Time to End Campaign for Human Development?

In dioceses across America, bishops send out lists of collections that are to be taken up in individual parishes throughout the year. Some are local, but many are promoted by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. There are, for example, Peter’s Pence, Missionary Sunday, and the Retirement Fund for Religious. One of these, the lesser-known Campaign for Human Development, has been such a cause for concern that in 2008 the American bishops began to question how it works and even suggested phasing it out. At the 2010 national meeting of U.S. bishops, Roger Morin of Biloxi publicly apologized for the program’s past mistakes. So what, precisely, does the CHD do? To answer that question, it might help to examine how the CHD got started, what its original purposes were, and how have things changed.

As Lawrence J. Engel relates in “The Influence of Saul Alinsky on the Campaign for Human Development” (Theological Studies, December 1998), to which this article owes a large debt, the CHD began in 1969 as American cities were burning down: Newark, Washington, Detroit, Los Angeles. It was the height of the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam War protests. Some scholars believed the nation was on the road to anarchy. The patriotism of the young during the Kennedy era was gone, replaced with: “Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?”