Catholic Charities CEO’s Get Rich by Helping the Poor

“Much has been said lately of the massive amounts of government money going to Catholic Charities, and some are beginning to awaken to the grotesque salaries taken by their CEOs.”​

In the 1951 film, “People Will Talk,” Dr. Noah Praetorius (an unconventional doctor, played by Cary Grant, who questions a medical industry that treats patients like machines) asks a colleague (Dr. Baker, played by Walter Slezak), “What is my business?” Dr. Baker responds with a rather conventional answer: “To diagnose the physical ailments of human beings and to cure them.” Dr. Praetorius immediately retorts that he is wrong, saying: “My business is to make sick people well. There’s a vast difference between curing an ailment and making a sick person well.”

This little dialogue (in what is truly a wonderful, pro-life movie) provides a philosophical question to the nature of the real purpose a doctor has in practicing medicine. The difference between “curing an ailment” and “making a sick person well” has less to do with methodology and everything to do with relationships. “Curing an ailment” places the focus on the ailment, whereas “making a sick person well” places the focus on the person, and in this post-modern world it is well and right to apply this difference to the question of charity.

Many organizations throughout the world claim to be “charities” or “charitable organizations,” and if you asked those who worked for them what their business is, they would respond with something akin to, “ending poverty,” or “relieving poverty,” or “ending the root causes of poverty.” As with Dr. Baker, such answers place the focus on the ailment, rather than the person. However, if one were to ask a Traditional member of a mendicant order what his or her business is, the response would be, “to serve the bodily needs of the poor while instructing them in the Faith in order to draw them to Christ.”

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