Follow The Money

Some of us were appalled by the message given at the National Cathedral Prayer Service. It was not Biblical and was not appropriate. (article here) Well, as usual, it turns out that there was more to the story than meets the eye.

On Friday, The New York Post reported the following:

Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde’s sermon to President Trump during an inaugural prayer service, coupled with her church’s advocacy for humanitarian immigration programs, reveals a striking hypocrisy — one that could be seen as self-serving and even a conflict of interest.

That’s because the federal contracting arm of the church, Episcopal Migration Ministry (EMM), is paid to bring in people on resettlement programs that Trump has temporarily paused and targeted for re-evaluation.

EMM budget figures for 2024 are not available yet, but in 2023 it earned $53 million from various taxpayer-funded government programs to resettle 3,600 individuals.

…Unlike everyday immigrants, these new arrivals receive government assistance and, most importantly, are immediately eligible for all forms of welfare, such as Medicaid and cash assistance, on the same basis as a US citizen.

Further, they can immediately sponsor friends and relatives under a recent Biden expansion of the refugee resettlement program.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement was projecting 656,500 new arrivals in 2025, who would fall under its care. Clearly this is a program wildly out of control.

In an wild understatement, a 2012 Government Accountability Office report quotes an official noting that “funding is based on the number of refugees they serve, so affiliates have an incentive to maintain or increase the number of refugees they resettle each year rather than allowing the number to decrease.”

The article concludes:

Of course, it is not fair to question the Episcopalians alone on this.

Their resettlement contractor is the second smallest of the 10 contractors in the industry. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) dwarfs EMM.

Forbes reported that USCCB affiliate Catholic Charities USA, which has its hand in all aspects of immigration and seems to get money from every government agency except NASA, received $1.4 billion in taxpayer dollars in 2021. That’s 68 times more than EMM got that year.

It was never intended that the sponsoring organizations, formerly known as “Voluntary Agencies,” would be purely federal contractors, with all the behavior, untoward incentives, money, and influence-peddling that this brings, not to mention questions of church-state relations which are never raised in this context.

Any re-tooling of our humanitarian immigration programs must put the bulk of responsibility back on the “sponsoring” entity and limit new arrivals’ access to welfare.

As for encouraging the church to practice true sacrificial charity, Bishop Budde may have put it best when she said in an interview with Rachel Maddow, “the first and primary role that we have is [to lead] by example.”

I would have no problem with the church sponsoring immigrants if the church took care of them after they got here rather than making the taxpayer pay for the church’s generosity. This is a racket. These facts make the Bishop’s remarks seem even more hypocritical than they seemed to be at the time they were given.

Skewed Compassion

The message Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde gave at the National Cathedral Prayer Service was not only inappropriate, it was not Biblical.

Jesus was compassionate when He was faced with sinners. When He faced the woman caught in adultery, He spared her life, but He also told her, “Go and sin no more.”

Jesus’ Christianity as revealed in Paul’s letters calls for an obedience to government–stating that governments are put in place by God. Paul also refers to the sin of homosexuality. The Bible also states that God made man and woman. Last time I checked, God doesn’t make mistakes. In the context of Christianity, sin can be forgiven if there is repentance and change, but it is still sin.

The comments of Bishop Budde regarding people in fear are interesting. Is it possible that much of the fear is due to the misreporting of our mainstream media? What about the fears of the people who now have people in their cities who are here illegally that routinely break the law by stealing, driving without a license, drunk driving, murder, etc.? Are their fears valid? The comments about the hard-working illegals seem to overlook the fact that they broke the law to get here. There are legal ways to come and work in America. Should we simply eliminate the consequences for breaking the law?

We need to reform our immigration system, but that is not an excuse to ignore the current laws. Painting a picture of people who broke the law fearing enforcement of the law as a bad thing does not reinforce the rules of a stable society.

I don’t expect an apology, although an apology would be a positive reflection of the Christianity Bishop Budde claims to espouse. I just think that what she did was highly inappropriate. People go to church to grow in their faith–not to be lectured.