Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff appears to show contempt toward Catholics and evangelicals as revealed in the latest email exchanges exposed by WikiLeaks.
The WikiLeaks dump showed that John Halpin of the Center for American Progress sent an email to Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, about an article saying how Rupert Murdoch and Robert Thomson were raising their children Catholic.
Murdoch is chief executive of News Corp while Thomson is managing editor fo the Wall Street Journal. The article gave a brief description of Murdoch’s daughters being baptized in the Jordan.
“Ken Auletta's latest piece on Murdoch in the New Yorker starts off with the aside that both Murdoch and Robert Thompson, managing editor of the WSJ, are raising their kids Catholic,” Halpin wrote. “Friggin' Murdoch baptized his kids in Jordan where John the Baptist baptized Jesus.”
Halpin wrote further about how conservative Catholicism is a “bastardization of the faith.”
“Many of the most powerful elements of the conservative movement are all Catholic (many converts) from the SC and think tanks to the media and social groups,” Halpin said. “It's an amazing bastardization of the faith. They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy.”
Clinton’s campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri responded and took a jab at evangelicals.
“I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn't understand if they became evangelicals,” she said.
National Catholic Prayer Breakfast founder Joseph Cella said these emails were "viciously mocking Catholics as they have, turn the clock back to the days of the 20th-century ‘No Catholics Need Apply’ type of discrimination” and demanded that Clinton and her campaign apologize to all Catholics, Catholic News Service reported.
Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway called on Clinton to apologize and to fire the staff involved in the “vicious anti-Catholic bigotry,” according to The Washington Times.
In another email, a message addressed to Podesta apparently suggested that the Clinton campaign formed Catholic groups for the purpose of starting a “Catholic Spring” or a series of protests from the “bottom up” regarding issues like contraception.
“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 from Voices of Progress wrote in an email to Podesta. “Is contraceptive coverage [in health care] an issue around which that could happen?”
Podesta said Catholics United and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good were two groups they established “to organize for a moment like this.”
EWTN managing editor Raymond Arroyo said the emails show how Clinton’s campaign planned to “change the church” and its core beliefs in order to advance her own agenda.
“It makes it seem like you’re creating organizations to change the core beliefs of the church,” he said. “For someone to come and say, ‘I have a political organization to change your church to complete my political agenda or advance my agenda,’ I don’t know how anybody could embrace that.”
