Thanks for your comment requesting more information about the Samaritan's Purse boxes. I wrote this post several years ago but am reprinting it as it's a rather timely piece of information.
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They're baaaaaaaaaaaaaaack.....those green and red boxes ....the Operation Christmas Child shoe box, the brainchild of Samaritan's Purse which is run by Christian Fundamentalist Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham. I mounted a campaign several years ago to get them out of our parish. After Father did his homework and telephoned and interviewed the "Shoe Box" people he banned them.
Operation Christmas Child is a tool for Evangelical Christians to proselytize children who are Muslim or Catholic. They do it under the guise of sending out Christmas gifts to kids in villages of developing nations. Each area can only receive these gift boxes every 5 years. Often these gifts contain inappropriate items, ie; shampoo or toothpaste in a country where water is scarce. They are given out at a Christian rally along with literature to encourage these children to embrace fundamentalist Christianity. Since Fundamentalism is generally opposed to Catholicism I was very unhappy that our parish was supporting this.
Other relief organisations were scathing of Samaritan's Purse's actions in Nicaragua in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch in 1999 which left over ten thousand people dead or missing and considerably more homeless. Rather than focus on helping people, Samaritan's Purse used up potential relief money arranging an evangelical concert at the national baseball stadium in Managua. 50,000 children - mainly Catholics - were whisked away in rented buses to the stadium to listen to Graham who flew in on a private jet, preached his brand of Christianity and then rewarded the children with a shoebox of gifts and a Bible (not a Catholic one!)
When you mix humanitarian work in an impoverished country with evangelisation you create a problem. You have desperate people and you have someone who has food in one hand and a Bible in another. Christian missionaries in 19th-century India used to describe those who came to the mission stations simply for food as "rice Christians". This became a derogatory term for those driven to accept Christianity out of hunger rather than genuine conviction.
There is an emotional hit in wrapping up a shoebox for a Christmas child but we must wean ourselves off the feel-good factor. We must get over our fondness for charity and develop a thirst for justice. If you were giving to a charity that you thought was merely giving gifts to the needy but was actually using those gifts to spread fundamentalist Islam, would you want to know? Would you still do it? Samaritan's Purse has a toxic agenda when it comes to Catholicism.
Partly we have poor post-Vatican II teaching to blame - what other church would proselytize against themselves? We must continue to educate and inform ourselves. I sent out one of these boxes several years ago. I included my $5 shipping and handling fee and then frittered away another $50 filling up the box with plastic junk made in China.
If you still feel the Shoebox is a good thing then by all means send it. I just wanted to let others know that there is another side to giving these boxes...purse strings.
