LA CROSSE, Wis.—Crop Walk has become “Crop balk” in two dioceses in the United States: La Crosse, Wis., and Rockford, Ill.

A nationally renowned hunger-relief program, Crop Walk raises money for the poor by enlisting the aid of local communities. Participants raise money from sponsors for global and local relief through a walking event.

Parishes and Catholic schools in the Diocese of La Crosse have participated in Crop Walk for many years. This year, however, Bishop Raymond Burke has officially withdrawn diocesan support from Crop Walk.

In his weekly column in the Sept. 5 issue of The Catholic Times, the La Crosse diocesan newspaper, Bishop Burke cited several instances where Church World Service, an interdenominational refugee assistance organization and Crop Walk's founder and organizer, has broken or compromised the Church's moral teaching on contraception.

According to the U.S. government's 1973 “Area Handbook for the Dominican Republic,” since 1965 Church World Service has been financially supporting a solution to the so-called overpopulation problem in that country.

Church World Service helped finance a group called Friends of Family Planning, the report said. Eventually, it “became affiliated with the International Planned Parenthood Federation.”

According to the report, Church World Service took an even more aggressive part in the efforts to control the Dominican population as it “was given authorization to import contraceptives on a duty-free basis by classifying them as ‘religious educational materials.’

But Judy McDowell, director of community fund raising at Church World Service, said there were no doubt “unique circumstances” in this particular report. She insisted Church World Service does not “export contraceptives.”

Still, until recently, Church World Service has been promoting contraception in Web site material and advocating it in legislation despite its own assertions that it takes no position on these issues.

A Web site education module called “Hungry Decisions” presents government-sponsored contraception as a legitimate means of family planning. In the module, found at www.-churchworldservice.org/decisions/in dex.htm, visitors are invited to play out optional scenarios as an impoverished husband or wife from the Third World. According to the site, the options with the best outcomes are those where the woman gets contraceptives and establishes a home business. Otherwise, the Web site suggests, the woman and her children are destined for a life of misery.

Also, Church World Service had publicly advocated on its Web site the passage of the Global Action and Investment for New Success (GAINS) for Women and Girls Act (H.R. 4114), U.S. legislation that would pressure the Third World poor into an increased use of contraception and abortion for family-planning purposes. That link has been removed since the Diocese of La Crosse raised the issue with Church World Service.

‘Not Our Mission’

According to the Rev. John McCullough, Church World Service executive director, in an October 2001 letter to the Rockford Diocesan Social Services Director Thomas McKenna, “CWS has no history ofádistributing contraceptivesáthis simply is not our mission.”

Judy McDowell denied that McCullough wrote the October 2001 letter, but agreed it is his signature appearing at the bottom.

“It was written by someone in our department on [McCullough's] behalf—and validly on his behalf,” McDowell explained. “But this letteráoffered far too simplistic a response.”

McDowell admitted Church World Service's partner agencies offer family-planning programs as one strategy to combat hunger.

Still, Gaston Razafinanja, director of the state Church World Service office in Madison, Wis., worked for the service for 20 years in Africa before taking the desk job and is convinced there is a misunderstanding of Church World Service's position.

As an umbrella organization that represents many churches, “we cannot tend to one side or the otheráso we take a neutral stand” on these issues, Razafinanja told The Catholic Times. “By nature we should not support this and our leaders know that.”

Dr. Arthur Hippler, director of the Office of Justice and Peace of the La Crosse Diocese and local Catholic Relief Services director, said Razafinanja's comments were similar to those made to local Catholic Crop Walk participants.

‘There's no sense in getting people to raise money for a group whose basic philosophy goes against Church teaching.’

But Hippler cited McDowell's statements affirming the involvement of Church World Service partner agencies in family planning services and stressed the offensiveness of this position to Catholics. “Many act as if promoting birth control and abortion in the Third World is a small matter,” he said. “But it is immoral and arrogant to solve the problems of development by killing the children of the poor. It sounds like the attitude P.J. O'Rourke has described as ‘just enough of us, too many of you.’”

Crop Walk participants can designate the funds they raise to go to a specific charity, Hippler noted. Many Catholics designate Catholic Relief Services as that charity. Also, 25% of the proceeds go to local hunger-relief programs.

But, according to a recent Catholic Relief Services report, average contributions from Church World Service to Catholic Relief Services from 1979 to 2001 totaled no more than $91,000 a year from the entire United States.

McDowell admitted Catholic Relief Services has had “problems tracking income.” Catholic Relief Services requested that Church World Service work with it in identifying the source of some checks Catholic Relief Services received, she added, and this may account for the low average income through Crop Walk.

Hippler suggested an alternative vehicle for raising funds for Catholic Relief Services. “Let's have a CRS walk and designate 25% of that to stay here and help the hungry in our community. That way CRS won't lose a dime and people still have an opportunity to help the hungry of the world. It's not Church World Service that's important, but feeding the hungry. CWS does not have a monopoly on feeding the poor.”

Reasons in Rockford

The Diocese of La Crosse is not the first to withdraw its support of Crop Walk. The Diocese of Rockford publicly withdrew its support for the same reasons last year.

According to Patricia Bainbridge, Rockford Diocese Respect Life assistant director, Bishop Thomas Doran's decision was based on information she had been collecting for years on Crop Walk and Church World Service.

In an Aug. 20, 1996, letter to Bainbridge, Church World Service official Ronda Hughes admitted that some partner organizations it funds are involved with family-planning programs. “Some of these partner organizations,” Hughes wrote, “also include, as a component of their maternal/child health programs, the supply of contraceptives.”

More significantly, Bainbridge cited the case of Father John Osterhout. In 1988, Father Osterhout was a priest of the Third Order Regular of St. Francis and director of student life at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio. (He is now a priest of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal.) At that time, he informed Church World Service that Franciscan University was pulling out of the Crop Walk in Steubenville because the service was discovered to have funded birth-control programs in the Third World.

In a Nov. 9, 1988, letter to Father Osterhout, Church World Service Associate Director Theodore Stanley wrote that he was sorry to hear Franciscan University was no longer going to participate in Crop Walk because “Church World Service allocates some of its overall funding for birth-control methods and education in the developing world.”

“We do not allocate a substantial or significant amount of our funding for birth control,” Stanley continued, “because it is our belief that improvement of the overall quality of life of persons of life [sic] in the developing world is the best way to limit population.”

Bainbridge said that for a hunger-relief organization to fund contraception programs is unacceptable. Quoting the U.S. bishops' document “Living the Gospel of Life,” Bainbridge noted, “the failure to protect and defend life in its most vulnerable stages renders suspect any claims to the rightness of positions in other matters affecting the poorest and least powerful of the human community.”

Bainbridge was pleased to hear other dioceses in the country have joined the Rockford Diocese in withdrawing participation from Crop Walk.

“Obviously other dioceses are recognizing the problem,” she said. “There's no sense in getting people to raise money for a group whose basic philosophy goes against Church teaching.”

Joseph O'Brien is a staff writer

for The Catholic Times,

newspaper of the Diocese

of La Crosse in Wisconsin.