The foundation has also supported the U.S. bishops' relief agency Catholic Relief Services and the Catholic Legal Immigration Network.
Another Ford grantee, Faith in Public Life, has received over $3.5 million in 14 grants from the Ford Foundation since 2007. This included a $225,000 grant in 2013 for an immigrant advocacy campaign, including support for Network Lobby's "Nuns on the Border" bus tour. Network Lobby continues to participate in Faith in Public Life efforts, and endorsed its 2020 voter's guide.
At least one recent grant to Faith in Public Life has taken a pro-abortion turn. The Ford Foundation gave $400,000 to the group for its Women of Faith 2020 campaign, which aims "to form a stronger vocal base of support for reproductive justice among moderate women of faith, and actively advance these principles through civic engagement."
Another Network Lobby donor, the Bauman Foundation, has given grants of $20,000 to $50,000 to the Network Education Program in every fiscal year from 2008 through 2019. While the foundation has two Catholic priests on its board of advisers, another board member is Jenny Lawson, Vice President of Organizing and Electoral Campaigns at the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and Planned Parenthood Votes.
Campbell told CNA her group does not ask donors if they are Catholic, but she assumes a majority are Catholic "because we're a Catholic social justice lobby."
Among donors who have a relationship with Network, she said, "I don't know a big donor who isn't Catholic." She rejected the idea that NETWORK could be a "dark money" group. That phrase, in her view, is "about money that doesn't get reported."
"That's secret money that gets passed through to candidates and campaigns. Our money is reported in our reporting to the IRS. That's not dark money."
"Quite frankly, they're small amounts over a 10-year period," she said.
Another donor, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, gave $225,000 to Network Lobby for civil rights, social action and advocacy, according to the fund's 2018 tax year forms.
Politico has characterized the fund as a "dark money" group. In a November 19, 2019 story, Politico said the Sixteen Thirty Fund spent $141 million on "more than 100 left-leaning causes" in 2018. Only the right-leaning Koch Brothers network and Crossroads network have exceeded those figures in a single year. The Sixteen Thirty Fund gave another $91 million to 95 other groups.
The Nathan Cummings Foundation, another Network Lobby donor, gave a $200,000 grant in 2020 to the group to promote "policies that mend gaps and bridge divides in our country, with a special focus on healthcare, housing rights, and citizenship policies that disproportionately impact women and people of color." The foundation describes itself as "a multi-generational family foundation, rooted in the Jewish tradition of social justice, working to create a more just, vibrant, sustainable, and democratic society."
Campbell has pushed back at objections to Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee Kamala Harris' 2018 criticism of a federal judicial nominee for his membership in the Knights of Columbus. Harris specifically criticized the Knights of Columbus' pro-life work and its support for marriage as a union of one man and one woman. She questioned whether the nominee was disqualified due to his membership.
Responding to the incident, a Knights of Columbus spokesperson said membership should not be a disqualifier for public service, describing the order as "a charitable organization that adheres to and promotes Catholic teaching."
In an Aug. 17 essay in the National Catholic Reporter, Campbell argued that Harris "voiced her disagreement with some of the political positions of the Knights of Columbus."
"I'm a Catholic sister, and I disagree with some of the political positions of Knights of Columbus," she continued. "So let's drop this ridiculous attack and evaluate Harris' record faithfully."
The Knights of Columbus is the largest Catholic men's fraternity in the world, with about 2 million members. Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin, in his July 14 letter to the Knights' Supreme Convention, conveyed the Pope's greetings and sentiments, and praised the Knights' "strong and courageous defense of the inviolable dignity of human life from its conception."
Campbell told CNA said Parolin's remarks were "great" and "good news." But she said she would not take part in that effort.
"I don't agree with their stance as regards to the stance of economic justice," she said. "They don't work for increasing wages, they don't work for ensuring that immigration law is fixed. They don't work for the marginalized. They would say that's their niche. I think they ought to expand."
Asked why Network Lobby cannot expand its work on abortion, she said "because it doesn't fit in economic justice, which is our mission."
"The thing that's so painful for me is the view that only one issue, as important as it is, defines all of Catholicity," she said. "And it doesn't. I think we have to have grown-up faith, where we see complexity, just as Pope Francis says."
The group has previously clashed with the U.S. bishops' conference. In 2010, when the bishops were working for strong restrictions on abortion and for strong conscience protections in the major healthcare bill known as the Affordable Care Act, Sr. Mary Ann Walsh, director of Media Relations at the USCCB, said the group "grossly overstated whom they represent in a letter to Congress that was also released to media."
Network Lobby has also backed an LGBT advocacy bill called the Equality Act, opposed by the U.S. bishops. The bishops have said the bill would threaten the right to free speech, conscience and exercise of religion, and would redefine gender in a way that could require women to share restrooms and locker rooms with men who say they identify as women.
Network Lobby has had a longtime relationship with the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the subject of a Vatican doctrinal assessment published in April 2012 that also mentioned Network Lobby.
That assessment said "while there has been a great deal of work on the part of LCWR promoting issues of social justice in harmony with the Church's social doctrine, it is silent on the right to life from conception to natural death, a question that is part of the lively public debate about abortion and euthanasia in the United States."
The Catholic view of family life and human sexuality "are not part of the LCWR agenda in a way that promotes Church teaching," and the conference statements sometimes disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the Church's "authentic teachers of faith and morals," the assessment said.
Kevin J. Jones is a senior staff writer with Catholic News Agency. He was a recipient of a 2014 Catholic Relief Services' Egan Journalism Fellowship.