Anti-Catholicism Redux

A few days ago, I posted an article about a recrudescence of anti-Catholicism from a Republican politician. Lest anyone accuse me of partisanship, here's what the Democrats were circulating a few years ago.

Clinton Campaign Official Denounces Catholics as "Severely Backwards," Calls for Left-Wing Infiltration of Church

12/10/16 19:24

Neo-pagan pseudo-elites. The stench of their hubris is asphyxiating.

Compiled by Catholic Family News

“Conservative Catholics” are the latest Americans to be smeared by members of Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign, leaked emails revealed on October 11 show.

Catholic beliefs are bashed as “backwards” and conservative Catholics are termed responsible for “an amazing bastardization of the faith” in one of the more than 1,000 hacked emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta released in mid-October by WikiLeaks.

“I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion,” writes Clinton campaign Director of Communications Jennifer Palmieri. “Their rich friends wouldn't understand if they became evangelicals.”

The exchange between Palmieri, then president of the leftist Center for American Progress (CAP), John Halpin, a senior fellow for CAP, and Podesta, occurred in April 2011 and was entitled “Conservative Catholicism.”

“They can throw around ‘Thomistic’ thought and ‘subsidiarity’ and sound sophisticated because no one knows what the hell they're talking about,” Halpin wrote Palmieri and Podesta.

Halpin goes on to describe how “many of the most powerful elements of the conservative movement are all Catholic,” and refers to Catholic beliefs as “severely backwards” and asserts that conservative Catholics are utterly ignorant of Christian democracy.

“It's an amazing bastardization of the faith,” Halpin says in the email. “They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy.”

Podesta, Palmieri and Halpen know nothing about what constitutes the Catholic Faith. They view the world and the Church through their warped, left-wing orientation.

Their contempt for Thomistic thought (otherwise known as philosophical realism) and for subsidiarity is no surprise. The Catholic principle of subsidiarity holds that what can be done by the lower should not be done by the higher. What a family can do for itself, the town should not do. What the town can do for itself, the federal government should not do. By contrast, big-government statists such as Hillary Clinton press for increasing control and regulation of business and individual lives.

Along similar lines of contempt for Christianity, we review Hillary Clinton’s speech to the 2015 Women in the World Summit in New York City where she addressed her commitment to “reproductive rights” - code for contraception and abortion. Here she pontificated, “Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will.And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”

Podesta Admits Creating Leftist Infiltration of Church

A subsequent leaked email (from 2012) shows Hillary Clinton’s current campaign chairman John Podesta and a Left-wing activist casually discussing fomenting “revolution” in the Catholic Church.

“There needs to be a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic Church,” Sandy Newman, president and founder of the progressive nonprofit Voices for Progress, writes to Podesta in an email titled “opening for a Catholic Spring? just musing.”

The emails were leaked in the third round of releases of Podesta’s emails by WikiLeaks.

Newman, who is Jewish, admits he does not know much about the Catholic Church and isn’t volunteering personally to subvert Catholic teachings. “Even if the idea isn’t crazy, I don’t qualify to be involved and I have not thought at all about how one would ‘plant the seeds of the revolution,’ or who would plant them.”

In response, Podesta assures Newman to rest easy for he and his progressive friends have already created organizations explicitly designed to infiltrate the Catholic Church with progressive ideology, though he cautions that the time may not be right for full revolution — just yet.

“There needs to be a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic Church,” Sandy Newman, president and founder of the progressive nonprofit Voices for Progress, writes to Podesta in an email titled “opening for a Catholic Spring? just musing.”

“We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this. But I think it lacks the leadership to do so now. Likewise Catholics United. Like most Spring movements, I think this one will have to be bottom up,” Podesta writes.

In this February 2012 email, Mr. Newman ponders exploiting the US Bishops’ opposition to the Mandate and he asks whether the Catholic Health Association (CHA) might side with “progressives” in their offensive against the Church.

“Is contraceptive coverage an issue around which that could happen,” Newman asks Podesta. “The Bishops will undoubtedly continue the fight. Does the Catholic Hospital Association support of the Administration's new policy, together with ‘the 98%’ create an opportunity?”

Lifesite’s Lisa Bourne writes, “The CHA infamously opposed the USCCB in its stand against the controversial Mandate forcing religious employers to provide subsidized birth control and sterilization to its employees in violation of their religious principles, with Barack Obama citing the CHA’s support earlier this year to defend the federal government’s case against the Little sisters of the Poor.”

Even Catholic News Agency denounced the leftist “social-justice” oriented Catholics United for the Common Good as being neither Catholic nor for the common good.

These are just some of the damning emails released by Wikileaks in mid-October. For many of us, it confirms what we had long known from observation of current events.