For alum Kerry Robinson, overseeing Catholic Charities USA is ‘the fulfillment of my life's vocation’

For most of the world’s 1.42 billion Roman Catholics, the odds against personally meeting even one pope are astronomical. That Kerry Robinson ’94 M.A.R. has shaken the hands of three is symbolic of the exceptional life of service she has led, both to her faith and the Church that contains it.

Robinson’s achievements extend from New Haven, where she helped transform the landscape of Catholic life at Yale, to Rome, where she was invited to advise the Vatican on empowering women leaders. In 2023, her extraordinary career reached an apotheosis when she was named President and CEO of Catholic Charities USA, one of the most visible humanitarian roles in American Catholicism. 

Catholic Charities USA (CCUSA) supports the work of 169 independent diocesan Catholic Charities agencies across the country. As its leader, Robinson oversees an organization that serves tens of thousands of staff and volunteers at more than 4,000 facilities in 50 states. The 116-year-old charity provides food, housing, health care, and emergency relief to some 16 million Americans beset by poverty, neglect, persecution, and natural disaster.     

It is a role she was, quite literally, born to. Robinson is heir to a now five-generation legacy of Catholic family philanthropy with roots connected to Yale. As a teenager, she volunteered with the Raskob Foundation for Catholic Activities, a $204-million private foundation founded by her great-grandparents, John J. and Helena Green Raskob. The non-profit foundation’s mission is to fund Catholic aid organizations and associated relief projects nationally and around the world. As an adolescent, Robinson was inspired by the dedication and commitment of its grant recipients.

“That was such a formative time in my life,” she recalls. “My eyes were opened to the extraordinary work our grant seekers do. They are true moral heroes.”

These early exemplars molded the girl’s life path and represent the highest ideals of the woman she became. “There’s this beautiful line from Father Greg Boyle,” she says, summing up her worldview by quoting the celebrated Los Angeles Jesuit who leads the world’s largest gang intervention and rehabilitation program: “’This is what we seek. A compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry, rather than in judgment at how they carry it.’”

Overarching all her efforts is the presence of her great-grandfather, John Jacob Raskob. The patriarch of his namesake foundation was a powerful business executive, free-market warrior, and inventor of corporate consumer credit. His motto was “Go ahead and do things!” and he once penned a magazine article titled, “Everybody Ought to be Rich,” encouraging workers to invest their savings in the stock market. It ran two months before the 1929 Wall Street crash. Undaunted, in 1931, in the depths of the Great Depression, Raskob built the Empire State Building. From 1928 to 1932, he chaired the Democratic National Committee and was a major supporter of Alfred E. Smith, the first Catholic to run for President of the United States.

Of her dynamic ancestor, Robinson admits, “He does haunt me.” Listening to her, one senses an unspoken ambivalence. Raskob’s Catholic humanitarian philanthropy is the wellspring of her life’s work, after all, and yet he also opposed the government relief programs of the New Deal, reforms profoundly influenced by the Catholic social teaching that guides her thought. When speaking of him, Robinson invariably evokes her great-grandmother, Helena Green Raskob, in the same breath. In 1928, the Raskobs established the Bill Raskob Foundation, a small, private charity named in remembrance of their son who died in an automobile accident during his last semester at Yale. The larger Raskob Foundation was founded by the couple in 1945. 

Robinson was born in London, where her American parents gave her an Irish first name and Welsh middle name—Alys—to go with her British surname. After graduating from Georgetown, with a junior year at Trinity College Dublin, she moved back to London to work for a charity providing services to nonprofits throughout the UK. She returned to the U.S. to marry her longtime boyfriend and began Yale Divinity School in 1992, with a concentration in ethics. In 1997, Robinson accepted a job as Director of Development for Saint Thomas More (STM), Yale’s Catholic chaplaincy, to raise what she thought was $5 million for a proposed student center. That work began a defining friendship with the Reverend Robert L. Beloin, a.k.a. “Father Bob,” who served as Yale’s Catholic chaplain for 25 years until his death in 2018. 

“The impact of his abundant life is everlasting,” Robinson wrote in a remembrance of Beloin in Yale Alumni Magazine. The STM job opened doors to new realms of Catholic leadership for her, and informed all her subsequent positions. She worked in tandem with Beloin for nine years, raising what became $75 million to build the Thomas E. Golden, Jr. Center, now a nationally renowned hub of Catholic spiritual and intellectual life. The Center will observe its 20th anniversary in December 2026. 

In the past year and a half, humanitarian organizations like CCUSA have seen the social safety net reduced or even eliminated by federal cuts, increasing demands for relief services while complicating efforts to meet them. In April, the Trump administration canceled a long-standing $11 million contract with Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Miami to shelter unaccompanied migrant children. At the same time, conservative provocateurs regularly spread spurious claims about CCUSA and other NGOs secretly aiding illegal immigration. 

Adjusting to the current political climate requires additional time and imagination, Robinson admits, and generous applications of tact, sobriety, and restraint. But anyone hoping to provoke the charity’s head into criticizing the administration or its supporters has another thing coming.

“Before proceeding,” she declared in our first interview, “I want to be really clear that CCUSA works extremely hard to be a bridge builder, a peacemaker, to advance our mission of serving poor and vulnerable people in a manner that brings Catholics and all people of goodwill together. We serve Republicans and Democrats, we’re comprised of Republicans and Democrats, we’re funded by Republicans and Democrats, and all of that we try to make secondary to our mission. So, I am really a practiced diplomat in all this.”

Robinson is married to Dr. Michael Cappello, an infectious disease specialist and chair of the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at Yale New Haven Hospital, who has a joint appointment at the Yale School of Medicine and the Yale School of Public Health. The couple lives just outside of New Haven, and Robinson commutes each week to Virginia, where she keeps an apartment across from CCUSA’s Alexandria offices. 

As for those popes: Robinson met Saint John Paul II in 1987 while still a college student, as part of a delegation of Catholic foundations and donors. She was Global Ambassador for the Leadership Roundtable, a Catholic best-practices collective she helped found, when she met Pope Francis as part of a Global Solidarity Fund delegation in 2022. And earlier this month, she traveled to Rome with the CCUSA board and executive staff for a private audience with Pope Leo XIV. It was her second time meeting the Chicago-born pontiff since he was named head of the Catholic Church in May 2025. 

The interview below is condensed and edited from transcripts of three lengthy conversations conducted by phone and in person in March and April. 

Kerry, when Father Bob first asked you to work with him raising money for Saint Thomas More’s Golden Center, you were inclined to turn him down. What was that about?

I really didn’t want the job. As a matter of fact, I’ve never wanted any of my jobs. Well, not “never wanted.” I just always thought I wasn’t the right fit—I’m not qualified for this. You’ve got the wrong person—over and over and over again. I do believe that one day God will ask, “Why were you so obstinate?” With Father Bob, though, I especially did not want to be in charge of fundraising. I had never raised any money. He had called me on the phone to explain that he had finally persuaded his board at Saint Thomas More that they should be serious about a capital campaign. When they had finally given in, they asked him how much he wanted to raise and he blurted out, “$5 million.” And the board said, “$5 million?! We thought you’d say $1 million.”

And there was at least one person who doubted he could raise even that.

Yes. And Father Bob tells me all this and says, “Kerry, your name came to me in prayer.” 

Not exactly a standard recruitment gambit.

Best development pickup line ever. But I was horrified. I really was not qualified to raise that amount. So, that’s when I said to him, “I’m seven months pregnant with my second child.” There was a long silence on the phone and then he came to and said, “Congratulations. I’m happy for you. This is wonderful news. You can work from home.” And then he said, “Don’t answer right now. Pray about it for five days.”

Father Bob was very persuasive about the power of prayer. You quickly said yes, and the rest is history. The campaign for $5 million become $75 million, and resulted in the Golden Center, the locus of Catholic activities at Yale. 

The $5 million goal was not based on anything, no feasibility study, just a random, whim-of-the-moment number. And as soon as I said yes, I kid you not, the president of the board said the new goal was $10 million. The initial idea was to build a 3,000-square-foot Catholic center attached to the opposite side, the northeastern side, of the chapel, but soon everyone realized this was not ideal, because people would have to walk through the chaplain’s residence to get from the center to the chapel. We enlisted the brilliant Argentinian architect César Pelli, the former dean of the Yale School of Architecture, and he helped us look at the property we’re on now and imagine what we could do if we did it right the first time.

We felt a moral responsibility to the students who were arriving at Yale from all over the country and the world, and who in four years would advance exponentially in history or economics or science, whatever they studied. Yet they often arrived here with an eighth-grade level of understanding about their Catholic identity. We couldn’t bear for their faith, their religious vocabulary and theological discourse, to remain at that level, knowing they would go on to positions of prominence. The consequence of having a mature, adult life of faith and morality, and of living that out in one’s leadership, was profound to us. We had a sense of urgency about it. 

Did that vision and sense of mission make the work easier for you than you’d imagined?

Yes and no. Raising that money was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It was really, really difficult work. And part of it was that I was so young and inexperienced. Father Bob and I used to talk about how it was almost as though each of us had a piece of the combination that, when put together, allowed grace to flow through us. If we had had to do it over again, we would have hired people to help us, but we just didn’t know what we didn’t know. We were successful despite having not been trained in fundraising. We broke so many rules, not out of arrogance, but out of ignorance. And yet, we were successful because we had a compelling vision about where we were headed. We agreed on what mattered to us, and that no matter what, we were going to comport ourselves in a manner that was aligned with our faith, values, and beliefs. 

It was an extraordinary friendship and collaboration. And we really were a compelling combination. People enjoyed our company together, and could see how much respect and affection we had for each other. They knew and trusted that we lived and breathed our vision. Pretty soon everybody wanted to be a part of this life-giving initiative to expand Catholic life at Yale.

What brought you to Yale and the Divinity School in the first place?

I had been working in London and had moved back to the United States. I’d been in a long-term relationship with my now-husband, who was one year into a three-year fellowship in infectious diseases at Yale School of Medicine. When we got engaged, I wanted to be in New Haven while he finished his fellowship. Through my family, I was already deeply involved with Catholic philanthropy, and thought I would benefit from a deeper understanding of the church and its history, of Catholic theology and Catholic ethics. I applied to the Divinity School, and our degrees were timed to end together. Mine was a two-year M.A.R., and he had two years left on his fellowship. As we were both finishing, Yale asked him to join the faculty, so we made the decision to stay and had our two children here. And they both ended up going to Yale themselves. Yale has been very good to our family.

Did you go to Catholic school as a child?

I went to public school for almost all my childhood education. There were three years out of the 12 that were Catholic schools. The rest was public in Washington, D.C. and, when my mother’s work moved to New York City, in Fairfield County, Connecticut. I studied English and theology at Georgetown, including a year in Dublin. And then I met Margaret Farley at Yale Divinity School.

Margaret Farley RSM was YDS’s legendary Catholic ethics professor, whose portrait hangs among the exalted on the walls of the school’s Common Room. Talk about your study of ethics with her at YDS.

I essentially majored in Margaret Farley. I just loved everything about her. I took every course she offered, and even created an independent reading course with her. We read all the encyclicals that comprised Catholic social teaching, starting with Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum novarum all the way to, I think the most recent at that time was Centesimus annus, by Pope John Paul II in 1991. It was a deeply meaningful course that prepared me for everything I’ve done since.

What was it about Professor Farley that moved you so much?

Margaret was always the smartest person in any room she was in and such an exquisite communicator, such a beautiful teacher, just so compelling in every way.

Was there a specific lesson, or something she said, that continues to resonate with you?

Yes, the day she came to class and heard all of us students complaining about the Catholic Church for this reason or that. I have no idea what the reason of the day was, but as students will, we were lamenting that the Church wasn’t more of this or less of this, etc. And she said to us, “Be mindful of your words and your attitude of heart.” In a nutshell, she told us, “Remember there must be something you love about the Catholic Church and your membership in it, or you wouldn’t have enrolled in divinity school, or be studying theology, or sacrificing to learn more.” And then she said, “Always remember what it is you most love about being Catholic, about the Church, and about being a member of this faith family. Name what you love and claim it. It will provide ballast whenever the vicissitudes of faith or circumstance lead to disappointment or disillusionment.” 

I took her advice to heart and that day started to list all the things I most loved about being Catholic. The list was long and remains precious to me. Later, when I started working at St. Thomas More, she became my spiritual director. We met for lunch one day and she just saw the state of my mind, and out of great Christian charity said, “You could really use a spiritual director and I would be that for you if you would like.” Which was a priceless gift to me. I think anybody who’s had Margaret as a friend, confidant, spiritual director, guide, teacher, does believe that she saved their life. I am forever indebted to her.

Who were your heroes when you were young?

This is to the credit of John and Helena Raskob’s prescience when they established the Raskob Foundation. They wanted all their resources to be used to support the Catholic Church in any form of apostolate or ministry anywhere in the world, and they wanted their children and descendants to be invited as teenagers to serve as volunteers in the work of the foundation. That set the stage for me as a fourth-generation member of the family to see the women and men, ordained, religious, and lay, who were supported by Raskob or applying to Raskob. They were living the gospel by responding to different forms of human suffering all over the globe. Even as a child, I was aware that they were seeing the worst of what humankind can do to one another, and bearing witness to the consequence of structural sin, communal sin, and individual sin and injustice.

I was mesmerized by these women and men. They were my childhood heroes. I knew that they were seeing and addressing what is wrong with this violent, broken, unjust world, and yet they were the most joyful people I’d ever encountered. They had an interior freedom that I envied. And I remember as a child thinking, I am never, ever going to be that selfless, that other-centered. I wanted to be like them, but knew I never would be. So, I asked God, please let me do something with my life, behind the scenes, out of the limelight, that would make a positive contribution to my moral heroes. And when I look at all the surprising things I’ve been asked to do in my life, it really is an answer to that prayer.

Yes. To this day. 

That’s right. All of it has culminated with Catholic Charities USA, which is truly the fulfillment of my life’s vocation and that childhood prayer. Because the men and women of Catholic Charities, the 45,000 employees, the 215,000 volunteers, and all our partners and donors and board members supporting us across the country, all of them have those same heroic qualities. They’re exercising moral agency and mercy at a time that’s so fraught in our nation and the world. It’s hard to bear witness to human suffering every day, and yet the men and women of Catholic Charities do just that. They refuse to look away. Their faith compels them to alleviate suffering and call the question from a justice standpoint, to ask why, in the richest nation in the world, does a five-year-old go to bed hungry? I’m very proud of Catholic Charities.

It seems the winds have blown us into the political part of this conversation. I’m not forgetting your diplomat’s caveat at the beginning of these interviews, but I’d really like you to speak about this age of political deprivation, cruelty, and injustice we are in, as, for instance the zeroing-out of USAID, or, closer to home, the canceling of that $11 million Catholic Charities program in Miami. How do you cope with this political era we are in? How has it impacted you?

I can say this. We take our mission to care for the poorest very, very seriously. We approach everything—every policy discussion, every executive order, every election, every new technology—from the vantage point of how it affects the most vulnerable, the poorest in our midst. When I look at the work of Catholic Charities, I think that this is a bridge-building moment. There is so much potential now for faith leaders to lead us out of this divisiveness and acrimony, to remember our values and to speak up for them. And you’re seeing that with Catholic bishops across red states and blue states. I think it’s a very hopeful moment, even though it is heartbreaking to see SNAP benefits lapse for 42 million Americans, or people afraid about losing healthcare.

I’m struck by how you speak of your work not only in terms of material needs, but also of serving the needs of the soul.

Well, that’s absolutely embedded in everything Catholic Charities does, and is what separates Catholic Charities as a faith-based social-service provider from its secular equivalents. It is not just about making sure hungry people are fed or people needing safe shelter have a bed to sleep in. It is a disposition that places human dignity at the center of everything we do, every decision we make, every program we offer. It rises from our Catholic Christian faith that every person is stamped with the image of God, and every person’s dignity must be upheld, defended, protected, honored.

As opposed to Elon Musk’s view that empathy is a pitfall on the road to utopia. 

We need to be great defenders of empathy. It’s all about putting oneself in the shoes of those we are serving and asking, how would we feel in that moment? What would we need, what would provide solace, not just to our bodies, but also to our spirits?

Since January 2024 there are many more people in this country living in extremis in one way or another. More adults and children among the very poorest faced with healthcare cuts, food insecurity, housing, immigration arrests, deportations — the crises come from all directions. Can you speak to this reality?

I can say that one of the challenges of this past year for all of us in the faith-based, social-service world—my peers leading national Catholic organizations, Catholic college presidents, bishops, etc.—one of the things that we’ve had to contend with all year is the extra amount of effort required to interpret executive orders, policy proposals, etc. Everybody is monitoring this situation very closely. But I am far less worried about the abrupt, callous cancellation of federal funding for organizations like Catholic Charities and much more worried about the rise of nefarious false claims or accusations levied against the Catholic Church’s social services to poor and vulnerable communities. It’s almost impossible to argue back when you are accosted with that kind of calumny. And yet, I would say to those who would wish to discredit or harm us: In your own hour of need, when your family is hungry, Catholic Charities will feed you. We will provide safe shelter for your family. We will call you by name, and restore and uphold your dignity. We will be a reason for your hope.

Timothy Cahill ’16 M.A.R. writes on religion, ethics, and the arts.