Ongoing lawsuits involving Catholic Charities have put the Trump administration in an unusual position: an ally in one controversy and a primary opponent in another.
The Trump administration will back Catholic Charities’ religious liberty case at the Supreme Court on Monday amid separate legal disputes with the organization over taxpayer funding for refugee resettlement programs.
Local Catholic Charities agencies are led by the bishop of the diocese where they are located but may choose to join the nationwide Catholic Charities USA membership organization.
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Catholic Charities Bureau, an arm of the Diocese of Superior in Wisconsin, is asking the Supreme Court to find that it qualifies for Wisconsin’s unemployment tax exemption for religious organizations, which the state denied after determining the ministry’s services to the poor and needy could have been provided by a secular entity. The United States will participate in oral arguments to urge the justices to rule in their favor.
“This Court has long recognized that church autonomy protects religious groups’ ecclesiastical decisions about how they structure their polity,” Catholic Charities argues in court filings. “Here, the Diocese and Catholic Charities have made religious decisions, rooted in the Catholic Church’s teachings on charity and church governance, about how to structure their ministry to the needy across 15,000 square miles of rural northern Wisconsin. But Wisconsin penalizes those religious decisions by denying Catholic Charities a tax exemption based on its religiously motivated church structure, thus severing one part of the body ecclesiastic from the rest of the Church.”
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The Wisconsin Supreme Court found Catholic Charities did not operate “primarily for religious purposes,” denying its effort to secure the tax exemption that would allow it to join the Catholic Church’s unemployment program.
The Trump administration argued in its brief that the lower court’s reasoning would “permit government officials or judges to second-guess the sufficiency of religious values, inspect practitioners’ adherence to religious doctrine, and discriminate among various faiths.”
“Under the proper understanding of the religious employer exemption, petitioners—organizations that serve as the social-ministry arm of a diocese of the Roman Catholic Church—are ‘operated primarily for religious purposes,’” Deputy Solicitor General Curtis Gannon wrote.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been involved in disputes with Catholic Charities agencies across the country over terminating funding for refugee resettlement programs. For years, Republicans have called out the group for using taxpayer funds to help facilitate illegal immigration, including by purchasing airline tickets for migrants.
Catholic Charities Fort Worth indicated Tuesday it would drop a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) after the agency resumed payments, depositing nearly $47 million in previously frozen funds for refugee services.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) sued Feb. 18 after the State Department suspended funding for refugee resettlement. Catholic Charities agencies nationwide have begun to lay off staff due to the funding freeze, according to the National Catholic Reporter.
Some agencies, like Catholic Charities of Central and Northern Missouri, have started to permanently close their refugee resettlement programs.
“We cannot risk the more stable programs that we can continue to administer independent of government assistance to keep the refugee resettlement program running during periods of government recalcitrance,” executive director Litz Main worte in a declaration filed in court Feb. 24.
The government wrote in court filings that there is “no public interest served by forcing the government to continue to operate under a contract” it chose to terminate.
Catholic Charities USA President and CEO Kerry Alys Robinson urged the administration to reconsider its funding freeze in a statement Jan. 28, arguing the group provides “vital services.”
Catholic Charities did not respond to a request for comment.
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
