Catholic Charities, USA "supports efforts to improve vital safety-net programs needed to move people out of poverty and protect life," Sister Donna Markham said.
Yet "the disastrous, albeit cruel, cuts to anti-poverty programs such as SNAP, Medicaid and jobs training will have a devastating effect on millions of vulnerable individuals and families who depend on them," she continued.
The Catholic Climate Covenant also expressed serious concerns about Trump's proposed budget, calling the cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency "dramatic and unwarranted" and saying that they hurt the poor.
This is because the EPA has done "excellent work" for the environment, "yet far too many families, especially in low-income and of color communities, live near heavily polluted areas such as Superfund and brownfields sites, incinerators and coal-fired power plants," the group explained.
Trump's budget would cut programs having to do with clean-up of these areas and enforcement of environmental laws, rendering poor people in these communities more "vulnerable" to pollution.
"These cuts threaten the future of our children not only in the U.S. but around the world," Bishop Richard Pates of Des Moines, Iowa, bishop liaison to the group's board of directors, stated on Wednesday, pointing to cuts of programs working "to help reduce greenhouse gases, the major cause of the global warming we are experiencing."
"Pope Francis has made it clear that the threat of climate change demands that 'the use of highly polluting fossil fuels – especially coal, but also oil and, to a lesser degree, gas – needs to be progressively replaced without delay'," he said, quoting the encyclical Laudato Si' paragraph 165.
The pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List, however, approved of the proposal that funding for Planned Parenthood, the nation's largest abortion provider, would be redirected to community health centers. That funding would be estimated at $422 million.
"We're encouraged to see that the budget released today prevents federal funds from going to the nation's largest abortion chain, Planned Parenthood," the group's president Marjorie Dannenfelser stated on Tuesday. "Taxpayers should not have to prop up Planned Parenthood's failing, abortion-centered business model."
Matt Hadro was the political editor at Catholic News Agency through October 2021. He previously worked as CNA senior D.C. correspondent and as a press secretary for U.S. Congressman Chris Smith.