Tearing the Seamless Garment: USAID as a Pro-Life Reckoning for American Catholics
On the dismantling of American humanitarian aid, the consistent ethic of life, and the Catholic conscience that looked away.
There is a particular kind of moral silence that falls over a house when something has gone terribly wrong and no one quite wants to say so. Something like that silence has settled over American Catholicism in the months since the United States Agency for International Development was dismantled — methodically, publicly, and against the steady warnings of the people who actually knew what the agency did.
Nicholas Enrich’s new book, Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID, published recently with a foreword by Atul Gawande, tells the story from inside the agency. Enrich, a career civil servant across four administrations, was serving as USAID’s acting assistant administrator for global health when the dismantling began. He watched it unfold, tried to prevent it, documented it, and was placed on administrative leave for releasing the memos that would later be cited in a Supreme Court case on the legality of the agency’s dissolution. The book’s title comes from what Elon Musk posted to his social media platform in February 2025: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”
I read the book because a friend recommended it. I am writing about it because I cannot, as a Catholic priest, read what I read and remain silent.
This is not a political essay. It is a moral one. Catholics in the United States voted decisively — 56 to 41 percent, a fifteen-point margin, a ten-point swing from 2020 — for an administration that, within days of inauguration, began dismantling the single largest instrument of American humanitarian assistance in the world. Many of those Catholics believed they were voting for life. I want to examine what happened to the lives they were not thinking about.
I. The Seamless Garment, Precisely Understood
On the second anniversary of Roe v. Wade, in January 1975 — eight years before the famous Fordham address that would give the idea its name — Archbishop Joseph Bernardin of Cincinnati delivered a homily in which he said something that American Catholics have never quite known what to do with:
“The issue of human life and its preservation and development is one that begins with conception and ends only when God calls a person back to himself in death. If we are consistent, then, we must be concerned about life from beginning to end.”
The formulation was not yet called a consistent ethic of life. It was not yet accompanied by the metaphor of the seamless garment. But its logic was already complete. Bernardin was not proposing that all threats to human life are morally identical. He was proposing that the Catholic conscience cannot be selectively awake — cannot mourn the unborn child in the womb and remain indifferent to the child dying of malnutrition in a village whose rations were just cut off by executive order.
The Gannon Lecture at Fordham in December 1983 would develop this into what Bernardin called a consistent ethic of life. It came months after the American bishops had issued The Challenge of Peace, their pastoral letter on the moral problems posed by nuclear war, and Bernardin was responding to a real pastoral danger: that Catholics would compartmentalize their concern for life, defending it vigorously in the womb while remaining unmoved by its destruction in the village, the prison, the battlefield, the migrant camp. The “seamless garment” image — drawn from the tunic for which the soldiers cast lots at the foot of the Cross — came offhandedly, in the question-and-answer session afterward. Bernardin spent the rest of his life trying to explain what he had not meant: that he had not flattened moral distinctions, had not made all issues equivalent, had not relativized the gravity of abortion. What he had meant was simpler and harder: you cannot pick and choose. A Catholic who is careless about the end of one life has no reliable ground on which to defend the beginning of another. The ethic is called consistent because its consistency is precisely what authorizes it to speak.
Forty years on, the critique Bernardin feared has become the operating premise of a large share of American Catholic political life. The life concern has been segmented. One part of the garment has been clutched tightly; the rest has been left to fall. And in that condition — with the garment already torn, already hanging loose — a particular kind of political permission becomes possible. A Catholic can support an administration whose policies are draconian across the rest of the life spectrum, so long as that administration produces the right signals on the one life issue that still counts.
This is not a hypothetical. It is what happened.
II. What Happened to USAID
The timeline matters, because it demonstrates intention.
On January 20, 2025 — inauguration day — President Trump signed an executive order pausing nearly all foreign development assistance for a ninety-day review. On January 30 and February 6, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Catholic Relief Services sent joint action alerts urging Catholics to contact their members of Congress: “This freeze will be detrimental to millions of our sisters and brothers who need access to lifesaving humanitarian, health and development assistance.”
On February 3, Secretary of State Marco Rubio — a Catholic, a graduate of Catholic schools, a man whose Senate career had been built on the argument that foreign aid was both humanitarian duty and national interest — announced he was acting administrator of USAID and delegated operational authority to Pete Marocco. The USAID website went dark. The public affairs office was locked out of its systems. The agency’s name was removed from its own building. Members of the Department of Government Efficiency, according to CNN reporting, sought access to classified spaces at the headquarters; when security officials objected, they were placed on administrative leave.
On February 26 and 27, the administration abruptly terminated roughly ten thousand programs across USAID and the State Department. On February 28, Nicholas Enrich sent his memo. By March 2, he was on administrative leave.
Rubio announced on March 10 that 83 percent of USAID programs — 5,200 contracts — had been canceled. The remaining 18 percent would be folded into the State Department. On July 1, 2025, USAID was formally shut down, sixty-four years after President Kennedy had established it. The announcement came the day after the single most consequential peer-reviewed study of what the dismantling would cost was published in The Lancet.
It is worth pausing on one detail. Even the authors of Project 2025 — the conservative operational manual for the second Trump administration — had recognized USAID’s critical value. The agency was not a target of careful policy reform. It was a target of public theater. The man who announced its destruction on social media called it “a criminal organization,” “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists,” and declared “it is time for it to die.” The tweet that named Enrich’s book expressed satisfaction at the destruction of an institution whose cost to the average American taxpayer was roughly seventeen cents a day.
Catholic Relief Services, which had received $4.6 billion from USAID over the nine-year period ending in 2022 and which depended on the agency for roughly half its $1.5 billion annual budget, began laying off staff within days. CRS President Sean Callahan told his employees in early February that the organization would be “a much smaller overall organization by the end of this fiscal year.” Caritas Internationalis, the global confederation of Catholic relief agencies, responded with language unusual for an institution of its diplomatic bearing: “Stopping USAID abruptly will kill millions of people and condemn hundreds of millions more to lives of dehumanising poverty. This is an inhumane affront to people’s God-given human dignity.”
III. The Arithmetic of Dismantling
There is a tendency, when confronted with large numbers of deaths, to let the numbers dissolve into abstraction. I want to resist that. These are not abstractions. They are people — most of them children — whose deaths can be traced to specific decisions made in specific rooms by specific officials who had been told, in writing and in advance, what the consequences would be.
Nicholas Enrich’s internal memos, obtained by The New York Times, the Washington Post, and later ProPublica, laid out the projections with the kind of clinical precision that only bureaucratic warnings possess:
Up to eighteen million additional cases of malaria per year, resulting in up to 166,000 additional deaths annually
200,000 children newly paralyzed by polio each year, and hundreds of millions of infections over the coming decade
One million children per year no longer treated for severe acute malnutrition — a condition that is, untreated, often fatal
28,000 new cases of Ebola and Marburg annually
A 28 to 32 percent global increase in tuberculosis incidence, with rising drug resistance that would bring more difficult-to-treat cases to American hospitals
Rising maternal and child mortality across 48 countries
Enrich’s memo placed responsibility explicitly: the failure to implement humanitarian assistance, even where waivers had been theoretically granted, was “the result of political leadership at USAID, the Department of State, and DOGE, who have created and continue to create intentional and/or unintentional obstacles that have wholly prevented implementation.” ProPublica’s reporting documented that political appointees had been told, repeatedly and with specifics, what each program did and who would die if it ended. They terminated the programs anyway.
Then came the peer-reviewed science.
On June 30, 2025 — the day before USAID was formally dissolved — The Lancet published Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030, a retrospective-and-forecasting analysis across 133 low- and middle-income countries. Its findings were these: USAID programs had prevented approximately 91 million deaths between 2001 and 2021. The agency’s funding had been associated with a 65 percent reduction in mortality from HIV/AIDS, a 51 percent reduction from malaria, and a 50 percent reduction from neglected tropical diseases. And if the dismantling announced in early 2025 was carried through, the authors projected 14,051,750 additional deaths by 2030 — with an uncertainty interval of 8.5 to 19.7 million — of which 4.5 million would be children under the age of five.
In February 2026, a second peer-reviewed study from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, published in The Lancet Global Health and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, extended the analysis to include the broader retreat of Western donor countries. Modeling across 93 low- and middle-income countries, the authors found that even in their milder scenario, 9.4 million additional deaths were projected by 2030 — including 2.5 million children under five. In the severe scenario, the number reached 22.6 million. The authors observed that the resulting death toll could approach or exceed that of the COVID-19 pandemic.
These are not advocacy figures. They are the convergent findings of independent teams, using different methodologies, applied to overlapping data, arriving at estimates that corroborate one another. The midpoint of the ISGlobal range is approximately the Cavalcanti figure. Both are roughly five times the annual mortality of the entire American opioid crisis. Both are predominantly the deaths of children.
I want to be very clear about what this means in Catholic moral terms. These deaths are not the foreseen but unintended side effect of some proportionate good. They are not the tragic collateral damage of a just war. They are the predictable, warned-of, documented consequence of a political decision whose rationale — by the account of the Secretary of State himself — has been that American foreign aid should be restructured to serve narrower national interests. That restructuring was not an act of reform. It was an act of demolition. The Catholic moral tradition has a name for the voluntary removal of life-sustaining aid from persons who are dependent upon it for survival, when the removal is neither proportionate nor necessary. It is not a name one uses lightly.
IV. An Anticipated Objection: Family Planning, Proportionality, and the Principle of Cooperation
At this point in the argument, a serious and good-faith objection is likely to be raised by some Catholic readers — and it deserves a serious answer rather than a dismissive one.
USAID, the objection runs, was not only a humanitarian agency. It was also a global funder of family planning programs, including the provision of artificial contraceptives, in contravention of the Church’s constant moral teaching. How, then, can a Catholic priest lament its destruction without becoming complicit in what the Church teaches to be objectively wrong?
The objection deserves three honest answers.
First, the scale. USAID’s total annual budget in fiscal year 2023 was approximately $40 billion, less than 1 percent of the federal budget. Of that, Congress appropriated $607.5 million annually for international family planning — a figure held essentially flat, and declining in real terms, for more than a decade. In plain proportion: family planning represented roughly 1.5 percent of USAID’s total funding. The remaining 98.5 percent went to food assistance, disease control, maternal and child health, disaster relief, water and sanitation, agricultural development, education, and epidemic prevention.
Second, what USAID did and did not fund. Under the Helms Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act — passed in 1973, in the immediate wake of Roe v. Wade, supported by the U.S. bishops since its passage, and defended by them against every subsequent repeal effort — no United States foreign assistance funds may be used to pay for the performance of abortion as a method of family planning. USAID did not fund abortion. It was legally prohibited from doing so. Catholic moral advocacy secured that prohibition more than fifty years ago and has sustained it through every administration since.
USAID did fund contraceptive provision. That provision the Church teaches to be objectively wrong, and I will not pretend otherwise.
Third, the principle. Catholic moral theology distinguishes carefully between formal cooperation with evil — sharing the wrongdoer’s intent — and material cooperation, which contributes to an act one does not intend. Formal cooperation with intrinsic evil is always impermissible. Material cooperation admits of degrees, and remote material cooperation — where one’s contribution is mediated through many intervening causes — can be morally permissible when there is proportionate reason. The tradition has applied this principle for centuries, precisely because no Catholic living in a complex society can avoid some remote contribution to acts she cannot endorse. Every Catholic who pays federal taxes cooperates, in this remote sense, with federal programs she finds morally objectionable.
Applied to USAID, the analysis is clear. An American Catholic supporting USAID’s general humanitarian mission did not share the family planning program’s intent; her cooperation was mediate, material, and remote. The proportionate reason was not obscure: an agency that, by peer-reviewed estimate, prevented 91 million deaths over two decades was plainly doing work the Gospel itself commends — feeding the hungry, healing the sick, clothing the naked, caring for the least of these — on a scale that manifestly warranted tolerating a small and legally bounded component one could not endorse, while working through proper channels for its reform.
Now reverse the calculus. A Catholic voter who endorsed an administration pledged to dismantle USAID in order to eliminate its family planning component has not thereby achieved the elimination of the family planning component alone. He has co-signed the destruction of the entire agency — 98.5 percent of which he has no principled reason to oppose, and most of which he has every Catholic reason to support. He has chosen to demolish a hospital in order to close its one morally problematic clinic. The disproportion is staggering. The deliberate acceptance of 4.5 million additional deaths of children under five in order to terminate a program the Church herself judged could be tolerated as remote material cooperation is not an application of Catholic moral principles. It is their inversion.
The correct Catholic response to USAID’s family planning component was always what the U.S. bishops and Catholic Relief Services in fact pursued: sustained defense of the Helms Amendment against every repeal effort; opposition to the expansion of contraceptive and abortion-related funding; and participation in the agency’s humanitarian work through institutional partners like CRS, which received several billion dollars in USAID grants to carry out the Church’s own mission to the poor. What has happened since January 2025 is not a victory for that approach. It is its collapse.
One final observation. The dismantling has not, in fact, reduced the total number of abortions performed worldwide. The Guttmacher Institute estimates that the termination of USAID family planning services will result in approximately 4.2 million additional unintended pregnancies in 2025 alone — and, by predictable consequence, a rise in unsafe abortions in the places where those pregnancies occur. The bitter irony is that Catholic voters who hoped their electoral choice would defend unborn life have helped produce a policy whose immediate consequence is more abortions, not fewer, alongside the deaths of the children born who will not now be fed, vaccinated, or treated. This is the fruit of a segmented pro-life ethic: the garment torn in one place pulls apart in many others.
V. The Prosecution’s Best Witness Is the Secretary of State Himself
There is, in the entire record of the USAID dismantling, no more devastating indictment of the decision than the words of the man who carried it out.
For fourteen years in the United States Senate, Marco Rubio was one of USAID’s most vocal defenders. His defense was not merely pragmatic; it was moral, drawn from premises that a Catholic audience would have recognized as their own. At the Brookings Institution in April 2012, he called foreign aid “a very cost-effective way, not only to export our values and our example, but to advance our security and our economic interests.” In a February 2013 speech he said: “We don’t have to give foreign aid. We do so because it furthers our national interest. That’s why we give foreign aid. Now obviously there’s a component to foreign aid that’s humanitarian in scope, and that’s important too.”
In 2017, on the Senate floor and again in a post on what was then Twitter, he made the argument he would later repudiate: “Foreign Aid is not charity. We must make sure it is well spent, but it is less than 1% of budget & critical to our national security.” In 2019, speaking to the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches, he was blunter: “Anybody who tells you that we can slash foreign aid and that will bring us to balance is lying to you.” In a 2022 letter to President Biden, he urged that USAID must receive funding “to send a clear message that the United States has a comprehensive strategy to counter the Chinese Communist Party’s… expanding global influence.”
He praised USAID’s work in combating polio, Ebola, and tuberculosis (aid he called “critical”). He co-sponsored bills to fund USAID programs on women’s global economic empowerment, human trafficking, global education, substance abuse in the Philippines, and violence prevention. He praised the agency’s PEPFAR work, noting on the Senate floor in 2017 that the program had saved more than eleven million lives and prevented two million babies from being born with HIV.
None of this is ancient history. The 2022 letter is three years old.
In February 2025, as Secretary of State, Rubio called USAID “a global charity” that had “basically evolved into an agency that believes that they’re not even a US government agency.” In May 2025 Senate testimony, he acknowledged that “there are a lot of sad stories around the world, millions and millions of people around the world. It’s heartbreaking, but we cannot assume millions and millions of people around the world. No country can.”
Something has to be named honestly here. A man does not lose, in a matter of months, the moral faculties he exercised for fourteen years. What changes is not one’s knowledge of what foreign aid does, nor one’s judgment of whether it saves lives. What changes, in such cases, is one’s willingness to speak against power. The Secretary of State’s pre-2025 record is not merely a Senate archive. It is the prosecution’s witness statement, filed under oath by the man who later signed the termination orders.
VI. The Preeminent Priority, Weaponized
Of all the instruments that made possible what has happened, none has proved more serviceable to the architects of the dismantling than a single word, embedded in a document issued by the U.S. bishops themselves.
Since 2019, the introductory letter to Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship has carried the following line, reaffirmed by the bishops as recently as November 2023 by a vote of 225 to 11: “The threat of abortion remains our preeminent priority because it directly attacks life itself.”
One can make a serious magisterial case for that formulation, rooted in John Paul II’s teaching in Christifideles Laici that the right to life is the foundation of all other rights. Cardinal McElroy of San Diego, now of Washington, argued against the “preeminent” framing in 2019 and again in 2023, calling it “at least discordant” with the teaching of Pope Francis. Archbishop Chaput led the defense. The vote was not close. Whatever the merits of the internal theological dispute, the word survived, and it did its work in the world.
What “preeminent” was meant to mean, in the careful language of the bishops’ document, was that the direct and intentional destruction of innocent human life is always and without exception gravely wrong — a teaching to which no faithful Catholic can be indifferent. What it came to mean, in the rhetoric of an election campaign, was something subtly but consequentially different: that this single issue outweighs, in the voter’s moral calculus, any other consideration regarding human life, however grave. It came to mean sole, not supreme. It came to mean that a candidate’s position on abortion could authorize Catholic support for that candidate’s positions on every other life question — or, more often, authorize Catholic inattention to them.
The 2024 campaign leveraged this with considerable skill. The eventual President told rallies that Catholics are “treated worse than anybody.” His running mate, himself a recent Catholic convert, wrote op-eds accusing the opposing ticket of “prejudice against Catholics.” The Al Smith Dinner became a loyalty test. The bishops’ own “preeminent” language was quoted back at them, in a political register, to authorize support for a political program whose other life implications the bishops themselves had repeatedly and publicly opposed. The USCCB had, in an unusually critical joint statement after the first Trump executive orders, named the administration’s treatment of immigrants and refugees, its approach to foreign aid, its expansion of the death penalty, and its environmental posture as “deeply troubling” and likely to “harm the most vulnerable among us.” It did not matter. The “preeminent” word had done its work. The other concerns could be safely bracketed.
Catholics voted for Trump by roughly fifteen percentage points — a decisive swing from the near-tie of 2020. In Pennsylvania the margin was fourteen. In Michigan, twenty. In Wisconsin, sixteen. In Florida, twenty-nine. Without the Catholic vote, the outcome of the 2024 election is uncertain. With it, the outcome was not.
And then came the wood chipper.
I do not believe most of those Catholic voters intended what has followed. I believe many of them voted, sincerely and in prayerful conscience, for what they understood to be the defense of unborn life. That intention deserves respect. But intentions do not suspend consequences. A seamless garment cannot be defended in pieces. When one clutches a single thread and lets the rest hang loose, what one holds in one’s hand at the end is not the garment. It is a remnant. The life one claims to be defending is no longer the life the Church means when it uses the word.
VII. What the Church Has Said
In the midst of all this, the voices that have spoken with the greatest moral clarity have been, unsurprisingly, Catholic voices from outside the United States — and, increasingly, Catholic voices within the American hierarchy willing to speak against the national current.
Pope Francis, in the last months of his life, wrote to the U.S. bishops as the dismantling accelerated, addressing directly the public theological appeals being made to the ordo amoris — the ordering of love — to justify the administration’s policies. His response returned to the parable of the Good Samaritan: “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
Cardinal Michael Czerny, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, called the dismantling “a serious thing,” noting pointedly that “many people would say that shutting down is not the best way to reform” an agency.
Pope Leo XIV, elected in May 2025 as the first American to hold the See of Peter, has made humanitarian assistance and the dignity of the most vulnerable a consistent theme of his young pontificate. In his first address to the Diplomatic Corps on May 16, 2025, he insisted on the dignity of “every person, especially the most frail and vulnerable, from the unborn to the elderly, from the sick to the unemployed, citizens and immigrants alike.” In Dilexi Te, his October 2025 apostolic exhortation on love for the poor — a document Francis had been preparing at his death and which Leo chose to complete and issue as his own first magisterial text — he invoked John XXIII’s warning in Mater et Magistra against wealthier nations remaining indifferent to peoples oppressed by hunger and extreme poverty.
And in his January 9, 2026 “State of the World” address to the diplomatic corps — delivered six months after USAID’s formal dissolution, with the Lancet numbers on the record and the deaths already accumulating — Pope Leo stated a principle that reads, in context, as direct address: “The protection of the principle of the inviolability of human dignity and the sanctity of life always counts for more than any mere national interest.”
Ten days later, on January 19, 2026, Cardinals Cupich of Chicago, McElroy of Washington, and Tobin of Newark issued a rare joint statement grounding itself explicitly in Leo’s diplomatic address. They called for “a genuinely moral foreign policy for our nation” — one that “respects and advances the right to human life, religious liberty, and the enhancement of human dignity throughout the world, especially through economic assistance.” Cardinal Cupich’s accompanying remark deserves to be read slowly: “As pastors entrusted with the teaching of our people, we cannot stand by while decisions are made that condemn millions to lives trapped permanently at the edge of existence. Pope Leo has given us clear direction and we must apply his teachings to the conduct of our nation and its leaders.”
The pope and the three cardinals are not speaking in a political register. They are speaking in the register of the consistent ethic. They are saying, without quite naming Bernardin, what Bernardin said at Fordham forty-three years ago: that the garment is seamless, that it cannot be torn, that a Catholic who defends life must defend life, and that there is no national interest so pressing that it licenses a Catholic nation to step over the dying Samaritan in the ditch.
VIII. An Accounting, and a Summons
We will not know the full cost of what has been done for many years. The deaths accumulate in places where their counting is imprecise — in villages whose clinics closed, in camps whose food rations were cut, in hospitals whose TB medications expired, in homes where a child who would have lived instead did not. The accounting will be done slowly, and much of it will be done by God. But the outlines of the moral ledger are already visible, and they will not improve with time.
An American administration has, in a period of months, taken an instrument of humanitarian assistance that saved roughly 91 million lives over two decades and destroyed it. It has done so after being warned, in writing, by the officials most qualified to assess the consequences. It has done so while the institutional Catholic Church in the United States — Catholic Relief Services, the bishops’ conference, Caritas — pleaded publicly for reconsideration. It has done so through the instrumentality of a Catholic Secretary of State whose entire pre-2025 record contradicts what he has now executed. And it has done so with the decisive electoral support of American Catholics who were persuaded, in many cases by their own bishops’ language, that the one life issue on which this administration spoke their language outweighed the many other life issues on which it did not.
There is enough guilt here to occupy a confessional for a very long time.
I want to be careful, as a priest, about where I land this essay. Condemnation is the easy ending, and there are moments when it is the right one. But the deeper work of the consistent ethic of life is not condemnation. It is conversion — the slow, patient recovery of a moral vision that has been fragmented by partisan manipulation and pastoral fatigue. The seamless garment can be torn. It can also, with grace and with effort, be rewoven. That is the only ending worthy of what Bernardin began.
For American Catholics, the reweaving begins with a kind of honest reckoning we have not yet undertaken. It begins with being willing to hold, in the same moral frame, the child in the womb and the child in the village clinic in sub-Saharan Africa whose antiretroviral regimen is now interrupted. It begins with recognizing that the language of “preeminence,” whatever its magisterial justification, has been weaponized in ways its authors did not foresee and perhaps did not want — and that the moment calls for a re-articulation of the pro-life witness that is manifestly, visibly, credibly consistent. It begins with listening, seriously and not only performatively, to Pope Leo XIV and to the three American cardinals who have already named what is happening.
And for those of us who are priests, it begins with remembering that our vocation is not to tell our people what they want to hear. It is to tell them, as kindly and as truthfully as we can, what the Gospel requires of us — all of it, at every stage of life, for every neighbor the parable names and unnames. The soldiers at the foot of the Cross cast lots for the seamless garment precisely because it was seamless. If we tear it ourselves, they will not need to.
Monsignor Arthur Holquin, S.T.L., is a retired Catholic priest of the Diocese of Orange, California, and retired rector of Mission Basilica San Juan Capistrano. He writes at Liturgy and Truth.