A phony “Catholic” organization founded by Clinton campaign chief John Podesta used Church leaders to push congress members into accepting President Obama’s Iran Deal, according to new revelations.
In the midst of the hundreds of John Podesta’s emails released by Wikileaks last week, one contained a report by Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, a faux Catholic association founded by John Podesta in order to provoke a revolution in the Catholic Church.
Fred Rotondaro, Chairman of Catholics in Alliance, forwarded the report to Podesta, chronicling the group’s “efforts to have the Catholic org community promote the Iran Treaty.” That deal established “the comprehensive lifting of all UN Security Council sanctions as well as multilateral and national sanctions related to Iran’s nuclear programme.”
“There is a tremendous amount of potential in these inter Faith orgs including the ability to reach so me [sic] working class voters,” his message read, to which Podesta praised him for the group’s “great effort.”
The report from the group’s executive director Christopher J. Hale detailed a strategy for encouraging members of congress to support the controversial Iran deal, which was eventually effected on July 14, 2016.
The strategy revolved around convincing leading Catholic prelates to use their influence to pressure congresspersons into accepting the deal.
“While I think there should be many goals for these meetings, I think the top-line goal is pretty clear: we need Archbishop William Lori and Cardinal Donald Wuerl to make direct appeals to Senators Cardin and Mikulski on this issue,” Hale writes. “While I don’t have any advance knowledge, I have a sense from the conversations setting up the meetings that there might be willingness for that to happen.”
Along with outreach to Catholic bishops, Hale reported that the group had taken out advertisements in the liberal Catholic journals National Catholic Reporter and Commonweal.
Hale said that his “colleagues will be working with our allies to scan the local newspapers this upcoming week to see if people are communicating faith values in supporting the deal to letters to the editors in newspapers across the nation.”
“That would be something to be proud of for our group,” he stated.
The director also referred to the group’s “grueling preparation for Pope Francis’s apostolic trip to the US.”
“As you can imagine, Iran is just a portion of the work we’re doing in preparation for the Holy Father’s trip,” he said.
Along with efforts to infiltrate the Church hierarchy, the organization’s collusion with the Obama administration is made apparent in Hale’s report.
“I spoke to the White House yesterday and they assure us the media’s moniker calling us ‘God Squad’ isn’t just sweet nothings, but actually a fair assessment of the substantial difference we’re making in this conversation,” he wrote.
Following last week’s Wikileaks revelations, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput described a meeting with two members of the other “Catholic” organization that Podesta claims to have founded—Catholics United. In a published essay, Chaput depicts a methodology eerily similar to that employed by Catholics in Alliance.
Chaput said that the two men were “obvious flacks for the Obama campaign and the Democratic Party—creatures of a political machine, not men of the Church,” who showed remarkable “talents of servile partisan hustling.”
“And presumably (for them) bishops were dumb enough to be used as tools,” he said.
In a stinging statement, the head of the U.S. Bishops Conference, Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz, issued his own indictment of the Clinton team, calling them out for interfering in the Church’s self-governance for “short-term political gain.”
Kurtz suggested that Podesta’s actions in creating “Catholic” lobby groups for the Democratic Party constituted a breach of religious freedom, “one of the founding principles of our republic,” which ensures the right of faith communities to “preserve the integrity of their beliefs and proper self-governance.”
As more and more comes out detailing exactly how these groups exploited the Catholic hierarchy as “useful idiots” for political gains, the less likely their ploys will work in the future and the more suspicious Catholics will be of any friendly overtures coming from the Clinton campaign.
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome
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