Uncovered in one of the latest troves of Wikileaks revelations are the emails of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta. Podesta has been the chief architect of Clinton’s strategies to woo and play to specific demographic segments in order to maintain dominance over Republican rival Donald Trump.
There have already been controversies over Clinton’s supposed allegiances and disaffections for, respectively, the African-American community, Southerners, uneducated voters and now — Catholics.
In the past, one of the largest funders of anti-Catholic movements worldwide has been Jewish billionaire financier and philanthropist George Soros, who (perhaps not uncoincidentally) is also one of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors.
Now, it’s been shown that in league with Soros, Podesta sought to disempower the religion and “manipulate public opinion against the Catholic Church” according to Catholic League President Bill Donahue. So angry was Donahue about these latest emails that he sought to have Podesta dismissed from the Clinton campaign.
As outrageous as it is, it seems that Podesta created two dummy “Catholic” organizations to try to influence the Church’s teachings following President Obama’s 2011 Health and Human Services mandate that employers (including Catholic organizations) pay for contraceptive costs as part of providing health coverage for their employees.
Earlier emails revealed in court cases showed that the Obama administration had specifically targeted religious groups with the law, including the Catholic Church.
The two groups that Podesta created, “Catholics United” and “Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good,” were designed to undermine Catholic proscriptions and were run by senior fellows at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank founded by Podesta in 2003.
In 2012, the former group was accused by Catholic website LifeSite News of trying to “silence the Church from speaking to the great moral issues of our age.”
In emails to Podesta, Sandy Newman, the founder of liberal organization Voices for Progress, inquired of Podesta about the best way to “plant seeds of revolution” in the Church, referring in his subject line to a revolutionary “Catholic Spring,” whereby Catholics would rise up to demand contraceptive coverage in a reference to the “Arab Spring” of 2011 that saw the overthrow of longtime Arab dictators Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Ali Abdullah Saleh, Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi of, respectively, Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt and Libya.
Podesta, in turn, boasted to Newman that he had created the aforementioned groups to do just this. In the emails, Podesta says, “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.”
Certainly, this creation under false pretenses of religious organizations to bring about political change is one of the worst “sins” the campaign of Hillary Clinton has yet been accused of.
The president of the U.S. Bishops Conference (USBCC), Louisville Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz, declared that Podesta’s actions amounted to interference in the Catholic Church’s self-governance in order to bring about “short-term political gain.”
He called the Democratic figure’s efforts an affront to religious freedom — “one of the founding principles of our republic” that provides communities of faith the right to “preserve the integrity of their beliefs and proper self-governance.”
Kurtz said it was extremely “troubling both for the well-being of faith communities and the good of our country… [Catholics] expect public officials to respect the rights of people to live their faith without interference from the state. When faith communities lose this right, the very idea of what it means to be an American is lost.”
At the same time Kurtz was making these denunciations, a group called Catholic Association, led by its president, Ashley McGuire, has demanded answers of Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine, a self-described devout Catholic and former Jesuit missionary, regarding these matters.
“What does [Kaine] have to say now that the curtain has been pulled back and the blatant anti-Catholicism of his ticket revealed?” McGuire asked.
“Catholics deserve a response to the mockery of their faith seen in the leaked emails from the Clinton-Kaine ticket from the candidate who has used his Catholicism when convenient to push a radical agenda.”
Hastily trying to deflect attention from the matter, the Clinton campaign tried to pin the blame on Wikileaks, saying that the emails were the work of the Russian Kremlin.
“By dribbling these out every day, Wikileaks is proving they are nothing but a propaganda arm of the Kremlin with a political agenda doing Putin’s dirty work to help elect Donald Trump,” sputtered Glen Caplin, a Clinton campaign spokesman.
But this issue may not go away so easily. In fact, this revelation, in concert with other disparaging remarks Clinton and her staff have been making in the Wikileaks-disclosed emails could yet prove to be the Democratic campaign’s undoing; time will tell if the smoke from these messages will expose a political firestorm.
Regards,
Ethan Warrick
Editor
Wealth Authority
