Virginia Priests Refuse ACORN Collection

Good news from Virginia.

The Washington Times reports

Several priests and parishes in Northern Virginia’s Arlington Diocese balked Sunday at taking up a collection for the much-criticized Catholic Campaign for Human Development, whose contributions to the voter-registration group ACORN got a dose of bad publicity this fall.  […]

The Rev. Dennis W. Kleinmann, the pastor at St. Mary’s, also was unenthusiastic in encouraging donations to the CCHD at his Masses. According to two parishioners, he cited the recent controversies over the campaign’s grants to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) as one reason to be “cautious.”

The CCHD, whose $9.4 million budget depends on annual November collections from Catholic parishes, recently revealed it had donated more than $7.3 million to ACORN over the past decade. The community-organizing group has been accused of voter fraud in 15 states.

Although the CCHD cut off all funding to ACORN, the dioceses of South Carolina and Alabama recently suspended their CCHD collections pending the findings of a church audit into more than $1 million in church funding that went to ACORN in 2007. […]