WikiLeaks: Podesta and Left-Wing Activist Plot ‘Catholic Spring’
Lifezette.com ^ | October 12, 2016 | Edmund Kozak
Posted on 10/12/2016, 12:27:14 PM by Kaslin
Longtime Clinton confidante discussed infiltrating the Catholic Church with progressive ideology to foment revolution
A newly leaked email shows Hillary Clinton’s current campaign chairman John Podesta and a Left-wing activist casually discussing fomenting “revolution” in the Catholic Church.
“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,” Sandy Newman, president and founder of the progressive nonprofit Voices for Progress, writes to Podesta in an email titled “opening for a Catholic Spring? just musing.”
“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.”
The emails were leaked in the third round of releases of Podesta’s emails by WikiLeaks.
Newman, who is Jewish, admits he does not know much about the Catholic Church and isn’t volunteering personally to subvert Catholic teachings. “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.”
In response, Podesta assures Newman to rest easy for he and his progressive pals have already created organizations explicitly designed to infiltrate the Catholic Church with progressive ideology, though he cautions that the time may not be right for full revolution — just yet.
“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,” Podesta writes.
The conversation further reveals the contempt with which radical progressives view Catholics and the Catholic Church. On Monday, WikiLeaks published an email showing Democratic operatives mocking conservative Catholics.
A scholar at the Left-wing Center for American Progress emailed Podesta in 2011 bashing then-Fox News CEO Roger Ailes for his Catholic Faith.
"It’s an amazing bastardization of the faith," John Halpin wrote to Podesta, and Jennifer Palmieri, now the communications director of the Clinton campaign. "They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy."
Palmieri, agreed.
"I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion," she wrote. "Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelicals."
