Vatican Complains After USAID Stops Funding Catholic Charity Plagued by Fraud, Sex Abuse
Caritas Internationalis struggles to recover reputation after €61 million embezzled from its Luxembourg branch
Caritas Secretary General Alistair Dutton with Cardinal Michael Czerny. (Caritas Internationalis)
The Vatican’s largest social justice network is complaining that the Trump administration’s cuts to its funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) will plunge millions into poverty and even death.
Caritas Internationalis, a charity which was forced to gut over 60 projects and sack 100 staff after it was hit by a €61million ($67 million) fraud scandal in July 2024, is overseen by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development headed by Cardinal Michael Czerny. It is comprised of 162 member organizations.
With an annual budget of more than $40 billion, Caritas is heavily invested in leftwing political activism, climate change, and anti-Israel lobbying, and has been associated with the World Social Forum — a pro-abortion, pro-LGBT body engaged in anticapitalist activism.
Charity Protests Cash Cuts
On Monday, Caritas Internationalis issued a statement condemning “the reckless decision by the U.S. Administration to abruptly close USAID funded programmes and offices worldwide.”
“Stopping USAID abruptly will kill millions of people and condemn hundreds of millions more to lives of dehumanizing poverty,” claimed Secretary General Alistair Dutton.
Dutton, a Catholic who is listed as a parishioner at a liberal Anglican church in Oxford, is a former Jesuit novice who worked previously for the Jesuit Refugee Service. He called the USAID cuts “an inhumane affront to people’s God-given human dignity, that will cause immense suffering.”
“Killing USAID also presents massive challenges for all of us in the global humanitarian community, who will have to completely reassess whom we can continue to serve and how,” he said.
Cardinal Joins Chorus of Complaint
Dutton’s statement was backed up by Cardinal Czerny, who agreed that considerable sums of USAID money were being spent on anti-Catholic woke programs like promoting gender ideology and LGBT advocacy, as The Stream recently reported.
“If the government thinks that its programs have been distorted by ideology, well, then they should reform the programs,” Czerny told The Associated Press. “Many people would say that shutting down is not the best way to reform them.”
The pro-immigration Jesuit cardinal who promotes the concept of “eco-justice” and has called for an “ecological conversion” noted that Trump’s “crackdown [on illegal aliens] is a terrible way to administer affairs and much less to administer justice” which has resulted in “many people [being] hurt and indeed terrorized by the measures.”
Caritas did not reveal how much cash it received from USAID but noted that it has been an “essential partner” of Catholic relief efforts for over 60 years.
Embezzlement Scandal Dampens Donor Confidence
Caritas Internationalis suffered a severe loss in private donations as well as loss in government funding after Caritas Luxembourg confirmed in July that it had filed a complaint for “misappropriation of funds” estimated at €61 million.
Luxembourg’s government will not provide “a single euro” to Caritas while uncertainty remains about “who did what,” Prime Minister Luc Frieden announced.
Caritas manages services for illegal aliens and the homeless for the government of Luxembourg. In 2024, the state allocated €21.5 million to the charity. Frieden stressed that any funds not used for their intended purposes must be returned.
“It’s a disgrace to steal money from the poorest people […] it’s sickening,” Foreign Affairs Minister Xavier Bettel remarked, noting that the embezzlement impacts “the poorest people in Luxembourg and in the world.”
“The financial losses include transfers from Caritas Luxembourg accounts and reserves, as well as credit lines that were opened, thereby diverting funds that the organization never actually had at its disposal,” the charity explained in a statement.
Luxembourg’s public prosecutor’s office said that it had identified over 8,200 transactions, carried out in very short intervals, to hundreds of accounts opened in a multitude of countries around the world during its investigation.
Pope Francis Sacks Charity’s Top Brass
In November 2022, Pope Francis sacked the entire senior leadership of Caritas Internationalis, including its president, Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, in a radical overhaul of the charity. The pontiff also fired Secretary General Aloysius John, Treasurer Alexander Bodmann, and ecclesiastical assistant Monsignor Pierre Cibambo.
John said the Vatican’s actions amounted to “a brutal power grab” and were “made in haste, with incredible violence and very poor public communication,” and that it had “discredited the church and one of its jewels, Caritas Internationalis.”
John, a French citizen of Indian descent, implied that he was fired because of his race, claiming that Caritas leaders from wealthier “Northern” regions had wanted to impose their will on the confederation and never wanted a Caritas leader from the “South.”
“No evidence emerged of financial mismanagement or sexual impropriety, but other important themes and areas for urgent attention emerged from the panel’s work,” said the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. However, “real deficiencies were noted in management and procedures, seriously prejudicing team spirit and staff morale.”
UN Cuts Ties with Caritas Over Sex Abuse
In 2019, the United Nations suspended ties with Caritas in the Central African Republic (CAR) after reports that the charity had appointed Fr. Luk Delft, a Belgian Salesian priest who was a convicted pedophile, as its director.
Caritas said it was “saddened and outraged by the child abuse” and expressed its “compassion and solidarity with the children and their families” Delft had victimized. The Salesians of Don Bosco, an order founded to care for boys, covered up Delft’s sexual abuse for years by moving him from post to post, including sending him to work in some of the world’s most remote areas.
Delft was convicted in 2012 and given a suspended sentence for sex assaults and possession of child porn going back to 2001. He was barred for 10 years from ministering to children and youth. Despite the ban, he began to work at CAR in 2013 and was appointed by Caritas in 2015.
In November 2023, Sebastian Wiśniewski, deputy director of a Caritas branch in Białystok, Poland, quit the church, saying that the institution is a “mafia” that has been “sheltering criminals,” including those guilty of child sex abuse.
The decision was “the result of years of work and observations in Caritas and almost 50 years as a Catholic,” Wiśniewski told the media, explaining that his accusations were based on his experience within Caritas, where he witnessed corruption and greed. He subsequently joined the Baptist Church.
Wiśniewski claimed Caritas took “joy from natural disasters and other events that improve the … budget through financial proceeds from fundraising.”
Caritas has also been accused of supporting anti-Jewish terrorist organizations like Hamas and demonstrating a consistent anti-Israel bias in its activism.
Caritas Sides with Hamas Against Israel
According to NGO Monitor, Caritas has “provided funding to a number of highly biased and politicized NGOs active in the Palestinian-Israel conflict including Breaking the Silence, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights–Israel, Yesh Din, [and] Who Profits.”
The charity openly sided with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) despite “the membership of countless UNRWA staff members in Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and other Palestinian terrorist organizations in Gaza,” according to the Israeli government.
As part of its political activism, Caritas opposed the implementation of two bills passed by the Israeli Parliament in October 2024, prohibiting UNRWA’s presence and operations across Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
While the charity has issued no consistent condemnation of Hamas and its October massacre of Jewish children, women and men, Caritas continues to draw a moral equivalence between Israeli hostages and Hamas terrorists in Israeli prisons.
In August, it called for “the immediate release of the remaining Israeli hostages and some 9,500 Palestinians who are arbitrarily detained by Israel without charge or rule of law.”
Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.