Although it is highly unlikely that it will ever happen, Philadelphia’s Archbishop Charles Chaput says that Hillary Clinton should repudiate the anti-Catholic plotting that was revealed in recently released emails that arrogantly scorned “all of us backward-thinking Catholics who actually believe what Scripture and the Church teach.”
In his weekly column, the Archbishop recounted an episode in 2008 when two members of a dissident group named Catholics United visited his office in Denver to try to convince him to resist identifying the Church with single-issue and partisan (read: abortion) politics.
“It was an interesting experience. Both men were obvious flacks for the Obama campaign and the Democratic Party — creatures of a political machine, not men of the Church; less concerned with Catholic teaching than with its influence,” Chaput remembered.
And yet he could not help but praise the men for their “talents of servile partisan hustling” because, thanks to work by people such as them, “American Catholics helped to elect an administration that has been the most stubbornly unfriendly to religious believers, institutions, concerns and liberty in generations.”
But bad can always get worse, he warns, and refers to the contemptuously anti-Catholic emails exchanged by the upper echelon of the Clinton campaign team which were released by Wikileaks earlier this week.
In them, it was suggested that people only embraced the Catholic faith for political purposes and called for a new “Catholic spring” in which people would infiltrate and subvert the Church, forcing her to change her “severely backward” teachings. Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta revealed that he was already hard at work on this project, thanks to the help of dissident “Catholic” organizations such as Catholics United and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good.
On the evening these WikiLeaks emails were released, Chaput received an angry email from a a nationally respected (non-Catholic) attorney who was very experienced in Church-state affairs:
“I was deeply offended by the [Clinton team] emails, which are some of the worst bigotry by a political machine I have seen. [A] Church has an absolute right to protect itself when under attack as a faith and Church by civil political forces. That certainly applies here . . .,” the attorney wrote.
“Over the last eight years there has been strong evidence that the current administration, with which these people share values, has been very hostile to religious organizations. Now there is clear proof that this approach is deliberate and will accelerate if these actors have any continuing, let alone louder, say in government.
“These bigots are actively strategizing how to shape Catholicism not to be Catholic or consistent with Jesus’ teachings, but to be the ‘religion’ they want. They are, at the very core, trying to turn religion to their secular view of right and wrong consistent with their politics.
“This is fundamentally why the Founders left England and demanded that government not have any voice in religion. Look where we are now. We have political actors trying to orchestrate a coup to destroy Catholic values, and they even analogize their takeover to a coup in the Middle East, which amplifies their bigotry and hatred of the Church. I had hoped I would never see this day — a day like so many dark days in Eastern Europe that led to the death of my [Protestant minister] great grandfather at the hands of communists who also hated and wanted to destroy religion.”
In the face of this outrageous bigotry, the least the Clinton campaign should do is apologize for it, Chaput says.
“All of us backward-thinking Catholics who actually believe what Scripture and the Church teach would be so very grateful.”
The Archbishop continues: “In the meantime, a friend describes the choice facing voters in November this way: A vulgar, boorish lout and disrespecter of women, with a serious impulse control problem; or a scheming, robotic liar with a lifelong appetite for power and an entourage riddled with anti-Catholic bigots.
“In a nation where ‘choice’ is now the unofficial state religion, the menu for dinner is remarkably small.”
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