The Leftist Conspiracy Against Orthodox Catholicism

For the most part, 1P5 is a politics-free zone. Our mission lies elsewhere — in the restoration of the Catholic Church and its proper place within the world. Sometimes, though, the two areas overlap, and never in recent memory has this been so apparent as in the revelation of an actual leftist conspiracy against the Catholic Church in America.

The ongoing dump of emails from Wikileaks has laid bare a campaign to infiltrate the Catholic Church here in the United States and to undermine her teachings. A campaign that would make Saul Alinsky (with whom Hillary Clinton had a well-documented relationship) incredibly proud.

From the Wikileaks website, we see this 2012 email exchange between Sandy Newman, President of “Voices for Progress” to John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s current campaign chairman (click the image to enlarge):

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The text of the Newman email reads:

Hi, John,

This whole controversy with the bishops opposing contraceptive coverage even though 98% of Catholic women (and their conjugal partners) have used contraception has me thinking . . . 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. Is contraceptive coverage an issue around which that could  happen. 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?

Of course, this idea may just reveal my total lack of understanding of the Catholic church, the economic power it can bring to bear against nuns and priests who count on it for their maintenance, etc. 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. Just wondering . . .

Hoping you’re well, and getting to focus your time in the ways you want.

Sandy

Sandy Newman, President
Voices for Progress
202.669.8754
voicesforprogress.org

Podesta – a Catholic – responds:

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. I’ll discuss with Tara. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is the other person to consult.

At LifeSiteNews, Lisa Bourne reports:

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.

A day earlier, Bourne had reported on another email exchange between key players in the Clinton campaign, including Podesta:

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

At The American Conservative, Rod Dreher offers commentary:

This is chilling and infuriating — though I suppose not surprising. It’s simply that now it’s undeniable. It shows that at the senior level of the Democratic Party’s brain trust, a Clinton political operative — a Catholic! — created front groups specifically to undermine the authority of the Catholic bishops, and to separate the bishops from the people, as well as to secretly undermine Catholic teaching to make it more friendly to the Democratic Party’s agenda. Podesta ought to be excommunicated.

So now we know what’s coming under a Hillary Clinton presidency: a war on the Catholic Church and any other church that stands in the way of progressives in power. At an international conference last year, Hillary Clinton said that the fight for global abortion rights must never end:

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. As I have said and as I believe, the advancement of the full participation of women and girls in every aspect of their societies is the great unfinished business of the 21st century and not just for women but for everyone — and not just in far away countries but right here in the United States.

As Peters points out, the Clintonistas have long been conspiring to do exactly that to Catholicism in America. I use the word “conspiring,” because Podesta, in the text of his e-mail, says that “we” created these two Catholic fronts “to organize for a moment like this” — that is, to exploit a perceived weakness in the Catholic church.Here’s more.

It’s clear now that believing Christians are going to have to fight these powerful, deceptive, amoral progressives for the rest of our lives. Dark days ahead. A Catholic friend e-mails to say, “So we knew the KGB infiltrated the Russian Orthodox Church, but who knew the Democrats were sponsoring activists inside the US Catholic Church? Wow.”

That last point bears further reflection. We have periodically discussed Bella Dodd and the Communist infiltration of the Catholic Church in these pages. We also reported the testimony of Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa — the highest ranking defector in the history of the Soviet intelligence services — who said that Liberation Theology was a KGB construct designed to loosen the hold of the Catholic Church on Latin America:

The movement was born in the KGB, and it had a KGB-invented name: Liberation Theology. During those years, the KGB had a penchant for “liberation” movements. The National Liberation Army of Columbia (FARC), created by the KGB with help from Fidel Castro; the “National Liberation Army of Bolivia, created by the KGB with help from “Che” Guevara; and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), created by the KGB with help from Yasser Arafat are just a few additional “liberation” movements born at the Lubyanka — the headquarters of the KGB.

The birth of Liberation Theology was the intent of a 1960 super-secret “Party-State Dezinformatsiya Program” approved by Aleksandr Shelepin, the chairman of the KGB, and by Politburo member Aleksey Kirichenko, who coordinated the Communist Party’s international policies. This program demanded that the KGB take secret control of the World Council of Churches (WCC), based in Geneva, Switzerland, and use it as cover for converting Liberation Theology into a South American revolutionary tool. The WCC was the largest international ecumenical organization after the Vatican, representing some 550 million Christians of various denominations throughout 120 countries.

Sounds strikingly similar, doesn’t it? It seems that when one finds a playbook against Catholic belief and culture that works (Gramscian thought and the Frankfurt School certainly come to mind here) there’s no reason to fix what isn’t broken.

Alinsky was fond of Trojan Horse tactics – infiltration was preferable, in his mind, to protest. In an online excerpt I found from his biography, this example of his tactical preference was illustrative:

“…in the spring of 1972, at Tulane University…students asked Alinsky to help plan a protest of a scheduled speech by George H. W. Bush, then U.S. representative to the United Nations – a speech likely to include a defense of the Nixon administration’s Vietnam War policies. The students told Alinsky they were thinking about picketing or disrupting Bush’s address. That’s the wrong approach, he rejoined, not very creative – and besides causing a disruption might get them thrown out of school. He told them, instead, to go to hear the speech dressed as members of the Ku Klux Klan, and whenever Bush said something in defense of the Vietnam War, they should cheer and wave placards reading, ‘The KKK supports Bush.’ And that is what they did, with very successful, attention-getting results.”

Leftist infiltrators creating and heading up “Catholic” organizations is taken from the same manual. The goal this time, of course, was not to discredit the Church herself in the eyes of non-Catholics, but to discredit her teachings in the eyes of Catholics.

I posted an image earlier today drawn from Sunday’s epistle, which was Ephesians 6:10-17. Again, we are reminded of the stakes — and the players — in this battle:

Finally, brethren, be strengthened in the Lord, and in the might of his power. Put you on the armour of God, that you may be able to stand against the deceits of the devil. For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and power, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places. Therefore take unto you the armour of God, that you may be able to resist in the evil day, and to stand in all things perfect. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of justice, And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace: In all things taking the shield of faith, wherewith you may be able to extinguish all the fiery darts of the most wicked one. And take unto you the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit (which is the word of God).

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