By Mary Kay Craig

There are a lot of “narrow gates” in life.

For many of us, the words refer to the difficulty that Jesus said a rich man experiences in squeezing into heaven. That message was among Jesus’ many ways of saying that we have a serious obligation to be generous with our God-given bounty and help those on the margins who are barely surviving.

For low-income people, a narrow gate easily can refer to the poverty of access they experience in trying to obtain enough of the essentials – food, clothing, housing, education, health care and more.

November is the month that our U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops chose as the time for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development collection, in pews nationwide.

CCHD uses your donations to provide grants for self-help groups to organize and take on projects aimed at changing conditions that are barriers to human dignity. Examples of grant recipients include groups that have worked to end predatory lending, to obtain health care for children or to stop discrimination. Economic development grants have gone into cooperative businesses and led to jobs with decent wages.

Our bishops began the CCHD program 40 years ago.

CCHD’s mission is to attack root causes of poverty through cooperative efforts to change systems that keep people poor. The mission also includes educating the rest of us about why it is necessary to stand in solidarity with the poor.

This Justice Voices column began a decade ago, putting western Montana faces with the economic and social problems of our neighbors and their efforts to overcome them. Each month, an individual from the Diocese of Helena has written about an issue that parishioners can influence as they work to change unjust systems so that low-income families and other marginalized people might gain greater access to necessary resources.

Getting through the gate takes two feet.

To understand what CCHD is, one may consider that charity is one of our feet and justice the other. For this writer, the Joe Sullivan book “Social Justice for Dummies,” published in 1997, remains the best text for figuring out the difference between the two feet.

The book explains that the Good Samaritan story is a fine example of the charity foot: a nice guy bandaged and took care of another person in crisis. Catholic Charities, food banks and thrift stores are examples of ways that we use this first foot.

But in order to walk, we need the other foot as well – the justice foot.

Sullivan says to think of the Exodus story: “Moses does not ask for food and medicine for the laborers,” he writes. “He challenges the institutional system of slavery. The message is ‘Let God’s people go.’”

The self-help groups that work – to increase wages of the working poor, for example, or to defeat homelessness or boost voter registration among American Indians – are bringing about a society that is more just.

Giving away goods and services to help people in immediate crises is not enough, our bishops say.

We are asked to look behind the crises to identify their causes, and then go after those causes of poverty.

Each November, you have helped with donations to CCHD, one of the nation’s largest private supporters of self-help programs for the poor. Some of the western Montana groups that have benefited from your generosity are the North Missoula Community Development Corp. and Montana Peoples’ Action/Indian Peoples Action, also in Missoula; Wakina Sky and the Montana Senior Citizens Association, both in Helena; the Bozeman-based Coalition of Montanans Concerned with Disabilities; the Butte Community Union; and the National Affordable Housing Network in Butte.

Support of CCHD allows easier access – two-footed access – to that skinny ol’ narrow gate. Please be generous during this year’s collection in your parish.

More information about CCHD grants for private nonprofits is available from Deacon Jim Butts at 406-837-4846, from Mary Kay Craig at 406-723-3851 or on the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ website at http://www./usccb.org.


Mary Kay Craig is a member of Holy Spirit Parish in Butte.


Published in The Montana Catholic Online, Volume 25, No. 11, November 20, 2009.