This is the Catholic-Wedge Strategy that I described in the 2012 election.

The idea was to take a Catholic distinctive, i.e. contraception, and define it as an insane, anti-American position, such that Catholics would have to choose between being  (liberal) Americans or part of a ghettoized, stigmatized minority.

As a student of history, I recognize this as the same dynamic at work in Germany prior to and during the rise of National Socialism.

Infiltrating and splintering Catholicism with false fronts is equally a tool used by Totalitarians of all stripes.

This is absolutely antithetical to American tradition and democracy.

//WHEN RELIGIONS COLLIDE: Clinton campaign spokeswoman takes shots at Catholics, evangelicals in leaked email exchange.

Related: “To repeat, the head of Clinton’s campaign has been organizing to fracture a major religion. Clinton claims to be for all Americans… what if Podesta had created organizations to foment ‘Revolution’ among the American Muslim community? Would that be worthy of dismissal?… how much of his plans to fracture Catholics did Podesta share with Hillary as a campaign strategy? Does she agree with his strategy now?”

Thou shalt have no other gods before Progressivism.//

From the source cited in Instapundit: 

//The new Wikileaks dump from Clinton campaign chief John Podesta’s emails reveals that Podesta created a couple of activist groups for the sake of undermining the Catholic bishops and the Church’s authority.

In the 2011 e-mail chain, a progressive activist named Sanford “Sandy” Newman e-mailed Podesta to suggest collaboration on a way

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.

Newman, who is Jewish, concedes that he doesn’t know much about the Catholic Church, but he sure does want somebody to undermine the hierarchy:

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.”

Not to worry, said Podesta, who is Catholic, and who was at the time head of the Center For American Progress. They have progressive front organizations prepared to act when the time is right:

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.//

Catholics have been complaining about Liberal Totalitarianism for at least four years.

Today, we have the smoking gun.

I love belonging to a politically subversive movement...

Progressives seem really threatened by Thomism.

Wikileaks lets us listen in on the anti-Catholic bigotry of the Progressives.

//From:jhalpin@americanprogress.org To: JPalmieri@americanprogress.org, john.podesta@gmail.com  Date: 2011-04-11 21:10

Subject: Re: Conservative Catholicism
   
 Excellent point. They can throw around "Thomistic" thought and "subsidiarity" and sound sophisticated because no one knows what the hell they're talking about.

Jennifer Palmieri wrote:  I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn't understand if they became evangelicals.

  ----- Original Message ----- From: John Halpin To: John Podesta ; Jennifer Palmieri Sent: Mon Apr 11 18:55:59 2011 Subject: Conservative Catholicism  

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. Friggin' Murdoch baptized his kids in Jordan where John the Baptist baptized Jesus.  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.  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. //

This is what the "wedge strategy of 2012" and questions about contraceptives was always about.

Bigotry on parade. This is the other barrell of the "religious freedom isn't worth protecting" shotgun, namely, although (Rule 1) "hate speech" laws trump religion, (Rule 2) "hate speech" against Catholicism isn't really "hate speech" under Rule 1. On the day that Mother Teresa is canonized, the Salt Lake Tribune publishes a New Atheist op-ed that hits all the tropes of anti-Catholicism. Thus we see: - Catholic priests raping altar boys? - Check. - God hates amputees? Check. - God could have stopped priests from committing sexual abuses? Check. - Mother Teresa didn't heal all the people who came to her in poverty? Check. This is just nasty ugliness on the part of Associate Professor Gregory Clark. In the face of comparable bigotry against Father Damien of Molokai, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote something that is worth considering in this context. After Father Damien died a Presbyterian Minister in Honolulu suggested that Damien caught leprosy by sleeping with the women lepers. Robert Louis Stevenson was outraged and published an open letter to that Minister: //But I fear you scarce appreciate how you appear to your fellow-men; and to bring it home to you, I will suppose your story to be true. I will suppose—and God forgive me for supposing it—that Damien faltered and stumbled in his narrow path of duty; I will suppose that, in the horror of his isolation, perhaps in the fever of incipient disease, he, who was doing so much more than he had sworn, failed in the letter of his priestly oath—he, who was so much a better man than either you or me, who did what we have never dreamed of daring—he too tasted of our common frailty. “O, Iago, the pity of it!” The least tender should be moved to tears; the most incredulous to prayer. And all that you could do was to pen your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage! Is it growing at all clear to you what a picture you have drawn of your own heart? I will try yet once again to make it clearer. You had a father: suppose this tale were about him, and some informant brought it to you, proof in hand: I am not making too high an estimate of your emotional nature when I suppose you would regret the circumstance? that you would feel the tale of frailty the more keenly since it shamed the author of your days? and that the last thing you would do would be to publish it in the religious press? Well, the man who tried to do what Damien did, is my father, and the father of the man in the Apia bar, and the father of all who love goodness; and he was your father too, if God had given you grace to see it.// : And, likewise, Mother Teresa was the mother of Associate Professor Gregory Clark, who besmears himself with filth in order to score a point or two.

Bigotry and Stereotyping are Fun!!!!!

When directed against the right people.

Otherwise, H8te!!!

Tarzan Movie

A friend of mine who is a Baptist Pastor and has been coming to our Aquinas study group said that he had just seen the new Tarzan movie.

He said it was a good movie except for the gratuitous anti-Catholicism which made the villain a Catholic who killed people with his rosary.

He said it was obviously intended to appeal to anti-Catholic sentiments in that this element would be insulting to Catholics and unnecessary to the movie.

Could you imagine a movie where the villain is a devout Muslim who kills people with the Koran?

Of course not.

I was going to see this movie. If I had, without this warning, I would have been blindsided by this and had to sit there as a captive, once again, being surprised by yet another example of my faith being used as a "stock villain." I may still see it on Netflicks, but at least I will have been warned.

Are we are at a point where the only "permissible" villains are Nazis, Catholics and fundamentalist Evangelicals?

If so, what does that have to say about Mary Eberstadt's thesis about the shift in culture against Christianity?

Unlike other religions, the Catholic Church built Western Civilization, promoted companionate marital fidelity, made charity normative, built universities and hospitals....

...and doesn't issue fatwas.

Tax-Funded Art Museum in Virginia to Exhibit Painting Mocking Catholic Mass

A non-profit art museum in Virginia Beach that receives federal, state and local taxpayer funding is opening a new exhibit this weekend that includes a controversial painting by Los Angeles artist Mark Rydenmocking the Catholic Mass.

The painting, entitled “Rosie’s Tea Party” (which can be seen here on the museum's website), features the image of a little girl in a white dress with a crucifix around her neck slicing a ham labeled “Corpus Christi” – the Latin term for “Body of Christ.” The painting also depicts a rabbit pouring blood out of a tea pot into a tea cup with the Latin words “Sanguis Christi” (“Blood of Christ”) written on the saucer.

 “The offensive nature of this painting is clear on several levels,” said Michael Hichborn, president of the Lepanto Institute, a group “dedicated to the defense of the Catholic Church”.

“It mocks the Sacrament of Holy Communion, it mocks the Catholic belief in transubstantiation, and in fact, it mocks the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass,” he said, calling the painting “outright blasphemy”.

The painting is part of the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art’s (MOCA)Turn the Page: The First 10 Years of Hi-Fructose exhibit honoring the San-Francisco-based arts magazine, which opens on Sunday and runs through December. It will feature “51 of some of the foremost contemporary artists of this decade,” according to a MOCA press release.

But Ben Loyola, a commissioner on the Virginia Beach Arts and Humanities Commission, which provides local taxpayer funding to MOCA, said that the painting was “anti-Catholic” and asked: “Is this the sort of thing we want to be subsidizing?”

“This is very anti-Christian and anti-Catholic. I was shocked to see this,” Loyolatold WAVY-Channel 10 after previewing the exhibit. “Look at this, she’s got a saw in her hand cutting off a piece of ham with the words on the ham ‘Corpus Christi.’ That is Latin for body of Christ, and the hand is dropping down and eaten by rats.”

Hey, Catholics.

This is why knowing facts is important and stuff.

The asshat in this Salon article recommends:

"eliminate the ritual of confession for children and adolescents;"

Of course, it has been a mainstay slur of liberalism that the confessional is the place where priests seduce children, but does he know the actual data?

Obviously not.

The only comprehensive study of the subject - the Jay Report - put the instances of sexual improprieties occurring in confessionals at less than 2% of the total.

In other words, this guy is an ignorant bigot and articles like this are less about reality than about passing medieval prejudices on to the modern era.

Don't let that happen.