Why the Catholics Funded ACORN

There's plenty of unhappy noise about the United States Catholic Conference's funding of ACORN through its affiliate Catholic Campaign for Human Development. (The funding was cut off last year, after the $1MM "disappear" of funds.)

Here's the history (more at the link)

...when Alinsky began his career in the 1930s as an urban agitator in the Chicago stockyards neighborhoods known as “back of the yards,” he also managed to strike an alliance with the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, which helped him found the community organizing operation, Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) which to this day holds training workshop for aspiring radical activists.

...In the 1950s, Father John Egan of the Cana Conference, who met Alinsky through Maritain, was so impressed with Alinsky’s hands-on experience and confrontational style, that he convinced Chicago’s Samuel Cardinal Stritch to hire IAF to advance social projects. According to Church historian Steven Avella, Cardinal Stritch and his successor Albert Cardinal Meyer funded Alinsky community organizing operations for years because he persuaded them that the “Church could be a very powerful social force in…Chicago if it could only mobilize itself for action.”

So?

Alinsky trained scores of young priests who later took on major responsibilities within the Church bureaucracy including the U.S. Catholic Conference.

Doesn't take too much to figure out why Catholics generally ignore Bishops on matters economic and political.