Catholic Candle note: Catholic Candle normally examines particular issues thoroughly, at length, using the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas and the other Doctors of the Church. By contrast, our feature CC in Brief, usually gives an extremely short answer to a reader’s question. We invite every reader to submit his own questions.
CC in Brief
Making Donations During Our Time of Great Apostasy
Q. The [Church’s] commandment to contribute to the support of the Church is somewhat challenging, bearing in mind the current situation in the human element of the Church. Any suggestions on where to direct such support?
A. Good question, regarding contributing to the support the Church! The first thing to keep in mind is to make sure that you do no harm. Do not contribute to any compromise group under a misplaced desire to “contribute somewhere” or to donate to the “least bad” group available! Compromise priest and groups are not doing God’s work!
Further, do not contribute to a group that does both good work and also evil, under the rationalization that you are donating to that group “for the good part of the work they do”.
Your donation money is God’s money. Of course, everything we have belongs to God and we are His stewards of whatever He chose to give us out of His largess. He does not need us or our donations in order to accomplish His work. He can easily do everything He wants to do without us. But He wants us to donate to His causes because it is good for us to serve Him in this way.
We recommend that you make sure you always give wisely. Give alms to the needy who are truly needy. Here is an example of persons who do not seem to be truly needy: One of the Catholic Candle Team works in a large city’s business district. He sees beggars near the train station every day who, after rush hour (i.e., when most people are gone), are sitting on the sidewalk smoking and texting on their cell phone that had been hidden. Considering further, that most beggars have access to the state’s myriad government “social services” programs and welfare freebies, it would seem that such beggars are not the best recipients of our alms.
Regarding our giving alms to the truly needy: one example is that we recently became aware of a newly-widowed woman, the mother of a Catholic family with dependent children. Although, of course, we want to do good to everyone, we should especially want to help Catholics, following St. Paul’s teaching: “let us work good to all men, but especially to those who are of the household of the Faith.”. Galatians, 6:10.
The truly needy include, most of all, those with great spiritual need. There is such great spiritual need now! Although we want to relieve bodily needs as well as spiritual needs, it would be infinitely better for one person to save his soul by means of spiritual alms than a hundred people to have their bodily needs met if they were still to lose their souls. So all alms prudently given are great but alms which do important spiritual good are best.
Give away rosaries to those who are interested, along with information on how to pray the rosary. Give away Catholic books, Traditional Catholic Missals, etc. But do this wisely. Give them to those persons whom you think are interested and will really use them or read them. A woman on the Catholic Candle Team intentionally strikes-up friendly conversations with modestly-dressed women when she sees them at the grocery store, to see if they are interested in the Truth. When she finds one that is, she sees how she might help.
Another idea starts with the observation that, when an uncompromising priest becomes available to us in the future, he will need financial help to do the most good. So this idea is that, by setting aside money now (as appropriate) to place yourself in a position to assist God’s work by supporting such an uncompromising priest when God sends him to us. For example, in the past, when God sent us a then-uncompromising priest, there existed an uncompromising Catholic charity which paid for all of his plane tickets to fly around the country and other parts of the world to bring the uncompromising Mass, Sacraments and True Faith to the people. We think that a similar time will come again in the future and we should try to be ready to help financially (as well as in other ways). Thus, creating such a fund and giving funds to it as you are able, would in our opinion, be considered alms in God’s eyes (assuming a person is honest with himself that he is not simply keeping the money for himself).
But rather than creating one’s own fund, you should know that that the particular uncompromising Catholic charity referred to above still exists (and is a tax-deductible public charity under IRS regulation 501(c)(3)). You can still contribute to it if you wish. Some members of the Catholic Candle Team are connected with that charity but, of course, do not receive any of the money themselves. Everyone working for that charity volunteers and donates his time and receives no salary or payment of any type. That public charity is called Traditional Catholic Religious Life, Inc. But that charity does not currently have any priests to support because they have no access to, or information about, any uncompromising priests. Please contact Catholic Candle at CatholicCandle@gmail.com if you are interested in donating.