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.

Good news

It seems that the IRS and the FFRF were entering into a collusive settlement.  It sounds like it was supposed to involve a consent decree signed by a judge so that the IRS could claim that it was forced to violate the Constitution.

The Becket Fund stepped in and blocked the settlement and threatened to actually litigate the case, which both the IRS and FFRF knew they couldn't win.  Consequently, FFRF dismissed the case RATHER than have judicial precedent AGAINST it.

//FFRF filed the lawsuit in an attempt to force the IRS to enforce the ban, something the IRS has for decades been reluctant to do. The Becket Fund successfully intervened in the suit on behalf of Milwaukee-based Holy Cross Anglican Church and its vicar, Father Patrick Malone, a Benedictine abbot. The church argued that FFRF's suit must fail because enforcing the Johnson Amendment against its internal religious speech would violate federal constitutional and statutory law.

"The IRS has long threatened churches with speech restrictions but hasn't been willing to do much more for fear of losing in court. But FFRF's suit, which tried to force the IRS to make good on its threats, gave houses of worship a chance to fight back. Once FFRF realized its error, it packed up shop quickly," Blomberg said.

"It's remarkable to see the collusive way that FFRF and the IRS orchestrated getting out of this suit as fast as they could. From hiding documents to falsely promising to provide information, they did whatever they could to run away quickly," he added.//

America needs to preserve its classic Protestant heritage...

...according to Archbishop Chaput:

One of the key myths of the American Catholic imagination is this: After 200 years of fighting against public prejudice, Catholics finally broke through into America’s mainstream with the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy as president. It’s a happy thought, and not without grounding. Next to America’s broad collection of evangelical churches, baptized Catholics now make up the biggest religious community in the United States. They serve in large numbers in Congress. They have a majority on the Supreme Court. They play commanding roles in the professions and in business leadership. They’ve climbed, at long last, the Mt. Zion of social acceptance.

Chaput discusses the Protestant tradition that permitted - actually required - Christian religious principles to influence American public policy:

The roots of the American experience are deeply Protestant. They go back a very long way, to well before the nation’s founding. Whatever one thinks of the early Puritan colonists—and Catholics have few reasons to remember them fondly—no reader can study Gov. John Winthrop’s great 1630 homily before embarking for New England without being moved by the zeal and candor of the faith that produced it. In “A model of Christian charity,” he told his fellow colonists:

We are a company professing ourselves fellow members of Christ . . . That which the most in their churches maintain as truth in profession only, we must bring into familiar and constant practice; as in this duty of love, we must love brotherly without dissimulation, we must love one another with pure heart fervently. We must bear one another’s burdens. We must look not only on our own things, but also on the things of our brethren . . . We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So we will keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.

Not a bad summary of Christian discipleship, made urgent for Winthrop by the prospect of leading 700 souls on a hard, two-month voyage across the North Atlantic to an equally hard New World. What happened when they got there is a matter of historical record. And different agendas interpret the record differently.

The Puritan habits of hard work, industry and faith branded themselves on the American personality. While Puritan influence later diluted in waves of immigrants from other Protestant traditions, it clearly helped shape the political beliefs of John Adams and many of the other American Founders. Adams and his colleagues were men who, as Daniel Boorstin once suggested, had minds that were a “miscellany and a museum;” men who could blend the old and the new, an earnest Christian faith and Enlightenment ideas, without destroying either.

The positive assessment of Puritanism came to an end in the 19th Century when the Puritans were reconceived as ignorant and dour bigots, a reconception that served one side of a cultural war, the side that ended up winning the war by 1960, although at the time that victory seemed like a very good thing from the Catholic perspective.

The same Puritan worldview that informed John Winthrop’s homily so movingly, also reviled “Popery,” Catholic ritual and lingering “Romish” influences in England’s established Anglican Church. The Catholic Church was widely seen as Revelation’s Whore of Babylon. Time passed, and the American religious landscape became more diverse. But the nation’s many different Protestant sects shared a common, foreign ogre in their perceptions of the Holy See—perceptions made worse by Rome’s distrust of democracy and religious liberty. As a result, Catholics in America faced harsh Protestant discrimination throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. This included occasional riots and even physical attacks on convents, churches and seminaries. Such is the history that made John F. Kennedy’s success seem so liberating.


The irony is that mainline American Protestantism had used up much of its moral and intellectual power by 1960. Secularizers had already crushed it in the war for the cultural high ground. In effect, after so many decades of struggle, Catholics arrived on America’s center stage just as management of the theater had changed hands -- with the new owners even less friendly, but far shrewder and much more ambitious in their social and political goals, than the old ones. Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox, despite their many differences, share far more than divides them, beginning with Jesus Christ himself. They also share with Jews a belief in the God of Israel and a reverence for God’s Word in the Old Testament. But the gulf between belief and unbelief, or belief and disinterest, is vastly wider.

According to Chaput, we are now seeing a surprising consequence of the decline of the mainstream Protestantism that informed so much of American history:

If government now pressures religious entities out of the public square, or promotes same-sex “marriage,” or acts in ways that undermine the integrity of the family, or compromises the sanctity of human life, or overrides the will of voters, or discourages certain forms of religious teaching as “hate speech,” or interferes with individual and communal rights of conscience—well, why not? In the name of tolerance and pluralism, we have forgotten why and how we began as nation; and we have undermined our ability to ground our arguments in anything higher than our own sectarian opinions.

Interesting.

An "extraordinarily diverse polyphony."

This post points out that the Enlightenment attitude toward the Establishment of religion was not as uniform as we are often taught.

No Reformation in Connecticut

Committee hearings on the "Henry VIII" Bill have been cancelled after public protest.

First Amendment Alert

The Connecticut state legislature is taking a page out of the playbook of historical enemies of the Catholic Church, including the French Revolution, Napoleon, the Communist Chinese and others. It is attempting to "democratize" the Catholic Church, and weaken the authority of Bishops, by requiring that parish matters be controlled by a board of lay people, with the bishop being reduced to a non-voting ex officio member.

In other words, the Connecticut legislature wants the Catholic Church to be more Protestant.

Yea, that will work.

Here's a link to the bill, which targets the Catholic Church by name. This has to raise substantial separation of church and state issues, but given the anything goes climate of state supreme courts, who knows what will happen.

Connecticut Senator Michael Mclachlan writes:

The Judiciary Committee of the Connecticut General Assembly, chaired by Senator Andrew McDonald and Representative Michael Lawlor, seems to have run off into a ditch this session.

First we have an over-reaching attempt to codify the Connecticut Supreme Court's Kerrigan decision legalizing gay marriage - Senate Bill 899 - and now we have a bizarre attack of First Amendment rights against the Roman Catholic Church in Connecticut - Senate Bill 1098.

I'm going to focus on Senate Bill 1098 -- "An Act Modifying Corporate Laws Relating to Certain Religious Institutions." The stated purpose of this bill is "to revise the corporate governance provisions applicable to the Roman Catholic Church and provide for the investigation of the misappropriation of funds by religious corporations." The real purpose of this bill is payback to the bishops and pastors of the Roman Catholic Church in Connecticut for opposing gay marriage.

Unfortunately, I think some well-intentioned, unhappy Catholics from Darien are being used as pawns by Senator McDonald and Representative Lawlor in a thinly-veiled attack on the Church.

This legislation seeks to eliminate bishops and pastors from all financial decisions of the Church. Currently, local parish corporations are governed by the bishop, diocesan administrator, pastor and two lay trustees as required in Canon Law. Senate Bill 1098 will change this to an elected board of directors of seven to thirteen lay members and will exclude the bishop and pastor. The pastor of the parish corporation will report to the board of directors.

This proposal turns the Catholic Church of Connecticut into a congregational church structure. The proponents claim this is necessary because of financial impropriety of two pastors from Darien and Greenwich in the past several years. McDonald and Lawlor claim the parishioners approached them for assistance making changes to the Catholic Church to hold the bishops accountable for their decisions.

Some would say this is an incredibly bold move by McDonald and Lawlor but the constitutional scholars say their proposal is a clear attack on the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Connecticut Catholics are outraged by the proposal and are likely to fill the halls of the State Capitol and the Legislative Office Building on Wednesday, March 11th for the Judiciary Committee's public hearing on the bill.

I suspect this public hearing will be more like a zoo with the tone of an inquisition. Chances are the topics for discussion on Wednesday will go far beyond the bill proposed. I fear that we'll be hearing all kinds of attacks on the bishops, pastors and priests of the Catholic Church.

I pray fervently that we can dispense with this brutal attack on the Roman Catholic Church very quickly. Catholics don't deserve this attack and the proponents of this bill will hopefully hear this message loud and clear.

Connecticut State Senator Andrew McDonald - a sponsor of the bill - is acting like turning the Catholic Church in Connecticut into a congregational church is just an exercise in good government.

The NCR explains the politics behind the bill.

The Republican Party of Connecticut describes the bill as follows:

Legislation proposed by the Democratic chairmen of the Judiciary Committee represents a brazen affront to the Roman Catholic Church and speaks to their desire to have the state dictate policy and procedure to people of faith, according to Republican State Party Chairman Chris Healy Monday.
"Democrats have crossed the line between church and state," said Healy. "Mike Lawlor and Andrew McDonald are now saying that the state knows best when it comes to being church member. Every citizen of Connecticut, no matter what faith, should be frightened by this legislation."

Committee bill 1098, which will be heard at a public hearing on Wednesday, would require that each Roman Catholic church’s governing body be comprised of between seven and 13 lay people and that the Archdiocese would have a solely advisory role. These lay councils would have complete control over the operations of each church or organization.

This is amazing. Between the undemocratic restructuring of marriage and the legislative grab at restructuring the church, how far are we from a complete collapse of the social compact?

[Via NRO]