Catholic Church does great work, far from hypocritical

Recently Jack Jokinen commented that the Pope Francis was hypocritical in telling us "that building a wall is wrong" while "the Vatican takes no immigrants." This statement is completely incorrect. The Vatican has indeed taken in refugees.

The pope actually said "a person who thinks only of building walls anywhere rather than building bridges is not a Christian."

The context of the words "only" and "rather" do show what would be a purely universal Christian concept, that is, if we were only building walls with no concern for the disadvantaged people, that would be un-Christian.

The good Mr. Jokinen is inferring that the Catholic Church who "makes millions of dollars ..." does not do as it preaches when it comes to following its principles. Again he is wrong.

Please see the following absolute facts about the Church.

The Catholic Church is the largest charitable organization in the world. Every day the Catholic Church feeds, clothes, shelters and educates more people than any other organization in the world.

They provided food services for 7,146,490 people in the U.S. alone. Operating 8,516 elementary and high schools, 230 Catholic colleges and universities, 629 hospitals and health care facilities assisting 88,519,295 patients annually.

Catholic health care systems in 50 states provide acute care, skilled nursing, hospice, home health, assisted living and senior housing.

They don't ask people if they are Catholic, they ask people if they are hungry. They were responsible for the birth of health care and education systems, establishing the first hospitals and pioneering education for the commoner.

In this modern day and age when the life and dignity of the human person is being threatened at every turn, the Catholic Church remains the world's premier institutional defender of human rights. That is only the start of what the Church does with its money.

Frank Ward

Parrish

This story was originally published March 8, 2016 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Catholic Church does great work, far from hypocritical ."