Two major American charities funding abortion and the LGBTQ+ agenda are financing the Vatican’s three-day climate change summit May 15–17.

The summit, held at the initiative of Pope Francis, is showcasing radical leftist U.S. governors Maura Healy (Massachusetts), Gavin Newsom (California), and Kathy Hochul (New York), who all identify as Catholic but defy the Roman Church’s teaching on abortion and homosexuality.

London’s pro-Hamas Muslim mayor Sadiq Khan is also a featured speaker at the conference, which is titled “From Climate Crisis to Climate Resilience” and organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

The summit’s brochure acknowledges the financial contributions made by the MacArthur Foundation and the Boston Foundation — cash which comes at a time when the Vatican is operating with an annual budget deficit amounting to 60 to 80 million euros since May 2020.

MacArthur Foundation Spends Millions on Abortion Rights

The MacArthur Foundation’s grants database reveals it contributed more than $372 million between 1986 and 2019 to support global activism to further contraception and abortion in countries like Brazil, India, Mexico, and Nigeria.

The grants went toward enabling organizations and individuals to protect “fundamental rights, including abortion rights, and introduced sexuality education curricula in our priority countries,” the foundation reveals.

The foundation “helped bring about a paradigm shift” in abortion and population control, with its funding of $3.1 million for activists, researchers, journalists, and NGOs at conferences in Cairo and Beijing which were the “core drivers,” the charity’s website boasts.

The MacArthur Foundation, whose assets totaled roughly $8.3 billion as of December 2023, has also supported the National Abortion Rights Action League Foundation in its fight “to support the National Commission on America without Roe” and “to discuss the health implications of the possible overturn of Roe v. Wade.”

“Genius Grant” for LGBTQ+ “Trailblazers”

In 2022, the charity awarded a “Genius Grant” (an $800,000 no-strings-attached prize) to abortion activist Loretta J. Ross, founding member of the organization SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective.

SisterSong aims to amplify the voices of indigenous and women of color “to achieve reproductive justice by eradicating reproductive oppression and securing human rights.”

Ross is an associate professor of women and gender studies at Smith College. Her courses include “White Supremacy in the Age of Trump” and “Reproductive Justice.”

In 2023, the charity awarded its “Genius Grant” to obstetrician Diana Greene Foster “who led a groundbreaking study on what happens to women who can’t get abortions.”

The leftwing charity has also made significant contributions to LGBTQ+ activism, including awarding MacArthur Fellowships totaling $1.25 million to Mary Bonauto and Alison Bechdel, described as “two LGBTQ trailblazers” in the field of activism.

Civil rights lawyer Mary Bonauto has been a “longtime champion in the movement for marriage equality” and “has worked on landmark same-sex marriage cases across the U.S.,” which paved the way for the Supreme Court striking down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013.

Alison Bechdel is a cartoonist “whose work intimately explores the lived realities of lesbian communities and the complexities of family” with her comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For,” using “humor to portray the political and cultural concerns of queer women.”

Foundation’s Contributes to Heterodox Catholic Charities

Grants totally $15,475,000 were made to Baltimore-based Catholic Relief Services between 1999 and 2017, demonstrating the charity’s links with the Catholic Church. CRS is the official international charity arm of the Catholic Church in the United States.

The Catholic charity has come under fire for a string of scandals, including giving $2.7 million in 2013 to Population Services International, a $670 million organization that markets abortion drugs in the developing world.

According to a March 2024 investigation published by the Lepanto Institute, CRS is promoting contraception and “implementing health referral networks that included abortion” and has “referred girls as young as 10 to abortion and contraception providers.”

The MacArthur Foundation has also contributed smaller amounts to Catholic Charities, the local charity arm of the Catholic Church in the United States.

Boston Foundations Funds Abortion, LGBTQ+ Advocacy

Meanwhile, in April, the Boston Foundation, which has net assets of some $1.7 billion, created a Fund for Reproductive Health in 2022 after the Supreme Court’s overturned Roe v. Wade to respond to women’s abortion “needs” in individual states.

In 2019, the Equality Fund at the Boston Foundation announced $160,300 in grants to nonprofits serving the diverse members of the LGBTQ community. By 2024, the Fund had provided grants worth $1,828,947 to LGBTQ+ organizations and projects.

Addressing the summit on Thursday, Pope Francis struck a note of apocalypticism, alleging that “climate change data is getting worse every year” and that “unless addressed collectively and urgently, these problems pose existential threats to humanity, other living things and all ecosystems.”

Failing to raise the issue of abortion that the sponsors of the summit are funding, the pontiff asked: “The question then is: Are we working for a culture of life or a culture of death?”

Catholic Governors Who Defy Catholicism Address Vatican Summit

In her speech to the summit on Wednesday, Gov. Maura Healy talked about the flooding of Massachusetts farms and downtowns last summer, saying she did not “need to cite the Book of Genesis to say that a flood can send a message.”

Healy, who is in a lesbian relationship with Joanna Lydgate, became the first lesbian governor in the U.S. in 2022. While serving as the attorney general of Massachusetts, she led a multistate effort to support same-sex marriage.

On her website, the Catholic governor boasts of spearheading efforts in Massachusetts to protect abortion facility workers and patients by defending the Massachusetts buffer-zone law which bans pro-life speech and prayer outside abortion mills.

Addressing the summit soon after Pope Francis, Gov. Gavin Newson used his platform to accuse former President Donald Trump of “open corruption” and blamed the purported climate crisis on “the burning of gas, the burning of coal, [and] the burning of oil.”

In 2023, American Spectator blasted Newson for claiming to be a Catholic while committing adultery with a married woman, attempting a civil marriage while still married, seeking ordination in the Universal Life Church, attempting to marry two men, and claiming involvement in his mother’s assisted suicide.

“Newsom is one of the people with foremost responsibility for legalized gay marriage in the United States,” the journal observed, adding that the governor had “made California an abortion factory,” making it easier “for doctors to kill the elderly,” and “transformed California into a tourist destination for parents wishing to mutilate their children.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul, who spoke on Thursday afternoon, spent $13 million of taxpayer cash to bankroll abortion access in 2022. “Access to abortion is a human right, and in New York, we’ll always defend that right,” she tweeted.

In March 2023, she pressured executives at Walgreens, CVS, and Rite Aid to distribute abortion pills in states that restrict or ban them.

Muslim Mayor Lectures Vatican on Climate Change

On Thursday morning London Mayor Sadiq Khan presented Pope Francis with a “gift book” of four teas from the London Tea Exchange.

Khan, who allegedly has links to Islamic extremists and antisemites, came under fire earlier in May from British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak for drawing a moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel.

“I recognize there are more than a million Londoners of Catholic faith who would give their right arm to spend time with His Holiness,” Khan, who has been heavily criticized for near-totalitarian restrictions on driving vehicles in London to protect the climate, told the media.

The Stream asked the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences how much money it had spent on the summit but received no response by press time.

 

Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.