A damning investigation conducted by the Lepanto Institute has revealed that an overwhelming majority of Catholic charity workers are contributing money to pro-abortion and pro-LGBT Democrat candidates or causes.

The investigative report, published on the Lepanto Institute’s website Monday, examined 47,000 public records for employees from seven Catholic agencies which showed that 83% of the workers’ donations were directed to Democratic political action committees — most prominently ActBlue, AB PAC, DNC Services, Biden for President, the Biden Action Fund, and the Biden Victory Fund — and individual candidates who defy Catholic teaching on abortion, homosexuality, and gender ideology.

The seven charities cited in the report are Catholic Charities USA, Covenant House, St. Vincent de Paul, Catholic Relief Services, the Knights of Columbus, Cross Catholic Outreach, and the Jesuit Refugee Service.

Investigators examined employee records over three reporting periods (2019-2020, 2021-2022, and 2023-2024) as well as contributions received between October 23, 2018 and February 27, 2024. Only 16% of the contributions went to Republican PACs or candidates, such as WinRed, Donald J. Trump for President, Inc., the National Republican Congressional Committee, and similar organizations.

“Charity” with an Agenda

According to the report, 100 percent of the political donations made by employees of the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) — an organization that has consistently pushed for virtually open borders — went to leftist organizations or candidates. On Monday, JRS issued a press release attacking the Biden administration for extending and expanding its restrictions on access to asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“This illegal action is the wrong answer to a complicated problem,” it read. “The U.S. should not slam its door to people who need asylum with a take-a-number process. The U.S. has the means, the resources, and the ingenuity to run an effective asylum system.”

In June, JRS slammed a temporary executive order closing the border and preventing border jumpers from receiving asylum when more then 2,500 cross over illegally in a given day.

Catholic Relief Services (CRS) came second, with 99% of its workers donating to Democrat causes. A 2024 field investigation conducted by the Lepanto Institute and the Population Research Institute of CRS’s projects in Cameroon, Zimbabwe, and Lesotho exposes the charity promoting masturbation, condoms, and abortion in the African nations.

CRS “referred girls as young as 10 to abortion and contraception providers” and was “the ‘prime implementer’ of projects that, through a network of partners, is designed to spread and promote contraception and condoms, and has even corrupting the good morals of young girls with its own materials,” author Michael Hichborn noted.

Hichborn, who is the founder and president of the Lepanto Institute, told The Stream, “Dr. Christopher Manion relayed to me that the former CEO of Catholic Relief Services, Ken Hackett, once told him that he would never knowingly employ a Republican.”

Flagrant Violations

The report revealed that 97% of employees from Covenant House, a Catholic charity that claims to “fight human trafficking and relentlessly support young people facing homelessness,” gave to Democrat causes.

At the bottom of the list was the more conservative Knights of Columbus, where only 10% of workers were found donating to Democrats. In November 2018, then-Sen. Kamala Harris, while serving as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, expressed concern about the Knights’ positions on abortion and same-sex marriage.

Applying a moral litmus test for judicial candidates, she referred to the Knights as “an all-male society comprised primarily of Catholic men.”

In its list of individual donors, the Lepanto Institute report named Wayne Paglieri, senior development director of Covenant House New Jersey, as the largest individual donor. He made$390,000 in reportable campaign contributions between 2019 and 2023.

Paglieri even made a $5,000 contribution to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the investigation revealed.

Lopsided Amounts

The second most generous donor was Leslie Abbey, Covenant House’s former deputy executive director and current CEO for Covenant House New York. She contributed $11,800 to Emily’s List, an organization whose mission is to “elect Democratic pro-choice women to office.”

In its summary, the report noted that its original dataset has 148,476 entries and includes Catholic schoolteachers, parish employees, and at least two priests who made donations to Emily’s List, the radical pro-abortion organization NARAL Pro-Choice, Pro-Choice Women, and the Human Rights Campaign.

In all, 35 individual donors have given more $5,000 to political causes since 2019: of those, only nine contributed to Republican candidates and causes. The total amount given to hard-Left politicians and causes by the other 26 individuals is $685,779, while only $100,225 went to Republicans, the report stated.

Church-State Collusion

Fourteen of the 35 donors are employed by Catholic Charities, the domestic charity wing of the U.S. Catholic Church and the largest social safety net provider in the country outside the federal government.

In September, The Stream reported that Catholic Charities had received nearly $1 billion from taxpayers via the Biden administration to facilitate illegal immigration.

Financial documents show that government grants for Catholic Charities nearly quadrupled after Biden took office in 2021, with most of the funds directed to the charity’s immigration services — especially its operations near the southern U.S. border.

The Lepanto Institute report also pointed to an April 2024 survey by the Pew Research Center, which found that 52% of registered Catholic voters identify as Republican while 44% identify as Democrat.

“Given this average, it would make sense for a survey of employees working for Catholic charitable organizations to closely resemble this nearly 50% split,” Hichborn remarked. “But what we find in this set of data is that the vast majority of employees working for Catholic charitable organizations are overwhelmingly Democrat.

“A statistical anomaly like this is so lopsided that it cannot be a mere coincidence and must be by design.”

Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.