The Left's anti-Catholic Wedge Strategy.

Attack the church, try to split the leadership from the membership and then try to strip the church of its rights when its leadership fights back:

After a fiery homily last weekend urging the faithful to oppose President Obama’s “radical pro-abortion and extreme secularist agenda” at the ballot box in November, Bishop Daniel Jenky of Peoria has been hit with an IRS complaint from a national secularist lobby group.

At a gathering of Catholic men on Saturday, the Illinois prelate had slammed Obama’s mandate forcing religious employers to cover contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortion-inducing drugs. The unprecedented attack on religious freedom, he said, signaled that the president “seems intent on following a similar path” as past dictators such as Hitler, Stalin, and Otto von Bismarck.

“This fall, every practicing Catholic must vote, and must vote their Catholic consciences, or by the following fall our Catholic schools, our Catholic hospitals, our Catholic Newman Centers, all our public ministries - only excepting our church buildings – could easily be shut down,” he said.

On Thursday, the Washington-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State claimed the homily violated federal law by taking sides in a political campaign.

“No rational person could believe the bishop was doing anything but saying vote against Obama,” said Barry Lynn, the group’s executive director.

“Bishop Jenky’s intervention in the election wasn’t just extreme and mean-spirited, it also seems to be a clear violation of federal law,” said Lynn. “Churches are tax-exempt institutions, and they aren’t allowed to intervene in partisan politics.”

“To be sure, Jenky never utters the words ‘Do not vote for Obama,’” Lynn wrote in his complaint. “But the Internal Revenue Code makes it clear that statements need not be this explicit to run afoul of the law.”

Here is Bishop Jenky's homily, which shows that he understands history:

As Christians we must love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, but as Christians we must also stand up for what we believe and always be ready to fight for the Faith. The days in which we live now require heroic Catholicism, not casual Catholicism. We can no longer be Catholics by accident, but instead be Catholics by conviction.

And:

Remember that in past history other governments have tried to force Christians to huddle and hide only within the confines of their churches like the first disciples locked up in the Upper Room.

In the late 19th century, Bismarck waged his “Kulturkampf,” a Culture War, against the Roman Catholic Church, closing down every Catholic school and hospital, convent and monastery in Imperial Germany.

Clemenceau, nicknamed “the priest eater,” tried the same thing in France in the first decade of the 20th Century.

Hitler and Stalin, at their better moments, would just barely tolerate some churches remaining open, but would not tolerate any competition with the state in education, social services, and health care.

In clear violation of our First Amendment rights, Barack Obama – with his radical, pro abortion and extreme secularist agenda, now seems intent on following a similar path.

Now things have come to such a pass in America that this is a battle that we could lose, but before the awesome judgement seat of Almighty God this is not a war where any believing Catholic may remain neutral.

This fall, every practicing Catholic must vote, and must vote their Catholic consciences, or by the following fall our Catholic schools, our Catholic hospitals, our Catholic Newman Centers, all our public ministries -- only excepting our church buildings – could easily be shut down. Because no Catholic institution, under any circumstance, can ever cooperate with the instrinsic evil of killing innocent human life in the womb.

And exactly like the Catholics who chose the State over Christ, various professors from Notre Dame - who show that they don't know history - demand that Bishop Jenky be removed from the university's Board of Fellows, thereby showing that they are cut from the same clothe as those German Catholics who chose the Nazi party over their faith.