Catholic Teaching on Foreign Aid
A Defense of USAID
I want to begin by asking readers to pray for Pope Francis, who is hospitalized with pneumonia. Pray for the recovery of his health and for spiritual strength.
Caritas Internationalis, the global confederation of Catholic relief agencies, issued a statement late last month saying that the organization “deplores” and is “appalled by” the Trump administration’s dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and freezing of other forms of international development assistance, not to mention the dramatic cuts to the foreign aid budgets of several Western European nations, as well. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has also criticized the freezing of foreign aid by the Trump administration, urging Catholics to petition their legislators to restore the funding.
The apparent closure of USAID has had a dramatic impact on Catholic agencies. For example, by the beginning of February, Catholic Relief Services, which receives about half its funding from USAID, was bracing for massive cuts to its programs and staff. Jesuit Refugee Services is also at risk of having to end vital programs in nine countries.
The Catholic Church’s concern over the freezing of US foreign aid is not simply a matter of protecting its own charitable efforts, as important as that is. Rather, the responsibility of wealthier nations to provide assistance to underdeveloped nations as a matter of justice and solidarity is a key aspect of Catholic teaching, a crucial way we are called to live out the Gospel. As Pope Francis put it in his recent letter to the US Catholic bishops, seeking to explain why we have a moral duty to care for those from foreign nations, “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’, that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.” So, what does Catholic social teaching say about foreign aid? In this article, I’ll discuss some of the crucial documents of Catholic social teaching and their key points related to international development assistance to help explain why US Catholics should be alarmed about the proposed closure of USAID.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the United States provided billions of dollars of aid for the reconstruction of Western Europe through the Marshall Plan. By the end of the 1940s, American and European leaders began to see the value in providing similar assistance to poorer countries throughout the world, both for humanitarian reasons and to head off the spread of Soviet communism. The call for development assistance grew more insistent as countries in Asia and Africa declared their independence from European colonizers. In 1961, the United Nations launched the Decade of Development, a major push for promoting development assistance in what was then known as the “Third World.”
USAID was an initiative of President John F. Kennedy and was created by Congress with the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. The agency brought together smaller, already-existing agencies focused on technical assistance (i.e., providing scientific, technological, and educational experts as advisers and trainers) and issuing development loans. By the 1970s, as USAID’s focus shifted primarily to meeting basic human needs, its means of funding shifted to grants, leaving development lending to international organizations like the World Bank and to private lenders.
The Catholic Church played a major role in promoting this emerging spirit of development. The Church played an important role in the resettlement of refugees and in providing charitable assistance to reconstruction efforts after the Second World War. The various national Caritas agencies—the first had been formed in Germany in 1897 and several others were established in the following decades—established Caritas Internationalis in 1951. In 1960, the confederation shifted its focus to include not just emergency aid but also increasingly development aid.
The first time international foreign aid was a focus of a major teaching document of the Church came in Pope John XXIII’s 1961 encyclical Mater et Magistra, published just a few months before the establishment of USAID. In that document, Pope John called on the wealthier nations to offer assistance to those nations where many people are “suffering from want and hunger” (#161). He added, however, that emergency relief is only of short-term benefit, and needed to be supplemented by long-term developmental aid in the form of technical assistance and financial and capital investments that will assist in promoting economic development (##163-65). The Second Vatican Council, meeting later in the decade, affirmed John’s teaching on foreign aid in the document Gaudium et Spes, teaching that wealthier nations should assist developing nations with technical specialists, gifts, loans, and financial investments (#85).
Pope Paul VI’s 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio can be considered the charter of Catholic teaching on international development. It follows the earlier documents in insisting that wealthier nations should provide both technical assistance and development aid (#48), but it also insists that development aid must be paired with efforts to create a more just international economic order, particularly through more equitable trade relations (#44). Paul VI recognized that the global economic system as it then existed created an imbalance between wealthier nations that produced industrial and consumer goods and poorer nations that primarily exported raw materials. (See Chapter 7 of my book Interrupting Capitalism: Catholic Social Thought and the Economy for more on this shift in Catholic social teaching.)
Twenty years later, in the 1987 encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, Pope John Paul II further explained how the political divisions created by the Cold War hindered the development of the Global South. He noted that the nations of the South deserve “effective and impartial aid,” but instead aid and financial investments were being used for ideological purposes and in some cases contributed to conflict that hindered the development of nations, creating a new kind of imperialism (##21-22).
Pope Benedict XVI’s 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate deals with the challenges of globalization. In it, he called on international aid agencies to take on a more grassroots, participatory approach in which the populations being served have a greater say in the planning of development projects (#58), an approach adopted by many international aid organizations, including Catholic Relief Services, in the 1990s and 2000s. Benedict also called for development agencies to engage in state-building and democracy-building initiatives (#41). And finally, Pope Francis has continued the Catholic social tradition’s support for international aid in his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti (see ##137-38).
Digging a bit deeper, three principles stand out as central to the Catholic Church’s teaching on foreign aid. The first is that the foundation for the moral responsibility for wealthier nations to provide aid to poorer nations is solidarity with our fellow human beings or a sense of belonging to the one human family. For example, in Mater et Magistra, Pope John teaches that “The solidarity which binds all men together as members of a common family makes it impossible for wealthy nations to look with indifference” at the plight of the poor in other nations (#157). Similarly, Pope John Paul II calls for a stronger sense of solidarity in response to the growing interdependence or interconnectedness of the world (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, #26).
Second, the responsibility of nations to provide foreign aid is likewise grounded in what Gaudium et Spes calls the “universal destination of earthly goods” (#69). In that document, the Council Fathers write:
[M]an should regard the external things that he legitimately possesses not only as his own but also as common in the sense that they should be able to benefit not only him but also others. On the other hand, the right of having a share of earthly goods sufficient for oneself and one's family belongs to everyone. The Fathers and Doctors of the Church held this opinion, teaching that men are obliged to come to the relief of the poor and to do so not merely out of their superfluous goods. If one is in extreme necessity, he has the right to procure for himself what he needs out of the riches of others. Since there are so many people prostrate with hunger in the world, this sacred council urges all, both individuals and governments, to remember the aphorism of the Fathers, “Feed the man dying of hunger, because if you have not fed him, you have killed him,” and really to share and employ their earthly goods, according to the ability of each, especially by supporting individuals or peoples with the aid by which they may be able to help and develop themselves. (#69)
In Populorum Progressio, Paul VI appeals to this same principle, calling on the well off to lend support to projects assisting the poor and urging them to be willing to pay higher taxes to assist public efforts in promoting development (#47). Likewise, Pope John Paul II describes this principle as one that should guide the international economy (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, #42).
Perhaps the most important contribution of Catholic social teaching to the field of development is the concept of integral or authentic human development. Although Pope John XXIII had already noted a tendency to make economic development and increasing living standards “the be-all and end-all of life” (Mater et Magistra, #176) at the expense of spiritual values, but it is Paul VI who introduced the notion of integral development in Populorum Progressio: Development “cannot be restricted to economic growth alone. To be authentic, it must be well rounded; it must foster the development of each man and of the whole man” (#14). He goes on to include the “truly human conditions” that are the goal of development, which include not only a lack of want and economic growth, but also education, safe and fair working conditions, just political institutions, the promotion of ethical values, and a relationship with God (##19-21). This line of thought is further developed by Pope Benedict XVI in Caritas in Veritate, where he argues that integral human development includes not just recognizing “the whole of the person,” but also that authentic human development is not just a human project, but a task in which we rely on God (#11).
Although Catholic teaching has strongly supported international development assistance, it has criticized certain misuses of foreign aid. Early on, Pope John XXIII recognized the temptation “of giving technical and financial aid with a view to gaining control over the political situation in the poorer countries, and furthering their own plans for world domination” (Mater et Magistra, #171), a situation he describes as “a new form of colonialism” (#172). Indeed, John anticipated one of the great sins of USAID. Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, USAID was used to further the US’s geopolitical aims in the Cold War: USAID offices abroad were sometimes used as cover for CIA officers, and USAID projects were often used to provide support to US-backed authoritarian regimes, for example through training police. Even after these practices were ended in the 1970s, aid was sometimes used as a “carrot” for diplomatic initiatives. That being said, taking advantage of the fact that foreign aid often serves as a type of “soft power,” a means of building international relationships and developing allies, seems permissible if aid is distributed fairly based on humanitarian need, and goals such as democracy-building and public health can secondarily serve the US’s national interests, as well.
In Mater et Magistra, Pope John also warns about the danger of foreign aid being used by wealthier nations to impose their values on poorer countries, at the expense of the latter’s “time-honored traditions and customs” (##169-70). Beginning in the 1960s, the Catholic Church became particularly concerned about efforts to link foreign aid to population control measures. This eventually expanded to include a concern that foreign aid would be used to support abortion. In the United States, the Helms Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1973 prohibited USAID from funding abortions, and the so-called Mexico City Policy implemented by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 prohibited foreign aid from being offered to organizations that provide certain services related to abortions, although the latter policy has been repealed and reinstated by subsequent Democratic and Republican administrations. The USCCB has consistently supported both the Helms Amendment and the Mexico City Policy. More recently, Pope Francis has also criticized tying foreign aid to the promotion of what he calls “gender ideologies” as a form of “ideological colonization.”
Despite these criticisms, the Catholic Church has continued to insist that foreign aid is essential. Indeed, since the 1980s, the popes have noted that the enthusiasm for development assistance of earlier decades has waned and there is declining support for international aid in the wealthier nations, a tendency they say must be resisted. For example, in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, John Paul recognizes in the West a temptation to “abandoning itself to forms of growing and selfish isolation” leading to an abandonment of its moral responsibilities on the world stage (#23). Similarly, Benedict XVI notes that globalization has created pressures for greater privatization and austerity, leading to calls for cutting foreign aid, but nevertheless “more economically developed nations should do all they can to allocate larger portions of their gross domestic product to development aid, thus respecting the obligations that the international community has undertaken in this regard” (Caritas in Veritate, #60). Similarly, in Fratelli Tutti, Francis claims that some advocate for “the propriety of limiting aid to poor countries, so that they can hit rock bottom and find themselves forced to take austerity measures,” failing to adequately recognize that “lives are at stake” (#37).
“Lives are at stake” is an understatement in regards the current crisis arising from the closure of USAID. Although the desire to reduce wasteful spending is legitimate (as Pope Benedict XVI recognizes in Caritas in Veritate, #47), lifesaving programs impacting millions of lives are on the line. Perhaps most notably, the freeze on foreign aid has put a halt to the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, first implemented in 2003, which has saved over 26 million lives globally by providing access to HIV medications. If the program ends, the lives of literally millions of people worldwide dependent on the program for access to HIV medications will be at risk. As the New York Times reports, the foreign aid freeze has eliminated funding for a UNICEF polio vaccination program, programs providing anti-malaria medications and mosquito nets to millions of people, and a project serving over 5 million children suffering from malnutrition in Nigeria, among many others. According to Nicholas Enrich, the current acting assistant administrator for global health at USAID, the dismantling of USAID could contribute to up to 18 million cases of malaria each year, millions of new cases of polio, including perhaps 200,000 paralyzed children per year, and thousands of cases of deadly infectious diseases like Ebola and Marburg every year.
Despite assurances that lifesaving grants would be reinstated, Enrich reports that administrators at the State Department and the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have kept them frozen. Even if Enrich’s numbers prove alarmist, there are still undeniably millions of lives at stake and public health throughout the world will suffer irreparable harm if USAID is dismantled. Catholics have very good reasons, both in terms of our Church’s teaching and a practical examination of the facts, for opposing the closure of USAID and for supporting the resumption of foreign aid.
Coming Soon…
As I’ve previously mentioned, next week I’ll explore the thinking of three “rogue Dominicans”—Durandus of Saint-Pourçain (14th c.), Robert Holcot (14th c.), and Ambrogio Catarino Politi (16th c.)—on original sin. This will be a Lenten theological reflection on the human condition!
Last weekend, the Religious Education Congress took place in Los Angeles. Although I’ve never attended, for the past two years I’ve provided a summary of the key themes in the keynote addresses from the congress, exploring what they tell us about the state of the Church in the US and what theological and spiritual themes are resonating with Catholics involved in pastoral ministry. I hope to do the same this year, so look for my thoughts in a couple of weeks.
I’m also making plans for some new interviews for the Window Light podcast, so stay on the lookout for further announcements on those.