a trip to Zimbabwe to watch what was, in fact, the waste of their money.
The current Lenten collection for CAFOD stated that nationwide donations would be “enough to buy nutritious sesame seeds”. Yet maize is the main staple in Zimbabwe, other important edible crops being millet and barley, besides which the South African Sesame Board gives free seeds for the Zimbabweans to sell the end-product (the Sesame Board has complained that some gets diverted to Mozambique for brewing), and NewsDay Zimbabwe of 9 August 2017 had already warned: “… some farmers in Gokwe district of Zimbabwe have been persuaded to dance with a crop called Sesame, which barely gives them enough to meet their household needs. Why should an expensively trained economist be proud to supervise a programme that gives farmers less than $10/month?”
Cafodists have not had the training to compare the Labour government’s naive effort in 1947 to bring groundnuts to colonial east Africa. In current terms £1¼ billion was lost after getting the soil, rainfall, culture and implements wrong.
In any case, what CAFOD boasts about in Zimbabwe, using its own figure of £2½ million, adds a mere 1% to funds from foreign statal donors, besides which Zimbabwe gets additional aid from Trócaire and other Caritas members in America, Australia and Denmark. CAFOD also suggested that £10 could buy a watering-can, which is double the price in England and triple that in South Africa. Zambians use ten-litre jerry-cans or discarded plastic containers for drip-feeding.
A further example noted earlier is that of simple donors being encouraged at Christmas 2018 to send £7 for each mosquito net that CAFOD would despatch somewhere out there. However, the Against Malaria Foundation, based near Union Station in Kansas City, supplies mosquito nets that sleep two and last four years for just a couple of dollars (£1.54p).
As for CAFOD’s partial offshoot, Fairtrade Foundation, this has long faced persistent and overwhelming criticism from all sides, much of which is available on websites just by asking Google is fairtrade unfair? Some are articles from the Daily Telegraph and Guardian as well as Independent on Sunday and Marketing Weekly, plus the BBC of 7 March 2007. Peter Griffiths, Philip Booth and Madsen Pirie are among economists with many objections: cost of the scheme … outdated/selected statistics … inadequate auditing and monitoring … damage to the majority of farms, including some too remote or tiny for Fairtrade.
Laura Raynolds of Colorado State University notes the lack of research into the benefits, while even some socialist economists such as Ndongo Samba Sylla in Dakar complain that Fairtrade really benefits western supermarkets. The biggest irony is that the Fairtrade cartel partly breaches the regulations of the European Union that has lavished 11½ million euros on CAFOD in the last five years — on top of $6 million from the United Nations.
It is obvious from the entire Cafodist culture of simplistic bungling that its directors, managers, employees and volunteers remain totally ignorant of a prerequisite in the documents of Vatican II, the fact that the council has been (mis)quoted to excuse all manner of heresy notwithstanding. Here is an excerpt from paragraph 88 in section 2 of Chapter V, The Fostering of Peace and the Promotion of a Community of Nations:
“For the spirit of charity does not forbid but rather requires that charitable activity be exercised in a provident and orderly manner. Therefore, it is essential for those who intend to dedicate themselves to the service of the developing nations to be properly trained in suitable institutions.”
But does the Magisterium count for anything at CAFOD? Its website helpfully reassures outsiders, “There’s room for everyone, Catholics and non-Catholics; people of all faiths and none”. There is also plenty of room for managerial and technical shortcomings, given the ineptitude of its episcopal overlords as the following out of all too many examples demonstrate.
… you know them
Consider the late Cormac Murphy O’Connor — whose risible rise through the ranks was sponsored by the social gospel zealot who engineered CAFOD's foundation, Archbishop Derek Worlock (England's "Bernadin-lite", according to the CO editor). A bishop before becoming CAFOD’s patron, to list just one among the litany of disasters that marked Murphy O’Connor's career: in 1988 he closely supervised the liturgical spoliation of St Paul’s church in mid-Sussex. Part of the allocated £500,000 was also wasted on a dangerous ramp to a new door whereas the old door was level with the ground.
Bishop Conry, a CAFOD foundation trustee, organised a jamboree in Brighton’s football stadium to celebrate the diocesan jubilee in 2015 at unrevealed cost. Basic research would have predicted the absence of four Catholics out of five, since objections surfaced long before he was exposed for serial adultery (which mega-scandal CO flagged years earlier, as the Daily Mail noted).
Before becoming CAFOD’s chairman, Bishop Arnold was encouraging “cycling for peace” in London, being photographed next to a bare-headed biker. Up to 13 cyclists are killed annually in the capital, with thousands more in accidents, lawsuits and fights involving motorists and pedestrians.
Only 75 yards from CAFOD’s four-storey headquarters stands the cathedral of the oldest bishop, Peter Smith. I told him at a reception in October 2015 that Bishop Egan of Portsmouth appeared to be warning his flock to boycott CAFOD. The Archbishop of Southwark replied lamely, “If so, that is a pity”.
Cardinal Nichols, who chairs the bishops’ conference, complained in 2011 that adding local parking-charges on Sundays would deter his churchgoers. Westminster Council’s leader thanked me profusely for identifying a dozen categories of Catholics, including pensioners with bus passes, who would be unaffected. Besides, the cathedral gets over 1,000 visitors each weekday when parking costs £2.50 per hour.
The point is: how can such people know what CAFOD and its cronies are up to with a yearly £51 million anywhere on Earth?
There is, however, one prelate who has a shrewd idea.
During a press conference in Rome on 23 October 2009, at the end of the African Synod, which warned against anti-Catholic aid programmes, I questioned Cardinal John Onaiyekan of Ajuba about CAFOD. His answer: “Their ways are not our ways”.