“NOSHA brought in 49 pounds of food for Second Harvest Food Bank for Saturday’s program.”

This bulletin showed up on last week’s NOSHA Facebook page, as have many others similar following the third Saturday meetings. Several years’ worth third Saturday meetings, in fact. It has been a tradition our generous humanists/humanitarians started a few years before COVID broke out and paused during the period of isolation, and then resumed after a green light was given to resume public gatherings.

Before we began collecting food at our meetings, we were associated with the Catholic-owned Second Harvest in a much more involved way. We met at he food bank’s office and warehouse and participated in the hands-on labor of sorting and boxing the hundreds of pounds of foodstuffs that came in by way of public donations. This work had more of a feel-good sense of accomplish that was more rewarding than than simply putting a few cans in a grocery bag and dropping it off at our meetings. I suppose this sense of involvement  is why these group outings usually drew double-digit attendance. Maybe the idea that the organization was affiliated with the church seemed a bit curious for our non-religious advocacy, but it helped to understand that even churches do some good things. 

But COVID happened, and Second Harvest discontinued using volunteer groups for this warehouse work. It has recently resumed, but we have settled in with the current donation collections.

But our participation is not the point of this; rather, the point is bringing the idea of a common humanity; and the idea that church leaders often follow good deeds with not-so-good deeds—and sometimes with really bad ones should be a familiar one to us.

Today we find out that the archbishop has fired and replaced the top brass at Second Harvest. Why? Because, the leaders say, “the nonprofit refused to contribute to paying survivors of child sexual abuse by priests…..following months of increasingly aggressive pressure placed on Second Harvest to contribute as much as $16 million toward helping to resolve victims’ claims related to the church’s sexual abuse-related bankruptcy” writes David Hammer, WWL Louisiana Investigator. The former leaders contend that Second Harvest “is a 501c(3) nonprofit and thus donations to it must be used for the organization’s stated purpose (feeding the hungry)”, and furthermore that it it had nothing to do with the scandal, and certainly “did not provide a point of access to children for clergy.”

This is a perversion of the mission of Second Harvest and untenable. Archbishop Aymond is a craven and misguided Christian; it is an attempt to extort one of the church’s most honorable foundations to bail out years of complicity in child abuse sex trafficing. Aymond needs to be fired, excommunicated, and prosecuted before he resigns and disappears.

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Marty Bankson, ed.

January 30, 2025