February 2020
The CAFOD Chronicles: 2
Subversion and revolution
Despite the criticism on all sides, one diocesan lobbyist claimed that even if CAFOD dominated Catholic giving, it was still better value than national non-Catholic charities. He was silenced by various figures to the contrary and the question: where does CAFOD end and the others begin?
Big Money non-governmental bodies are integral parts of the same political movement. For a start, staff right up to top management move between them and among foreign partners. Oxfam hired a man dismissed by the Belgian counterpart of CAFOD for sexual misconduct.
Chris Bain had been at Oxfam and Christian Aid. His successor, Christine Allen, went to Christian Aid in 2012 after working at Liverpool's diocesan Justice & Peace body, a junior job at CAFOD and then running Progressio, both of which had employed Juian Filochowski.
Among CAFOD’s several trustees over the years, Jenny Cosgrave had worked for Islamic Relief, and Dr Hugo Slim was once on Oxfam’s board, while Robert Archer had been at CIIR and one of the many international bodies touting human rights. Anna Ford (who gets celebs to boost CAFOD, all expenses paid) returned to it from Tearfund.
They also address each other’s gatherings at national and local level: for example, a CAFOD speaker at Friends of the Earth near Southampton on 27 March 2019.
Various personnel continue to be involved in other organisations that are at odds with Catholic doctrine, or else purely secular or overtly political, mainly for Labour or other socialistic and even communist parties. Not to mention Islam.
These joint efforts are blatantly publicised in diocesan magazines. For example, CAFOD’s theological head, Linda Jones, is also on the boards of a centre for social thought and an equally obscure “ecumenical movement committed to interfaith dialogue”. The former also includes CAFOD’s head of campaigns, Daniel Hale.
Vicious circle
The agencies make common cause too, notably through the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), as mentioned in David Craig’s The Great Charity Scandal [2015]. Its 14 members include CAFOD, World Vision, ActionAid, Tearfund, Concern Worldwide and Islamic Relief. DEC was largely created by War on Want, an offshoot of the communist front Liberation, and it became ludicrously pro-Soviet under (Mgr) Bruce Kent who, in 1979, helped to launch the World Disarmament Campaign along with Gordon McLennan from the Communist Party of Great Britain. Funding came from Oxfam and Christian Aid.
Kent quit the priesthood in 1987, having switched to controlling the (unilateral) Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Campaign Against Arms Trade, and Pax Christi. Full details are in Paul Mercer’s Peace of the Dead [1986]. The self-styled Catholic peace movement has long collaborated with Christian Aid and CAFOD, notably at Catholic Justice & Peace conferences. Typically, Pax Christi’s last secretary-general, Pat Gaffney, had previously spearheaded CAFOD’s interference in Catholic schools. CAFOD spent £2 million on “Peace and reconciliation” last year.
In addition, CAFOD belongs to both the National Council of Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) and to one of its members, Bond — the UK network for development organisations which belongs to 12 other organisations immersed in global solidarity, diversity and sustainability. Nor is CAFOD’s mission to homosexuals neglected; it also works with the Global Network For People Living with HIV.
CAFOD, along with Bond, is also part of the Corporate Responsibility Coalition (CORE) which was formed to get greater social and environmental commitment from British business plus a reform of English company law. Other backers include Friends of the Earth, New Economics Foundation and Save the Children which also works with CAFOD in the DEC. [foe.co.uk]
Then there is the London Mining Network, “an alliance of human rights, development, environmental and solidarity groups” which disrupt annual general meetings in the City. LMN is linked with Mines and Communities (MAC) whose 28 supporting pressure-groups include Friends of the Earth and Amnesty International … and CAFOD, which is also joined with the Climate Coalition.
CAFOD also works with Traidcraft, a public limited company, and Tearfund, a Christian charity, which both have the same founder. The first two of the trio then launched Fairtrade Foundation, itself part of a global network, together with the usual suspects, Oxfam and Christian Aid. Others included World Development Movement (WDM) which has changed its name to Global Justice Now. An individual backer of Fairtrade ran WDM before heading International Alert … and so it goes on.
The strategy is to build a structure so complicated that little people are overwhelmed by Big Brother who “raises awareness” (brainwashes) and demands their money on all sides.
Every time there is a new issue on the earthly, anti-God agenda, the directors of CAFOD et. al. all get together to spawn a new grouping, alliance, coalition or organisation with a long name that obscures the backers while providing the illusion of extended power. This word is among CAFOD’s favourites — as in the Power To Be campaign against the World Bank to stop investing in fossil fuels. Another advantage of this mephistophelian mafia is that CAFOD can justify its remit through ambiguous or ambivalent abstractions, while remaining at arm’s length from controversial deeds or words. One tactic is a joint letter to the press by directors, written in their “personal capacities” but listing their organisations.
Money maze
They also pool resources and take in each other’s washing. CAFOD was handed £28,000 by Christian Aid in 2015 when Islamic Relief increased its contribution sixfold to £301,000. CAFOD also got rent from an unnamed charity at a property since sold. While its published accounts are fuzzy about many items, they also reveal yearly income through Caritas Internationalis, largely meaning churchgoers abroad — such as New Zealanders who passed on £91,000 from Aotearoa in 2016. A year later, Development & Peace in Canada donated £953,000.
Last year, CAFOD got a typical £5 ½ million from a score of sister-agencies, including £443,000 from Caritas Australia (with which it has intensified co-operation) and £449,000 from SCIAF (the Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund) whose scandals have been exposed by catholictruthscotland.com. It has also had public money from Japan and Austria, but curiously refunded £32,000 to Ireland in 2009.
Conversely, “Inputs for international partners” (whatever that means, and no longer specified) cost it £804,000 in 2008. It is unclear under which category came typical expenditure for three staff to visit the Mexican resort of Cancún in 2010, and two to fly to equally balmy Durban in 2012 for environmental conferences. Nor do they specify the bill in 2013, split between CAFOD and CRS, for taking Jim Murphy, a Labour MP, to the Philippines where their activity is mainly on Mindanao island (as it happens, a longtime base of communist insurgency).
Unaccountable before that was the cost of bringing Bantu agitators to London for CAFOD’s campaign for supposed justice in South Africa. And who paid for Bishop John Arnold and fellow-cafodists to fly to San Salvador, yet again, for a trivial anniversary in 2017? Travel is no longer itemised, but based on the 2009 figure, jaunts to warm climes may well add up to £2 million a year. Bain himself was spending an annual £10,000 on globe-trotting on top of his hefty pay package (which reached £121,000 in 2017) mainly to confer with his ilk on either side of the Atlantic.
What the financial statements never tell is that disillusioned former employees could see from their own desks huge sums of money squandered, and salaried time wasted. One typical defector posted this comment: “Not very professionalized, people doing roles they are totally unqualified for due to internal transfer to avoid redundancies, low quality monitoring of grants and partners make you wonder what actual work is being done on the ground, nobody seems to know”. [glassdoor.co.uk, 1 Nov. 2017]
One suspects endless meetings, and churchgoers can see the piles of CAFOD paper dumped in porches, which is why its Westminister Bridge Road address has been dubbed Wastpaper Bins Row.
Mailing-houses do nicely out of CAFOD whereas Little Way Association sends out only a magazine costing about £1,200 a quarter. In 2009, CAFOD spent the equivalent of £1 million in today's money on printing, postage and stationery, something no longer itemised.
It is revealed, however, that for at least a decade since 2003 CAFOD was providing “accounting and payroll support” to the newly-formed Trade Justice Movement, yet another coalition involving several churches and charities. CAFOD still provides similar services for Crosby Support Limited, registered at its own address as company No 2949213 but with a shop in Liverpool that has provided CAFOD with £730,000 since 1983.
On top of all that, CAFOD, a registered charity (Nº 1160384), has also controlled the Cafod Trading Co Ltd. Bloomberg currently lists it as a commercial company limited by guarantee (Nº 09387398) at CAFOD’s old address in Stockwell Road, although it has now been wound up. CAFOD states that the run-off revenue was a mere £27,000, down from £42,000 in 2017 when auditing Cafod Trading cost £3,000.
Questionable transactions
While other charities live from hand to mouth, buried in CAFOD’s accounts for 2012 and 2013 were losses of £286,000 and £369,000 on “Interest receivable and investment income”. That is the equivalent of more than two year’s donations to St Francis Leprosy Guild. In the last couple of years, foreign currency transactions — partly involving speculation on future rates — have lost CAFOD a net £212,000 — a figure that is fourfold the annual donations to Missionary Servants of the Poor; donations transmitted straight to Peru.
Nor has CAFOD been lucky with its bankers. It would never touch Barclays, a onetime target for anti-apartheid campaigners because of its South African branches, despite traditional expertise throughout what was once the British Empire. CAFOD preferred the home-based Co-operative Bank whose customers include free churches, trade unions and anything politically red or green. But the collapse of the Co-op's “ethical banking” began in 2013 with a hidden loss of £1½ billion and lurid exposés of serious offences involving sex, drugs and money committed by its boss, a Methodist preacher and former Labour councillor.
Instead of a customary “review” (do nothing), CAFOD hastily confined itself to an existing account at Royal Bank of Scotland whose foreign misadventures had cost the British taxpayer £45 billion in 2008. Strangely, lobbying against HSBC’s lending to coal mines (anathema to environmentalists) has been left to Christian Aid.
CAFOD evades itemising all its aid, although the overall breakdown of £28 million into 50 countries in 2017 is typical. That ignored 85 others in the “global South”, including such Christian lands as Angola, Paraguay, Grenada and Armenia.
Cafodists are not just aiders but hivaiders too because they proudly earmarked £2 million for helping sufferers from HIV. This, of course, is where buying condoms for homosexuals comes in, and it seems an unnatural diversion of funds. The sum was miniscule compared to global hivaids programmes that totalled $49 billion (£38,000 million). Obviously, some people with hivaids brought it on their own bodies. But lepers, the lowest of the low with no chance of economic development, do not waste away from sin. Donations in 2017 to the leprosy guild already mentioned were less than even the £372,000 wasted by CAFOD on what it calls “Strategic leadership”.
Then there is money spent on internal audit as well as external, which is not the same as “Financial management”. There is further expenditure on “HR and organisational development”, which may cover free yoga in the lunch hour, as well as “Board training and meeting costs”. As for “Governance accountability and transparency”, last year it cost an opaque £3½ million.
Who knows where all the money goes? Starting with the coins and notes put on the plate! What strict measures are in place, for instance, to ensure that monies are not taken straight to an empty sacristy by collectors (a malpractice not unknown in parishes)?
As for the vast amounts that end up anywhere on earth, since CAFOD’s convoluted budgeting involves collaboration with so many non-religious agencies and Catholic associates in Britain as well as affiliates abroad and partners contracted worldwide under the Caritas umbrella, the field is ripe for the sort of fraud, wastage, corruption, embezzlement, money-laundering and misappropriation currently synonymous with Vatican finances. Given the Church’s need for payouts to victims of sexual abuse, for instance, it would be all too easy for the various accounts to conceal hierarchical or pontifical charges for services rendered.
Network of irresponsibility
One example of diverted funds involves Caritas Italiana. It is mired in the alleged embezzlement of four million euros, leading to the arrest of seven layfolk and a priest, Rev Vincenzo Federico, in 2015. The case continues.
Another is the diocesan embezzlement of $90,000 by the late Eamonn Casey, then Bishop of Galway, to silence Annie Murphy, the American mother of his child, in 1993. He was later made a hospital chaplain in distant Sussex by Murphy O’Connor. Just as the latter became Patron of CAFOD, so the disgraced Casey had headed its Irish counterpart, Trócaire.
These two worked together in Kenya and Ethiopia. As mentioned earlier, Ethiopia is where CAFOD was criticised by the Humanitarian Quality Assurance Initiative. As for Trócaire, the Irish Independent (the most Catholic of the nation’s dailies) reported on 23 August 2002 that Fr Kevin O’Mahoney, a White Father, was complaining because Trόcaire refused him funds for pastoral work at his mission in the furthest and driest part of Ethiopia. He warned, “If you want to build a church or a Catholic school don't go to Trocaire because you won't get it”.
Another of CAFOD’s partners — for example in Darfur during 2014 — is Norwegian Church Aid (Kirkens Nødhjelp) whose workers had been accused in Laos of the “sexual abuse of Akha girls and women”, and of theft. An independent enquiry, by Dr Chris Lyttelton, of Macquarie University in Australia and Kristin Ingebrigtsen, acknowledged at least some illicit sexual relationships in 2006.
CAFOD gets an inordinate amount of financial support from Norwegian Church Aid whose own income is amazingly high in such a small nation. Moreover, it has gone secular, unlike Brot für die Welt in Berlin, an avowedly Protestant charity whose website regurgitates CAFOD's socialistic gospel.
Therefore, unlike the Little Way Association whose monies go exclusively to Catholic missions, CAFOD does not tell the whole truth with its “Many of these organisations are connected to the local Catholic Church.” Even its vague entry on the secular Bond website is misleading: “It works mainly but not exclusively through church organisations”.
In any case, many Catholic ones out of some 300 to 500 overseas partners (the number continually varies) can mean far less than “most”, and CAFOD would be only too keen to state the percentage if it were better PR. Nor is being linked to some parishioners or religious the same as being under diocesan authority. CAFOD’s longtime partner in Cambodia is the Maryknoll order which became associated with the so-called theology of liberation four decades ago, while another mission seems staffed by feminists with slogans instead of nuns in habits.
It becomes obvious that various CAFOD partners espouse secular and socialist, if not Marxist, objectives — hardly surprising when the same applies at home. Some partners are blatantly political. While the ignored St Francis Leprosy Guild badly needs funds for a hospital plying Amazonian tributaries, in 2014 CAFOD spent £65,968 in Brazil’s richest city, São Paulo, boosting the organisation APOIO [SUPPORT] and thus the municipal candidature of its founder, Manoel Del Rio, a workers’ party lawyer whose favourite slogan is A luta é sempre ("the struggle continues"). CAFOD (which as we have noted has a salaried officer to recruit celebs) paid for Jo Joyner of the East Enders soap-opera to fly to Brazil and be filmed marching with APOIO’s housing demonstrators, spending an extra £5,229 on “Freelance journalists to cover campaigns”.
CAFOD’s Bolivian partner, ACLO, runs a radio station inspired by the theology of liberation. Typically, this is also funded by other so-called development agencies that include Manos Unidas in Madrid and Brot für die Welt which has even more press officers than CAFOD.
Among the very many other partners that have more to do with social change than poverty are the Centre for Women’s Studies in Nigeria and CTL (possibly onetime CECOPAL), a think-tank based on liberation theology in Cordoba, one of the wealthiest cities in relatively prosperous Argentina.
Some partners are the same as the 52 that have recently embarrassed the local Church in Canada via Development & Peace (CCODP), its "international development organisation."
Ever since its founding in Montreal just five years after CAFOD, CCODP has had a similar controversial history. Most recently, in a joint statement with the Canadian bishops last November, it admitted problems “ensuring that its own work and that of its direct partners is not in contradiction to the principles and values of Catholic social and moral teaching” — a re-run of an inconclusive enquiry in 2009.
In glaring contrast to hierarchies in the British Isles, however, Cardinal Thomas Collins of Toronto and 11 other bishops outside Quebec have been withholding or delaying collections for Development & Peace, and are still restricting allocation unless and until it becomes clear that money is not going towards contraception, abortion or lobbying for immoral legislation. (catholicregister.com, 17/4/18)
No comment is likely from Caritas Internationalis. According to its spokesman in Montreal, although aware of the Canadian investigation it “has no concerns about Development and Peace’s policies or its partner choices”. Meantime, in December, the few Catholics in Stockholm tumbled to the fact that Caritas Sverige helps to fund the Swedish Mission Council whose 20 members are into the same programmes.
Agitation without end
Not content with being part of the octopus-like confederation in Rome, CAFOD also belongs to Coopération Internationale pour le Développement et la Solidarité (CIDSE), based in Brussels, complete with a priestly lobbyist in lay clothes to “fight for global justice”.
Funding from the European Union — £3¼ million to CAFOD in 2013 — is, however, being challenged. The ngo-monitor.org website has a diagram showing how aid agencies are interconnected with interchangeable staff. CIDSE’s 18 members, all in the northern hemisphere, include the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns (which explains all). CAFOD also has an excuse for more hot air, here and there, by belonging to the Global Catholic Climate Movement.
Finally, CAFOD is integrated into two domestic networks, listed at the same address as the Catholic Bishops’ Conference for England and Wales, the very body that controls CAFOD. One is Caritas Social Action Network (CSAN) — actually housed at CAFOD’s own address as charity Nº 1101431 and company Nº 4505111) — whose 2017 income was £370,000. Among its trustees is Bishop Arnold (already busy enough closing churches in Salford), while its chief executive calls himself a member of CAFOD and Pax Christi (which body for faith in politics is somehow not the same as the National Justice & Peace Network [NJPN] that can count on campaigners in most dioceses and many parishes, often working on an interdenominational/interfaith basis).
Again, all their parts and personnel are interchangeable, making common cause with the world. Susy Brouard, another of CAFOD’s theological advisers, typically chaired NJPN’s 2017 annual conference: organising partners of which included a trust headed by the ubiquitous Filichowski, with CAFOD’s Clare Dixon as its secretary. Protestant input included a priestess from Christian Aid Scotland, while Mass was said by a self-styled “eco-theologian” denounced as “theologically dissident” and “dissenting” by stumblingblock.org and torchofthefaith.com.
As for CSAN, ahead of the May 2015 general election, it joined with CAFOD to produce a card with four loaded questions that Catholics were asked to put to candidates. And on 17 August 2018 the Tablet reported that the two bodies had left hundreds of shoes on the pavement outside Westminister Cathedral to draw attention to refugees.
Infiltration of parishes
The result of all this is that the cafodistic mafia has a stranglehold on the Catholic Church all the way from Archbishop’s House to the lowliest presbytery. Like a cuckoo in the nest, CAFOD has free distributive, collection and recruiting points in the form of passive Catholic schools, churches, colleges and seminaries, all of which are funded by either worshippers or ratepayers.
Even though CAFOD’s 437 employees are on an average salary of £36,613, most of the labour comes free, starting with 90 unpaid interns. Much more is done by parish priests, teachers and various other layfolk. These docile and trusting lackeys range from those who take the second collection at Mass to 6,000 volunteers (against a total of 222 shared by five smaller charities).
An additional army, albeit dwindling, is the Union of Catholic Mothers whose report for 2017 boasted “CAFOD is an integral part of UCM”. Its president, Valerie Ward, is also CAFOD’s representative in Shrewsbury diocese besides sitting on its commission for Justice & Peace and being a ‘special minister’. These mums are a far cry from the Catholic Women’s League of Canada that decided on 17 November to discourage donations to Development & Peace until it was certainthat it did not fund various sexual perversions.
When CAFOD made 50 diocesan agents redundant to save £3 million in 2015, it asked the UCM to take on the work — unpaid. As the Tablet summed up as long ago as 15 December 1990:
“...Cafod has a ready made network for the mustering and distribution of resources which is the envy of other development agencies.” Come 22 January 2015, the same magazine noted the uncharitable terms of the lay-offs.
Nonetheless, CAFOD retains a psychological — and thus diabolical — hold on Catholics in churches and classrooms. Before listing all the brainwashing, it is germane to learn lessons from the suicide in 2015 of Olive Cooke, an elderly do-gooder in Bristol, who was “overwhelmed” by appeals from charities. Amid an outcry against chuggers (British slang for 'charity muggers'; those paid to collect for charity on busy streets by signing up people to make regular donations, often by direct debit), the Charity Commission’s chairman threatened large fines for such harassment.
America's Lepanto Institute has also warned that folk in the pews are “pressured from the pulpit” to part with dollars for Catholic Relief Services whose profligacy and homosexuality mirror CAFOD (LifeSiteNews, 22/3/19).
Recourse to law
Another sign of the times is that, thanks to the Fundraising Regulator being made almost statutory in 2016, CAFOD must now take account of complaints. Last year, it admitted to 245, of which 194 were about direct mail and ten were about emailed appeals. Nothing was mentioned about legacies, where CAFOD scooped the pool with £9¼ million — more than the combined total of all other Catholic charities. Nor was there mention of exploitation of vulnerable adults. On the St Mary Magdalen site (24/1/12) blogger nickbris denounced: “… crooked fund raisers who CON kind, generous, mainly elderly people into setting up Direct Debits & Standing Orders which they keep for years and years. I know of at least two people in this parish who have fallen for it….”
I myself am still trying to recover from Oxfam automatic payments that my late mother was making well into dementia. And I recently discovered that on 5 March 2019 CAFOD got a lot of money for Ethiopian chickens out of a care home in the Portsmouth diocese. The ailing donors included my godmother: a nun, aged 99. This matter has been reported to the Diocesan Safeguarding Commission, just as the highly publicised incident at the Kent Catholic primary school, mentioned in Part 1, should have been reported to its Southwark counterpart. Indeed, all such commissions should be put on general alert for CAFOD’s invasion of care homes and classrooms. Such investigation is in the Catholic spirit of safeguarding, and the legal remit should be extended in the case of any argument.
I make these points in true charity to everyone concerned. Not least CAFOD officials and the dioceses, who need to know that they also leave themselves open to legal action in other ways, quite apart from the Protection from Harassment Act of 1997, invoked by the Charity Commission. One possible scenario is a Catholic version of the aforementioned Olive Cooke.
Suppose a parishioner dies suddenly following complaints of pestering by CAFOD. Relations (maybe non-Catholics) could sue for wrongful death, even if it was down to stress. America has seen several lawsuits ascribing blame for suicides, and similar actions seem likely in England. Given the exposure of churchmen to actions over child abuse, it seems but a short step to suing them anyway for assisting CAFOD: either in extorting money from the aged, or in exploiting children. Consider that there is now a body of case-law in the tort of Clergy Malpractice in the United States, and what the Australian state of New South Wales calls Negligence of Clergy.
Even setting that aside, I suggest that there are statutory grounds in England for suing clergy and/or teachers who have had it proved to them (the numerous authorities quoted in this report are enough) that CAFOD is actually anti-Catholic; and gives a false impression to the faithful folk as to all that it does; and how their money is spent. In my submission, CAFOD contravenes at least Sections 3 and/or 4 of the Fraud Act of 2006 which improved on the old laws against pecuniary deception.
I believe, therefore, that any priest or prelate, having to stand up in a Court of law on a count of duping his flock about CAFOD, would lose credibility after the opening question: Are you law-abiding? Answering yes, he would then be shown up as disobeying a host of decrees from Rome.
A last legal point: Croydon has become the hundredth local authority to limit collections in public; by-laws that ought to be extended to school and church premises. For, instead of being harassed on streets, old souls suffer the same intimidation from:
• the parish priest
• the deacon
• the CAFOD representative
• the CAFOD volunteers
• the men/women with collection plates
• the tables in the church porch
• the wall of the baptistry
• the diocesan newspaper
• the stand in the parish room
• the bishop’s pastoral, and
• the diocesan directory
If they have anything to do with them, they will see more of CAFOD at the parish school, at the Union of Catholic Mothers, or at an ecumenical sing-song with Christian Aid in the local Methodist church.
There will be still more CAFOD plus CSAN in their local cathedral.