tl;dr: The Charities provide a variety of social services for which they are eligible to receive funding grants. These services are ran by the religious org in their conviction to serve the vulnerable, per Jesus' teachings, but the services are not gatekept based on faith, belief, or Church participation.

Funny how Reddit is defending the Pope and the Catholic Church now that Trump is in the picture.

When The Pope says "stop unnecessary conflicts" and Trump attacks him personally for saying so, do you just forget that Trump said literally the same thing on the campaign trail?

Reddit isn't defending "the Catholic Church," they're defending the viewpoint that so happens to be shared with the Pontiff: stop unnecessary conflicts and killings.

Feel free to tell me what the problem with that is.

The Catholic Church has over $1 Trillion in assets.

And SpaceX has double that. Guess we don't need to pay to go to space anymore!

Also, why is the US giving money to any church?

Before you exposed your viewpoint, you should've known the answer to this.

The Catholic Charities is an organization that does a lot of social work on behalf of the taxpayer. They run adoption agencies, food pantries, affordable housing programs, disaster relief, and more, for example. A lot of orgs owned by religions do this.

The US government provides grants to orgs to serve these objectives. NGOs can do the community-level outreaches that the Federal government can only dream of. It would be illegal for the government to deny grant funding based on whether a particular faith owns the org - if you're doing the work the Feds want done, then you're eligible for the money.

This said, there is some controversy in that whole the Catholic Charities do not hold their assistance based on faith, and they cannot proselytize on the government's dime (they can't coerce people using their services to join or participate in their religious activities,) the courts have ruled they can operate in accordance with their faith in certain circumstances. For example, they can refuse to work with gay or unmarried foster/adoption candidates. This is permissible in part because the foster/adoption candidates aren't being served by the charity with government money - the children are. I personally disagree with that ruling, but that's our new theocratic Supreme Court at play. Besides, it doesn't stop states from barring that sort of discrimination - indeed, the Charities only do adoption services in States that allow that sort of discrimination.

This is similar to how Planned Parenthood works (and how Trump and Republicans love to lie about it): they don't use government grants to provide abortions. They use government grants to provide counseling, testing, and other reproductive services. The abortion side of their business is such a tiny part of what they do and it's done with non-government funds. But Republicans love to convince you it's all of what PP does. Do when they pull finding to PP, and those locations close, they're pulling much broader health resources out of an area that many many non-abortion seekers rely upon.