This from Reuters…
OLYMPIA, Washington (Reuters) – Washington state regulators have warned a Roman Catholic bishop that his diocese risks running afoul of state campaign finance laws if he follows through with a planned fund-raising effort opposing same-sex marriage on the November ballot.
State law prohibits organizations, including churches, from raising money from individuals to give to political campaigns, said Lori Anderson, a spokeswoman for the state’s Public Disclosure Commission.
“It’s not because it’s a church. It’s because it’s not a stand-alone individual,” Anderson said on Thursday.
The commission was calling into question a recent letter from Bishop Joseph Tyson to Yakima-area pastors urging them to distribute donation envelopes to parishioners during the weekend of September 8-9.
The money would go to Preserve Marriage Washington, the campaign to defeat legalization of same-sex marriage on the state’s November ballot.
The Democratic-controlled Washington Legislature voted this year to legalize same-sex marriage, and Governor Chris Gregoire, a Democrat and a Catholic, signed the measure into law during in February.
But the law was blocked from taking effect as scheduled in June when opponents submitted a petition for a repeal referendum on the November ballot. Referendum 74, subsequently certified as having collected enough signatures to qualify, asks voters to approve or reject the gay marriage bill enacted in February.
Tyson’s letter instructs parish priests not to open the envelopes once they are turned back in, but to place them into a pre-addressed security envelope to be mailed directly to Preserve Marriage, according to local media reports.
“It’s not our envelope,” Tyson told local television station KIMA-TV. “We’re not collecting the money, and we’re not taking the money. Preserve Marriage Washington is doing that. We’re going to follow the state law.”
But Anderson said she was not swayed.
“That can’t happen under our state law,” she told Reuters. “It doesn’t matter if they haven’t looked at the contributions.”
The commission has not heard directly from the diocese, but it sent Tyson a letter Thursday outlining the relevant campaign finance rules, Anderson said.
Under state law, only individuals are allowed to collect donations and give them to a political campaign, and in doing so must take down each donor’s name, address, occupation and employer. If the donation is above $25, that information must then be made public by the campaign.
The diocese may pass out campaign donation envelopes to its parishioners, but it cannot collect them or act in any way as an intermediary, Anderson said. The church is free to create a political action committee to raise money, and could then transfer donations to other campaigns as it sees fit, she said.
Organizations found to have violated state campaign finance laws can be fined up to $10,000 for each transgression.
Several diocese officials reached by Reuters said they were not authorized to comment. Tyson did not immediately return telephone calls.
Wake Forest University divinity professor James Dunn said the diocese’s fund-raising plans could also threaten its federal tax-exempt status as a non-political religious organization.
Handing out donation envelopes for a political campaign in church “is in blatant violation of the spirit of the law,” Dunn said, adding that the Internal Revenue Service has not strictly enforced that law in recent years.
The rest is here.
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Ismael Hernandez has a piece for Crisis Magazine where he argues that the Catholic Church should have never taken federal dollars to support its charitable works. Addressing his own bishops he writes:
Being a pastor is more like being a jazz musician than it is being say an engineer. All three of these occupations require a great deal of technical skill to be sure. But the pastor, like the jazz musician, is often called upon to improvise on a theme more than, like the engineer, apply a theory to a problem. This is all to say that pastoral ministry is more art than science.
Mostly what priests encounter in our flocks is what existential or humanistic psychologists call problems in living. Life just becomes flat. Relationships that once were easy and life giving just aren’t anymore. Saddest of all, what was once a source of joy in life is now merely “blah” if not something much worse.
